Outside, the morning belongs to the dogs. Like gangs in a lawless city they move in packs, barking and bearing teeth. There's the howls everywhere. A chorus of canine sound across the entire city. But as I walk there's little that can disturb the quiet contentment residing inside of me. We are here. In Mongolia. The final of our thirteen countries.
The night before I had left the kitchen full of good company, rancid food and burning alcohol to look into the sky. Above me the moon illuminated everything. The sky was a battle ground of stars. I rang Lauren to wish her a happy birthday. Of all the days away I missed you the most then. Hearing your voice, wishing you were here, seeing what I was seeing. This unreal beauty that seemed to stretch over everything.
We move in convoy out of the city, our cars thick in radio chatter that belongs more to Iraq than peaceful Mongolia. We're big kids on the radios playing soldier. Oscar Mike, staying frosty, square wheels. But the military chatter isn't without need. Two kilometers out of the city the road disappears and the battle that will last the next five days begins
The roads are hard to explain here. After every horizon they change completely. The desert is filled with machine gun ruts that shake the car so violently we call them wash boards. Everything in the car shakes and rattles as if you're in washing machine. If anything is lose we know about it soon. Fillings included.
In the grasslands pot holes the size of houses appear. And quickly. Across the hills it's a case of three wheels more often than four. You're up and down all the time. Your foot bridges the accelerator and the brake ready to press on rather quickly. You make split decisions to either brake or evade. When it rains, as it does entirely for one day, the roads become mud pits and traction becomes the only currency worth anything. Momentum becomes everything.
We forget entirety what asphalt looks like, or whether it ever existed. It's insane to drive in. You can't look away from the wheel. The few times you do, to either look into the rear view mirror or to company you're instantly an inch too far from where you should be. You become so conscious of where your wheels are that they begin to feel like limbs. You're always looking to see what's coming up in front of you twenty metres up the road. Anticipation is everything. Reaction time is halved if not quartered. It's the difference between breaking down or breaking apart. The line is just so thin...
All this sounds very omnious but... it's too much fun to describe. When you get it right it just feels so so so good. Being in the groove, in the right mood, 'getting it'... There's no limit to how wide the smile is you're feeling inside. You suddenly become all the boy hood adventures you've always wanted to fulfil. You're casting up massive dust clouds. Your driving in a fucking rally. Tearing apart roads, surviving off what you're carrying with your best friends. It's amazing
We see now why this is called the Mongol Rally. This is what it is all about.
I don't want to cast off the previous two weeks, or the twelve incredibly diverse, surreal and strangely beautiful countries we have been within. There are places that we have seen that we all wish to revisit. We've spread the seeds that we wish to return to. Bled is a constant in our memory. The Altay mountains too. But Mongolia just takes everything we've seen, and redefines the beauty we all had considered completely defined. The horizons here are boundless, endless. So much to the extent that you could barely dream that any world could possible exist beyond their confines. And yet they do. A half day later we rise over it's tip to look out again on the Lion King. A horizon stretching beyond anything Montana could offer and doubling it. Mufasa's words echo. One day, this will all be yours. And by the end of it. It is. We own it too. We've conquered it. Pitching tent we all sit, our eyes wide, begging our consciousnesses to remember this. To take all that we are seeing and re-create this bliss.
We're almost euphoric. In the distance we see kids run a kilometer to meet us. Hands ask for sweets. They know when we're coming through because the dust of the Rally always kicks up the dust in the middle of August. We take pictures of Eagles. Goats flee. Cows stare, surly, defiant. Like in India they don't move for anything.
And the convoy is brilliant. In our group we have ourselves (Alpha 1), a 206 Peugot (Lionel Richie) and a 130 Defender Land Drover Ambulance (Papa Bear). In the Landie sit 40 something's Mike Ashton and Laura Tam. Married for what appears like twenty years they are in fact almost strangers. Three weeks before they had met only twice before. They laugh almost constantly stopping only bicker in the inbetweens. They take care of us almost completely. Towing us at rivers, feeding us lunch, and when our forty buck tent decides it can't deal with either wind or rain, much less so when combined together, we sleep in the spare room of their twelve man tent
It would take an entire blog to acturarely describe Laura and Mike. In them we've found our road souls. A comptiablily in convoy that will last, we hope, well beyond the road. We fit into one another's lives so easily that it's not long before we're swapping seats. Si and I both take turns and the wheels. Driving a Land Drover in Mongolia completely re-defines how amazing Ka-put is. She's just fantastic. She's a little mountain goat. Laura finds an almost home in the back seats of Ka Put. Mike and I talk long into the night and try not to crash when we can't see anything in the dim headlights.
They're beyond generous. Insaitable. Brilliant. They help out with a variety of problems that occur over the next four days. Laura is an amazing cook and we eat well. There's stir fry, cous cous, Thai curry. Mike has packed absolutely everything you would need to take on a journey into the Apocalypse. After our rubbish tent finally succumbs to the elements we're inside theirs. Stuck on the other side of the river there's always a tow. When the roof rack looks like it's taking to much weight the Gerry cans come off and go into the back of Betsy (the name of the Landie). And they do all this with no hesitation. No problems.
We become a quasi family. And each night we fall asleep creasing, our stomachs hurting from laughing too hard, too much. There's never enough alcohol to suffice the end of the night and we're always running out of firewood. It's almost like we're force to sleep. It's a testimony that it's always beyond midnlight by the time we sleep even after sixteen hours of intensive driving.
