2350km UB-Bayankhongor-Dalanzadgad-Mandalgovi-UB

Briefly back in UB after a couple of weeks of not showering in the Gobi. I drove out to Bayankhongor to start with, taking about 11 hrs. The first couple of hours from UB the asphalt has so many pot-holes you can’t do much more than 60km/hr, then you get on a couple of hundred km of good black-top until Arvaykheer (410km from UB) where you can roll along at 100km/hr quite nicely. After Arvaykheer the asphalt goes bad again and soon you’re on a mix of field tracks and unsurfaced road-bed, back to 60km/hr if you are lucky. Considering it was the start of June it was amusing to be in a mini blizzard between Arvaykheer and Bayankhongor where the road goes up to around 2000m.

A grey-crane or two, many birds of prey, lots of locals herding animals and a total of five foreign cyclists (cold and struggling in a strong headwind) were passed en-route.

I then spent most my time doing fieldwork somewhere in Bayankhongor province (could tell you but then I’d have to kill you). The cold weather was replaced by warm to hot stuff within a few days. The heat of an unrelenting sun was tamed by persistent winds but at least the wind kept the mosquitos away most of the time.

After work was over I did a mega-drive of around 680km taking 14hrs to cross some of the Gobi and move on to our company’s base in Omnogov province near a local town called Manlai. A good journey as the tracks in the Gobi are some of the smoother ones in Mongolia – the only black-top during the whole ride was in Dalanzadgad town where I stopped of to pick-up some snacks from the biggest shop in the Gobi, a branch of Nomin that opened up last year. If you want a TV, carpet or electronic organ in the south of Mongolia then this shop is the place to come. They even had Irn-bru there last year but I was sadly disappointed not to find any this time.

After a few days around Manlai I carried on back up to UB. The night before a huge dust-storm had blown in for a few hours. It had a sharp 500m high front of muddy cloud and came in at around 50km/hr. The road from Manlai going north goes over a series of hills and wide shallow valleys and the going was slow for the fires 150km because the storm had left a lot of standing water behind it. As soon as water hits gobi the ground can go treacherously soft and finding a way to thread between the water-holes was quite fun. On the edge of each wet area was a parked up truck with a driver sleeping off the wait for the ground to harden up again.

A few hundred km of dirt later and a power-nap later I reached Mandalgovi, a province centre in Dundgov. It’s a depressing place to drive into from the south as the track goes next to the town’s waste dump. Getting rid of the waste just involves trucking it out into a flat area and dumping it. There are no dozers to push the dumps together, no pit to push waste into and nothing to stop shit blowing all over the local countryside. Against a backdrop of a abandoned hulk of a coal-powered factory it was not the most picturesque sight in the world. I’d flown into Mandalgovi several times before and the thing that always struck me from the air on a sunny day was the several square km of sparkling broken glass reflecting the sunlight from this area of waste.

Someone a year or two ago made the effort of laying a road-bed from Mangalgovi to where the asphalt starts near UB. Unfortunately they never got around to surfacing it and most drivers are again resorting to the field tracks running parallel on either side of the main road due to the number of deep pot-holes and long sections of ‘wash-board’. This was probably the worst section of the whole trip and slowed the day right down to give an average of only 40km/hr for this 475km. I was glad to see the tourist ger-camp (Ondor Dov?) marking the southern end of the asphalt from UB come into sight and let me know the drive was almost over.