September 11, 2014
Okay I might be a little bit lost: But I don't need no GPS
The tracks continued, winding their way up and down and around, criss-crossing, going this way and that. They were a bit bumpy but not awful, and it was quite fun trying to decide which track would be best. Getting off the asphalt, this felt like the real Mongolia at last.
Only ten kilometres into the day I came across a rest area with a row of cafes. My first thought was that Petr would have been very happy. My second thought was about what Bak Hyung Yeol had told me about there being nowhere to get food or water the whole way. Looking at the row of cafes it really didn't seem to be true. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more Bak Hyung Yeol's story failed to add up. He'd told me that there was no road, but there were actually six or seven. He'd told me there would be nowhere to get food and water, not even any yurts, but I'd seen quite a few yurts. He'd told me it was just desert, but there was plenty of grass where I was. Four days also seemed awfully fast to have cycled the whole way from Altay. I came to the conclusion, piecing the evidence together, that what had really happened to Bak Hyung Yeol is this: Trusting his GPS more than common sense he'd turned away from the tracks and headed south out into the Gobi desert where he wandered aimlessly for four days, surviving only by eating the remains of a wolf he'd managed to knock out with a hammer, before being picked up by a passing motorcyclist who drove him the rest of the way to Bayankhongor.
The morning was bliss. Cycling on the tracks was fun and not too difficult, and there was no headwind, the air was calm. There was essentially no traffic at all, but I was still following the electric pylons and I could tell from the sun that I was going west. Actually I only saw one car the whole morning. A little later I thought I saw a second, but it was the same one broken down. A family, a mother, father and teenage daughter, were sitting on the ground beside the car and I stopped to ask if they were alright. They were and I couldn't help much and I was so confident that I knew where I was going that I didn't even ask them if I was on the right road. By the way, from now on whenever I use the term 'road' I mean 'collection of tracks'.
A little later I stopped to take a break and thought I'd just have a little look at my map. When I did so I saw that there was another road marked on the map which ran south of the main road to Altay. It was almost parallel to it, but moved gradually south before turning away from it. I suddenly realised why there was no traffic on my road. There should have been some. I mean, the Mongol Rally team said they had seen lots of trucks, and there had been a few trucks the night before, and quite a few cars. Now there was nothing, and I knew I was on the wrong road. The road I should have been on, I could see on the map, was to the north of me. Oh what a disaster. Oh, cruel electric pylons, how they had deceived me. I decided that from now on I really should 1) pay more attention to the map, 2) pay more attention to the traffic and 3) pay less attention to electric pylons.
To get back to where the roads split would mean back-tracking for 30 kilometres. What a nightmare. I decided I could save myself a lot of time by just heading away from the tracks and going north cross-country for the 10 or 15 kilometres it would take to get on the proper road. So I abandoned the tracks completely and just headed out into the blank nothingness of the bleak landscape. I got about 500 metres before I turned back, partly because it was too hard to cycle on the rocky sand but mostly because I was 95% certain that I would get lost and die, probably by being eaten by wolves.
I rejoined the tracks and cycled back until I came to the family at the broken-down car. I asked them if this road went to Bombogor, the first village on the road to Altay, or not. I was quite sure by now that it didn't, but to my surprise they were all adamant that it did. Given the fact that there had been no other vehicles on the road other than me and them for the last six hours I took this to simply mean that they were also lost.
I didn't really want to cycle back 30 kilometres though, so I thought I'd trust them, and I turned around again and started following the road west as before. Pretty soon a van came towards me, but didn't stop. At least that made two vehicles. Then ten minutes later I thought there was a third, but it was just the van coming back, and this time it stopped. I saw that the family was sitting in the back. Well, in that case, that made two vehicles, but the second had been sent out to rescue the first. The driver of the van reassured me that I was on the road to Bombogor and I believed him. He did, after all, have a logo on the side of the van with the word Bombogor on it, so he really probably should know the way to Bombogor. I couldn't read the rest of the logo of course, but I imagined it probably said 'Bombogor Desert Rescue Squad.'
The tracks got much worse as the day went on and I was very frustrated at having wasted so much time going back on myself like that. I really should have had more faith in my trusty electric pylons. But if this was the road to Bombogor, where was all the traffic? I came to the conclusion that there must be another road, one that didn't go through the villages. That would explain everything Bak Hyung Yeol had said, he had simply been on the other road.
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My road became really tough, washboard and sand, and it seemed to be forever going uphill. The wind had also picked up and was practically blowing me backwards. As it came to time to camp I still hadn't arrived at Bombogor and I needed to find somewhere to shelter from the wind. Protected places were almost non-existent but I found a solution by setting up my tent in a dry river bed. The skies were quite dark and it looked like it might rain, and I knew it could be quite silly to camp in a river bed, but I really had to get out of the wind. I made a barrier out of rocks and sand and dug a channel so that if water started flowing down the river bed at least the first of it would be directed around me. Then I came up with an emergency evacuation plan in case of heavy rain. My heavy rain evacuation plan was simple and could be written down in a series of steps. Here is my evacuation in the case of heavy rain plan:
Emergency evacuation plan in case of heavy rain:Step One: In case of heavy rain, evacuate.
Yes, this plan was fool-proof, I was sure. I slept easy.
Today's ride: 80 km (50 miles)
Total: 28,193 km (17,508 miles)
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