September 23, 2014
Counting the bottles: Counting the cost
Of course the night passed without any trouble and I carried on down through the mountains. As I did a fox ran across the road in front of me and I thought 'There goes Bak Hyung Yeol's wolf.'
I came down and out into another flat wide desert. It looked like the Kazakh steppe, which shouldn't have been too surprising seeing as I'd gone around in a big circle and was practically back there now. I saw some more big birds. They were even bigger than the birds of prey but they weren't birds of prey. They were so big it was unbelievable. They looked like pterodactyls.
The road was long and straight and mostly empty. Quite a few of the cars that did pass stopped to talk to me but I really didn't want to. I was sick of Mongolia. Every time I saw an empty bottle of vodka at the side of the road it made me sick and angry. And that happened a lot. I decided to count the bottles. There were about twelve per kilometre. So I went past 1200 empty vodka bottles in one day, all of them thrown away from moving vehicles. That might seem like a lot, but consider that the road had maybe 30 or 40 vehicles driving along it per day and you realise Mongolians have one serious alcohol problem.
The more I thought about what had happened the less it mattered to me what had happened or whether the men lived or died. Of course it mattered to them and to their families, they probably all had children. But why should it matter to me? I didn't know them from Adam. 3000 people I don't know get killed by cars every day. If I was going to worry about anyone it was going to be the innocent victims, children hit by drink drivers and such. Why should I waste my time feeling bad about the drink drivers themselves?
But it didn't make me feel any better.
Today's ride: 101 km (63 miles)
Total: 29,008 km (18,014 miles)
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