Gobi Adventure

Driving in Mongolia sucks balls. It’s gotta be the worst way of getting around. Camel and horse riding is uncomfortable but if you did a couple of hours a day, it’d be fine. Driving gives you whiplash and it feels like you’ve been beat up by a bunch of teenagers when you get out of the vehicle. If you’re a car-sick kinda person, it’s even worse. You get thrown around the vehicle and then when you go up and down and stop and start so quickly, you want to puke as well. You can’t sleep because you’re getting thrown around and more often than not, have no seatbelt to hold you in.

The shittest part is, it’s always worth it.

Dad and I departed for the ‘Gobi Adventure’ lodge about a 3hour drive in some direction or another from the Three Camel Lodge. We stopped off on the way to check out mare milking and finally arrived, beaten and thrashed from the car ride, at ‘Gobi Adventure’. (below: dad and the camel with horns!? at the entrance to the ger camp)

The Gobi’s like any desert. It’s amazing and the landscape and vegetation changes dramatically. We’d driven through a 20km long gap in the ranges and came out the other side to mountains that looked like uncooked shortcrust pastry that’s been attacked by little children’s fingers, sand dunes so perfect they could be clean sweeps of thick yellow on an oil painting and vegetation so sparse and green it was enough juxtaposition in itself. (below: the dunes – in between the mountains and the plains)

We were tire-eerrrd. Those car rides really knock you around. But rest is for the wicked and we went on a 2hour camel ride. The bactrian camels down here have two humps (of course) that are a lot pointier than the two-humped camels I’d seen in the north of Mongolia. Two big, pointy humps with a bit of tufty camel hair on top. I plaited my camel’s tuft into a rats tail.

(below: dad holding on to our camels as I put my shoes on)

Camels are more uncomfortable to ride than a horse. A horse is a piece of piss. You can get on and off at your own peril and there’s not that far to fall. The stride of a horse is much shorter than a camels and the saddle, albeit wooden, makes a more comfortable ride than the camel’s spine running horizontally up your bum.

The ride was great though. We spotted some wildlife (a rabbit! dad was unimpressed), watched a camel drink (ohhhhhhh that’s why so many bars are called ‘thirsty camel’ and there are so many references to camels drinking quickly….. because they doooooooooooooooooo), plodded down a channel cut into the sand with an oasis in it, walked through the transition between sparse vegetation to dune vegetation to dune… And then hopped off. There’s actually no ‘hopping’ off a camel. It’s an entirely ungraceful movement of holding on for DEAR LIFE, squeezing your knees into the camel, holding on to the mat under your bum (but secretly holding onto the hump because it looks more permanent and stable) and being thrown forwards and then backwards and then forwards until you’re on the ground.

Anyway, we got OFF the camel and walked UP the dune. I ditched my shoes because in Mongolia, the closest I will get to a beach is a. Khosvgol Lake water (been there, done that) and b. South Gobi sand dunes minus the ocean. It’s a fair hike up a sand dune but it’s pretty cool. The view’s amazing and the sand underneath your feet is so clean and soft. The lines created by the winds in the dunes make for an unsurpassed display of the power of nature. And it makes for a really fun ride back down. No angular rocks to fall on, no slipping vegetation under your feet, no boulders to whack your head on. Just a nice clean, padded run down. (see photos below of me walking up, then down – the BIG dune)

We had a slight mishap. My heart skipped a beat. We were on the home run – our camels were hungry and they were occasionally allowed a bite of the vegetation. We were in a line of three – the guide was holding dad’s camel and dad was holding my camel. We’d all stopped for a quick feed and the front two camels were moving on. Dad had to give mine a bit of a pull to coax him along. He didn’t want to move on, so pulled the opposite direction and his nose ring thing (that holds the rope onto him) ripped OUT of his nose and dad was left with a bloody (literally) T piece of wood in his hand (from the camel’s nose) and a long rope. WHOLEY SHITBALLS. When that rope’s out of the camel, you’ve got nothing but two humps to hold on to. If my camel moved, I had NO IDEA how to ride a camel with no reins if it decided to bolt. It was my second undulate f*ck-up. (first: falling out of the saddle and onto the neck of the galloping horse at Khovsgol Lake) It was no one’s fault and there was nothing I could do but HOPE he was just hungry and would stay in situ while we called the guide and he figured out how to put the nose ring back in.

