The last 4 months

Finding time to look back at the blog has been limited recently, how people manage to do a daily blog while living a normal life I'll never know...

Looking back my last post was on the 16th Jan. My son, Alex, was born shortly after that and Nadia and I had a couple of weeks in Bangkok working out all the things new parents have to do. Having been in Bangkok for a few months by then we decided to try a local roadtrip and flee to the beaches of southern Thailand. Despite the heat Alex travelled quite well on a two-week trip down to Koh Lanta.

Soon after getting back from Lanta we packed up the apartment in Bangkok, shipped a 100 kg of mainly kitchenware up to Mongolia, and then started the journey ourselves. After a hour queue to get through Thai’s cattle-class check-in at the new Bangkok airport (about a million times worse than their business class check-in) the flights went well with Alex even sleeping all the way through the short Beijing to UB hop.

Back in UB we moved into Nadia’s apartment and started to hunt for something more family-sized. We looked at five or six places together but then Nadia found the gem one day while I was at work. We now have a modern place on the 8th floor of a new block with views to sunrise in the morning and sunset (over the engine-sheds of the Trans-Mongolian railway) in the evening. We’re about 15 minutes walk from my work and five-minutes drive from Sukhbaatar square in the other direction.

Having an apartment and being back in work again during the week, it took a couple of weekends to find a decent vehicle to buy. For the last few years I’d used company vehicles when I needed but I wanted to break away from that dependence and as I now had a secure heated garage it was time to buy something worthy of the Gobi. Unless you want the instant depreciation from buying a 4x4 in a showroom the best bet in Mongolia is a directly imported second-hand vehicle from Japan, hopefully only driven by a salary-man for weekend jaunts along nice smooth roads. We found a Toyota 80-series Landcruiser from 1997 in very good condition with 180,000 km on the clock. It was an automatic, which I can live with, but more importantly a diesel, as high-octane petrol is scarce outside of UB (so is diesel in the countryside but at least the fuel economy is better and carrying jerry-cans is less risky). The test-drives had a couple of ill omens, running out of fuel after the first 200 m and then not restarting after a stop at a petrol station on the second drive as only one of the two batteries was attached at the time. However we decided to ignore the signs and go ahead with the deal. Buying a car in Mongolia is a cash process so was down to the bank where I only needed my local driving licence as ID to take out a couple of inches of $100 bills to hand to a man in a roadside lock-up… Dodgy or what? Anyway the car was soon registered and a few days later was fully insured.

Having planned a trip back to the UK in May for the bub to see his grandparents on my side, we all settled down in our new apartment, with our new car for weekend trips and shopping, and a more relaxing than normal 5-day week for me – ahh, normality! Then I got an out of the blue request from the company to go and do some property appraisals half the world away in Australia, squeezing a two-week trip in before the flights to the UK. After a couple of days stopover in Bangkok to receive a briefing from the boss I headed on to Oz and got to see some beautiful bush-county while looking at some interesting geology. It was my first real time away from Alex but being in Australia the communications back to home were better than being in the Gobi, where I probably would have been otherwise.

Coming back from Australia I had a few days in UB to write-up before heading to the UK with Nadia and Alex. As on an Air China flight last year (June '06) we had the same ‘flight is delayed, come back at 20:00’ situation so finally took off 10 hours late and had just 3 hours to rest at a Beijing transit hotel. I mush have a short memory not to have used MIAT for flying out of Mongolia…

So, at last, back in the UK, where the weather has been fantastic for the last 10 days. We haven’t done much apart from shopping for baby kit, walking down the beach and sitting around with Alex [how things change ;-)]. I’ve been slack for getting in-touch with old friends so many apologies for not running around and seeing y’all.

Soon we’ll be back to UB and will probably be there until September unless any other requests come through from work. Weekends and longer evenings will give us a chance to get out of the city and at least a couple of longer trips are planned to visit the SE of the country and to help out as a surface photographer for a buddy who will be diving in Lake Huvsgul in August.

So, until next time…