International Motorcyclists Tour Club |
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| Mongolia 2000 |
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| In The Land of Ghengis Khan |
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The United Kingdom has a land area of 244,755 km˛ and has a population of approximately 57,000,000. That is an approximate density of 240 people per km˛. Mongolia is 1,565,000 km˛ and has a population of approximately 2,190,000, and 30% of them live in the capital city. That's an approximate density of 1 person per square km. In other words Mongolia is over 5 times the size of the UK but we have 26 times the population of Mongolia. Which in simple terms must mean that there are a lot of wide-open spaces out there and once outside of the main centres of population, and there aren't many of those, you may not see anyone for days on end. We had been invited to Mongolia to join a group of motorcyclists for a one-week tour by motorcycle. The trip was organised by Explore Travel who organises what might be coined as trail rides with a difference. We intended to stay in Mongolia for a second week and organise ourselves; hopefully hiring motorcycles and travel on our own or perhaps hire a four-wheel drive vehicle and explore a bit. As I have said we envisaged that we may not see anyone for days on end and this brings its own little problems. How frequent are petrol stations? How frequent are places to replenish water supplies? As water treatment tends to be related to density of population what is the quality of the water likely to be? If there are not many people, is it likely that there will not be many shops or roads? If the roads are not used much how well maintained would they be, if at all? Road signs again are related to density so would there be many and would they be readable as the Russian Cyrillic alphabet is still in use in Mongolia? These were all the type of questions which we had started to ask ourselves in our planning of the two weeks we were to spend in Mongolia, or would it be Outer Mongolia. Outer Mongolia conjures up visions of one of the remotest places in the world but I suppose there is no such place today as Inner Mongolia as it is now part of the Republic of China. Hopefully this initial contact would make it easier to organise the second week when we intended to go off on our own on the motorcycles we had used in the first week. This actually didn't happen. We hired 2 off road vehicles complete with drivers due to the difficulty of navigating around the country.
Communicating with Mongolia is not easy but with the advent of E-mail it is considerably better than it was. It is very difficult to telephone the country and rumour has it that letters either never arrive or take forever. It is not easy, as different cultures think very differently and even E-mails can become confusing when they quote place names, which don't appear on the maps in front of you. Confidence in the communication situation did not improve when we were told that we could not hire any vehicles for the second week unless we had a guide. 'There are few services, and there are NO road signs in Mongolia' were the reasons given. Surely not! Then a few days later another E-mail confirming the hire price without a guide. Had they suddenly put up a stack of road signs or had they heard I had the use of a friend's Global Positioning System for the trip? If so they obviously hadn't heard that I wasn't very well versed in the use of it. (It later transpired that this E-mail had lost something in the translation, they would not allow us out on our own as there were no route direction signs outside of the capital city Ulan Bator). Booking flights to Mongolia is not an easy task. With only four international carriers flying into Ulan Bator, Mongolia's only international airport, the choice is somewhat restricted. The best bet is probably to fly to Beijing and in from there with Air China. The other options are from Korea with Korean air, Russia with Aeroflot and from Berlin with MIAT, Mongolia's own carrier. As we were on a tight schedule the only sensible way was with MIAT, which some say stands for 'Maybe It'll Arrive Tomorrow and maybe it won't', from Berlin via Moscow. It was impossible to buy tickets from our local travel agent, I think something to do with MIAT not being IATA approved, but transferring the price of the airline tickets to a bank account in the USA solved this problem. The tickets were then issued in Ulan Bator and found their way to us via the Mongolian Embassy in London. First impressions are sometimes misleading but often are a true representation of what is to come. The International Airport at Ulan Bator is not so much an airport but more and airfield with a few associated buildings. When the Airbus landed, on time after an excellent flight that was well up to the standard of any good international carrier, you could immediately feel the space of the country as well as the warmth and friendliness of the 'locals'. (So much for the 'Maybe It'll Arrive Tomorrow and maybe it won't'). We were met by the representatives from Explore Travel who were to be our companions for the next 6 days whilst we experienced Mongolia from the saddles of 250R Hondas. The short trip from the airport to their base at the local Ger Tourist Camp was interesting enough and set me thinking how were we going to cope with the next few days if all the roads were like this? What would they be like? We started off from the airport on tarmac and within 1 mile we were on the rough, followed by a short length of tarmac and then more rough. Things improved though over the following days as we did not have to deal with the transition from tarmac to dirt so many times. I think we only changed from one to the other about 3 times in the next 800 miles as only about 50 of those miles were on tarmac. This ratio of tarmac to dirt appeared to be the same wherever we were in the country i.e. mostly dirt with tarmac only between the main centres of population, of which there aren't many, and even that tarmac appeared to come supplied with plenty of potholes as standard.
It was evident that our hosts intended to show us as much of their country as was possible in the time we had as the planned itinerary included more than 1 day, in fact 3 of the 6 days were, over 240 km. These seemed rather long days if the roads were not very good so surely those days would include quite a lot of tarmac. No wrong again. In fact one day was over 220 miles, and no tarmac. Now that's a proper trail ride!