Turns out it was easy peasy. Instead of putting the nose ring back in, he made a halter out of the rope for his head and off we went (see photo above right of the rope around my camel’s head).

Dinner was dis.gust.ing but it wasn’t mutton so I guess I should be happy. The whole two weeks dad’s been here, he hasn’t been served mutton once. Not fair! Dad found a bloke from Perth, said G’day and then asked for the State of Origin score. We still don’t know who won and it’s Saturday. Perth isn’t much into Rugby League. Bugger. Turns out he was a very interesting guy – breeds dorper sheep and sells their embryos all over the world.

We had a fairly good sleep, hot shower and left the camp at 10am. The guys that we’d met at the airport were also staying at the same camp and were tagging along for the ride with us to Yol Valley (yol means vulture). Turns out their vehicle was a piece of shit and only just made it to the valley. Which was lucky because the valley was COOL! The drive there was suppose to be the ‘short’ way home but we drove for something like 7hours so it most certainly was not.

Yol valley is a channel carved, deep and narrow pass between the epic smooshed up lump of rock that is the ‘spine’ of the Gobi. It is bloody spectacular. It has lots of cute little rat-looking rodents (that we found out this morning are poisonous), lots of green grass and ICE still not melted from winter time. We wandered along and through the river valley and took photos (I got my first slow-movement/foggy waterfall shot – it’s not great but first attempt!) and dad had a go at my video camera. WHO gave him that bloody thing? He didn’t put it down. And then flattened the battery. It really didn’t matter, it was more funny than anything.

 

 

 

 

 

So we loved the valley and took our time and I felt kind of guilty that we made Chucka (our driver) wait for so long. Turns out it was totally unnecessary because the YANKS STOLE OUR VEHICLE!

We got a note saying:

“Your friends will come soon. They are in a hurry. They went to the province Dalangazdad. Please wait here car will come soon”

It was handed to me by some random girl that was coming along for the ride, along with a bracelet that she bought me – even though we hadn’t even shared names. The note made as much sense to me as I’m sure it does to you.

So that was it. Our vehicle had gone to take the Yanks to the airport as they were late for their flight and their vehicle may/may not get them there in time. Bugger. That vehicle had passports, kindles, clothes, water, food – everything – in it. We weren’t particularly worried, we knew it’d come back at some stage and they were in a super rush to get to the airport.

We got to go in the shitty vehicle. We were absolutely STUFFED. I just wanted to get home and get the dust off me. And get out of the throw-you-around-like-a-doll piece of shit vehicle. We stopped at a ger. Nooooooooooooo! I want to go hooooooooome!!!! We had to try airag (fermented mare’s milk). We’d already tried it. We were tired. I didn’t need to sit in another ger and smile sweetly when I felt like death. We had no choice. The airag was a lot stronger than what I had previously tried. More dried cheese. Erk.

Turns out we only stopped there because we had to wait for our vehicle to meet us back from the airport. We played with the kids for a bit (a chubby little 6mth old boy and his older sisters), watched more horse milking and I whinged a bit… As I was just about to lose it, our car came bolting over the hill and screeched to a halt at our feet. Sweet. We were saved. I know I sound ungrateful – ger stops are amazing – but you kind of get over doing things when you don’t want to/eating things you don’t want to/being uncomfortable after you’ve been on a couple of trips. There’s no element of fun to those bits anymore.

 

 

 

 

An hour’s drive home and we were HOME. Shower and feed time. And then I slept well. My sheets and blankets were all in place. When everything’s still neat when I wake up, I know I was tired – too tired to bother rolling around getting comfortable.

Today, we’re doing nothing. I’m sitting at the bar in the lounge room writing my blog, dad’s reading. We’ll go for a wander on the basalt ridge, have lunch, read some more and I’ll probably video the Three Camels Lodge so I can show you how cool it is. Then we’ll head back to UB, rest up and tomorrow is dad’s second last day. I’m a bit sad. To be perfectly honest, I want to go home with him. I have 10 months to go and the last 2 have gone so quickly I don’t doubt the next 10 will too. I just kinda feel like I’ve been here and I know enough and I’d just really like to go home and do some work where I’m actually doing some work. And be able to get around easily, eat the food that makes me function properly (say: fresh food), be with the friends and family I miss so much…..

 

 

Right: a rainbow as the storm passed over the Gobi on our way back to Three Camels Lodge

Left: an example of the slow-motion waterfall photos that I took.