We would be spanning the length of Mongolia on its North-South axis. We were going to the Gobi desert! He turned out to be a softly spoken 25 year old with a wicked, dry sense of humour, and he quickly became one of the team. Against all expectations the coach had seatbelts! The driver played some banging traditional Mongolian music the entire way. We were seriously impressed that he had a ten hour collection of HD Mongolian music videos. No repeats! And so commenced a boring bus ride through a landscape so featureless and barren that we may as well have been on Mars.
On arrival we took a short walk through the city to take in the sights. It comes with a side of desert onions, which we were to try raw in the next few days. On a side note, the hotel in Dalanzadghad was probably a brothel. It was driven by Gaahna, our awesome driver for the next 4 days. The entire trip from here onwards was to be on dirt tracks.
But a lunch break at a mountain pass allowed us time to scramble in the hills looking for rock paintings. These petroglyphs are up to years old, and are casually scattered through many hills in the desert, relatively preserved in the arid climate. The paintings were an early means of self-expression for nomadic hillmen, and tell stories about their day to day experiences. They were painted using pigments from crushed lichen, and are by turns beautiful and amateurish!
En route to the flaming cliffs, we took vodka shots with some grandparents in a ger. The grandad was smoking a pipe. We ate dried meat, doughnut rings, amazing rice, goaty biscuits, goats milk, and goat curd.
Emily and Alex made friends with a diseased baby goat. The vodka was so good that we bought some flasks of it to take home. As usual, we were sat in the middle of a vast, undulating steppe, with a completely unpolluted view of the night sky, Milky Way included. The only downside was the rickety toilet pit.