The highest point in the country is 4734 metres and the lowest 560 metres so generally the affect of altitude is noticeable for the first couple of days. Annually the average temperature is around zero degrees. Fortunately for us the winter average is minus 25 degrees so when we were there, even though the nights were cold, the days were around 25 degrees. Generally petrol comes in two categories. Most available is 74 octane with 94 octane, which the Hondas preferred, only available very infrequently so special arrangements had to be made. One of our support vehicles had a separate tank for the higher-octane stuff.
That first day was a baptism of fire. As we flew in early morning we did not get out on the road until late morning and it was 9 p.m. before we stopped to set up camp. This was in part due to too long a stop for lunch, which as the week went on became shorter enabling us to erect our tents before it went dark. We were accompanied by a V6 4x4, which carried our daytime gear, and a 5 litre V8 ex Russian army truck that acted as a 'chuck wagon' carrying our tents etc. This met us most lunchtimes and the nights when we needed our tents. Even though our first night in the country seemed a bit of a shambles whilst trying to establish camp in the dark, the first nights experience of camping under a sky which had more stars in it than I have ever seen before was incredible. The nearest we had been before to this type of experience was when motorcycling across Israel, but we had never seen the Milky Way with such clarity ever before, no doubt something to do with the lack of light pollution. This lack of pollution spills over into the countryside where the environment must be as good as anywhere. If, which we did now and again, we found ourselves heading the wrong direction we would just leave the track and strike across open country. The complete absence of fences allows this and it was amazing just what wildlife scattered before your front wheels. The range was from the smallest of rodents through to the largest of birds and everything in between. I suppose the main reason for this vast array of wildlife is because that the majority of Mongolian people are still nomads so there is a complete lack of intensive farming methods. They still graze their stock, which includes camels, goats, horses and yaks, until the grazing becomes poor then move on to pastures new. This moving happens perhaps 5 times a year and they only move 10 or 15 km and can set up their ger camp in about an hour if need be. Of course being nomadic they have no postal address and do not need the use of maps to navigate around. In fact it is rumoured that each Mongolian has a compass in his or her nose, which is a good job as the two maps we had often contradicted each other.
Even though the nights were by and large clear it is not advisable to ride such roads in the dark as we found out the next night. We had ridden all day on dirt and did not arrive at our destination until 11 p.m.. The final 20 miles were along a very iffy track. We were low on petrol and with motorcycles that have direct lighting systems when the engine dies so do the lights. When this happens, as it did to 2 of the 3 machines, you realise just how dark it is when there are just no other lights around. We didn't ride this late again, which was a good thing as some people would be completely phased out if thrown into this situation. The further south we rode the hotter it became and then on the edge of the Gobi Desert, just inside the National Park of the same name, we set up our tents in an incredibly lush valley! Earlier in the day we had walked into the Eagles Mouth, a gorge that has a permanent glacier in it as no sun ever reaches certain parts. We certainly did not expect to see a glacier in the Gobi Desert region. Quite incredible when only half a days ride away we were climbing the largest of the sand dunes in the Gobi in temperatures so high that you definitely did not need a thermometer to tell you it was hot. There was little or no movement when we rode through the desert, apart from ourselves. We saw quite a few encampments and quite a few camels but very few people and even fewer vehicles. The reason, it was the hottest part of the day and really quite a silly thing to do unless you are into doing silly things. But then we were into silly things hence the climbing of 2000 metre high sand dunes and attempting to ride up them on two wheels. The first was exhilarating, the latter is definitely not to be recommended unless you feel the need to appreciate how difficult it must be to compete in such as the Dakar and deal with the masses of sand that they have to. We were primarily camping wild. There are some official sites but it seems more normal not to camp on them and because no one owns any land once outside of the towns or cities there is no objection to going wild, which is truly is a wonderful experience. So in the first week we only stayed twice in ger tourist camps, which are, once outside of the capital, the nearest you get to a hotel. The sleeping accommodation and eating facilities are in ger tents with other facilities in more permanent buildings. The rest of the time, apart form the last two nights in Ulan Bator, we camped wherever we were at the end of the day providing we had water close by or with us. Whilst in the south of the country, which tends to be rather dryer than the north especially in the region of the Gobi, we were always careful to have adequate water supplies with us. Further north there are more than enough
streams and rivers to provide water. We were always careful to either boil or purify any water we used, yes even for teeth cleaning, and non of us suffered from a bad stomach whilst out in the countryside. I did suffer slightly one day in Ulan Bator, which probably tells us how clean the water is out of town or how particular we were about not drinking untreated water. If we didn't boil the water we treat it with iodine tablets and then filtered it with one of the ceramic filters that there are on the market nowadays. The process was time consuming but well worth the trouble and it gives you something to do in the evenings. So there you have it. Mongolia is in many respects untouched by the rest of the world. It has some of the most unspoiled areas I have ever seen and will remain so for quite some time, as only those with adventure to the fore will dare go there. There are many areas where the comforts of the Western World do not exist and so it is not a country for the faint hearted. Its people are similarly untouched and, as is still found in nations that are mostly nomads, of which there aren't many left elsewhere, they are genuinely friendly, not nosey but interested in other nomads. We found this out quite often, as they were always willing to invite us into their gers (visitors keep to the left please) and offer us their hospitality. Likewise they were always interested in what our nomadic homes were like and hopefully they found our black coffee as palatable as their salted milky tea was to us.
Robert Wilson, photos & Text: (©2001) If you wish to send an E-mail to Robert Wilson |
