One of my favorite things about traveling in Mongolia was going inside Mongolian gers. I’m not talking about a Mongolian ger camp that’s been modified for tourism, but a real family’s ger. I was fascinated at how whole families could live in the round structure with no walls. There was absolutely no privacy in a […]
It’s hard to put into words what those last 20km were like as we drove into Ulaanbaatar. All I can say is that is wasn’t easy. It was actually some of the worst roads and construction we had experienced. There was no real time to relax and soak up the moment, as we had to […]
I woke up giddy, excited, anxious, and a bit sad. This was it – our last day of the Mongol Rally. It started exactly 5 weeks earlier on a Saturday in London. Now here we were 300 km from Ulaanbaatar Mongolia’s finish line. The day started like any other; local visitors brought gifts of food […]
I believe that there is something very special about the Mongolian skies. Out of all of the countries I’ve been to, the skies in Mongolia are the most memorable. They are vast. They are the most perfect color blue. Even when they get angry and dark, they are perfect. They make me feel small. And […]
“What’s that smell?” asked Deb. “I don’t know, but I smell it too,” said Dave. “I don’t smell a thing,” I said from the back seat. We stopped to investigate under the car and the hood. We had already had a tire repaired again today in a little ger truck stop…but now we had only […]
The first thing we did when we woke up was check the rear tire to see if it still had air. We already had one flat from the day before and had to put on our spare which had a slow leak in it – but it seemed to hold ok overnight…whew. We had 100km […]
We slowly moved deeper into Mongolia where the foreign landscapes, people, and towns started to become normal to me. We were moving from western Mongolia into Central Mongolia and the Gobi Desert; from Altai to Bayankhongor. The landscapes changed dramatically as we left the Altai mountains and hills behind and had nothing but a perfectly […]
Mongolia is flat…and so are our tires. A little photo essay on our tire changes…and there were many. The roads in Mongolia are brutal on tires…especially when you start out with rear ones that are bald already! I seemed to be bad luck on the tires as we only got flats when I was driving. […]
We get in the car, adjust the seat so that the pedal distance is just right, buckle up, and put two quarters in the slot. I choose three players, level of difficulty, my route, start the engine, hear the rumble of a muffler-less rally car, and I’m off…as if I’m in a video game. Driving […]
Once the sun came up, they started appearing. They were just puffs of dust off in the distance, and as they got closer, you could see 3 or 4 people squeezed on the motorcycle. They were curious about what two little tents and a car were doing in the flat, rocky landscape they call home. […]