In the other car, the 206, we last only a couple of days in convoy. Within it's walls, cousins Keith and Josie McVity are teamed with Russiky Sianne. It's amazing to jounrey with such people over such a short time. Keith is brilliantly funny, always lending a joke to any situation. Josie keeps a constant eye on the map and our co-ordinates. Sianne translates everything providing the only opportunity on the entire trip to find out what the border guards are really saying beyond their slightly sinister smiles. It's not good...
We depart with heavy hearts when Lionel Richie, three wheels ripped apart, an exhaust pipe completley torn off and a break cable in shreds, needs a hearty dose of medicine in the third checkpoint's mechanics. Our three car convoy becomes two.
But with their departure the convoy lifts off. We find a new speed. It's much easier to travel as a two and a six rather than a three and a nine. The speed of the Landie and the Ka is almost entirely compitable. In fact, in stretches and in particular, ones you wouldn't expect (especially coming out of mud puts and into hills) the Ka exceeds the Landie. It's just so quick up everything. So sneaky. We realise just how amazing Ka-Put is. She doesn't shy away from anything. She tackles things you would think impossible of her reach. Mike, a Landie driver both here and at home cannot believe her capacities or capabilities. We all smile intenerally as we try to appear humble. We're all unbelievably proud.
One night, probably the largest highlight of the trip for me, we pitch tent outside of a Mongolian families Ger. With no language exchanged we're forced to relay on our hands to describe. We're brought food and see a glimpse of what happens out here, miles and miles and miles from everything. We see three girls milk two hundred goats. We play with the kids. I take a dog for a walk in the morning. We do like the bears do. At night the moon shows everything. I watch a Russel Crowe movie with the entire family.
In other incredible moments we wash in rivers. We swim in lakes. Kass converts to camping completely. We all look incredibly messy. I'm loving it.
The four days across Mongolia isn't all sweet sailing though. One day it doesn't stop raining... Packing up a tent the size of Luxemburg isn't easy at the best of times. Whatever the road was called before it looks even worse in the wet. Two days before I brake so hard before hitting a pothole the size of your living room that the roof rack, already loose from constant washboarding, bumps and leaves us, sliding off the roof and onto the floor. 15 minutes it's back up on top but there's a fairly big rip in the door. The wing mirror is loose. In the sand a day later Si goes all the way to the left, then all the way to the right and suddenly there's no grip. Or brakes... As Laura puts it
'Meghan, this is what it must feel like to die, except at the end of it, you die'.
Everyone is ok. Everything is fine. But we're all counting our lucky stars. Ka-put is surviving everything that is being chucked at her.
And the roads don't let up. It wants blood. You can see why so many cars just die out here. If you make a mistake the car gets punished. Half the teams that set out on this trip don't make it to the end. Even less make it there without breaking down at least once. There's so much that can go wrong.
If you pick the wrong track sometimes the road just disappears into a crack so wide it feels as if an earthquake has been specfic to just four meters. The only other vehicles we meet on the roads are 4x4s, buses or trucks, each with a wheelbase much larger than ours. It means that the tracks are totally unsuited to our size and shape. Instead of straddling the road we have to take a line that puts one tyre in the ditch and the other on the bank. It means we're constantly off to one side. 45 degrees in the air. It feels like wake boarding or snow boarding. Crossing the wake, or getting off the is path requires a mass of patience, good timing and a little bit of luck. You have to know where the Ka is going at all times. How the suspension is going to ride. Whether you're going to hit something going down into the suspension or whether you're hitting it's peek. I'm concentrating as much as I did in my Maths GCSE.
When we stop for food I fall asleep pretty much instantly. In a cafe that had a menu the size of most good London eateries but in reality only served one dish (the only thing we ever seem to eat - mutton dumplings) I find a corner and pass out. I've never driven so hard. It's testing us all. We're all bumping around like a constant trampoline. The bumps hurt everything.
But as hit checkpoints, five towns on way to the capital we all seem to lift a little. We all seem more at ease as we get further East. We're so close now we can almost taste it. And there's relief coming out of us like nothing else.
With three days left on the road we make a decision. Push on the first day, rest for the second in a scenic spirtual valley called Dream Land and then hit the road to Ulaanbartaar for our last day of travelling. The last four hundred kilometers
The first day is rough. It's long and hard. We cover 400 kilometers of shitty roads.It's late by the time we finish. It's near impossible to drive at this time and we inch along at low speeds. Si takes the Landie and I follow closely behind. We switch as it goes near pitch black and it's 11 by the time we arrive into the city. It's been five days since we last showered. We're all sweaty, tired and hungry. But the restaurants are all closed and there's no hot water. It's another night of smelling like dust and looking worse. This is the dirtiest I've ever been.
But the next day is worth the pain we go through the day before. The whole day is just beautiful. We get up late. Everyone showers. We look like new people. Kass looks like a hair model. Meghan a new woman. I shampoo my beard. We fix loose screws and minor injuries to Ka-Put and get on the road for a fairly easy 200kms of grassland. The landscape is exactly how I pictured Mongolia to be. We're all on a high. It's why we're here. We've heard the roads to Ulaanbartaar are tarmac, no holes, easy. Tomorrow will be our last day travelling and from the reports it sounds like it'll be a piece of piss. 400 kms of asphalt bliss.
In the grasslands we chase goats down the roads. Watch clouds fight for the sky with eagles that dive down to the earth like lighting personified. We drive into Dream Land - a luxury Ger camp - to party. It's Meghan's birthday tomorrow and we're all ready to let our hair down. We come to make party and to give Meghan the best 30th birthday possible....
written by Matt
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