WARNING: This page describes in detail the immediate aftermath of a serious traffic accident. I don't think there is anything overly gory, but if you are particularly squeamish, or just don't feel like reading about the aftermath of a serious traffic accident, then don't read this page.

I don't know what it was that made me look up. There might have been a horn, there might have been a screech of brakes, I honestly don't remember. Maybe I just looked up at that moment by chance. But I remember what I saw; about 500 metres ahead of me, maybe a little more, a Land Rover-type vehicle leaving the road. For some stupid reason the road was raised a couple of metres above the height of the rest of the desert, and the vehicle headed down the steep-sloped embankment. It went over the edge, then suddenly it flipped and started to roll. It rolled over and over and over again in a billowing cloud of sand. It seemed like it was happening in slow motion, and with each roll the terrifying situation that was unfolding in front of me grew more and more serious.

I was right opposite the building when it happened and a group of men were standing in the parking lot outside, so I urgently called out to them and pointed at the accident scene. Their looks of shock confirmed that they knew what had happened, and I imagined that they would all jump in a vehicle and drive down as quick as they could. At least I wasn't going to have to deal with this on my own. I started riding again, and pedaled quickly down to see if there was anything I could do.

I've sometimes thought about what I would do in this situation, arriving first on to an accident scene. I think most of us have. I always imagined I would run fearlessly in like David Hasselhoff, administer First Aid and CPR, apply bandages and tourniquets and get everyone back on their feet by the time the emergency services arrived. At the very least I would run fearlessly in. But let me tell you, that is bullsh!t. Complete bullsh!t. Oh, I had every intention to run fearlessly in as I laid my bicycle down. But then I saw the scene in front of me. The vehicle was right-side up again, but it was a complete wreck, the whole roof had caved in completely. Spread out across the sand to the right of it, evidently thrown from the vehicle as it flipped, were the bodies of four men. And they were bodies. They were all dead for sure. Their bodies were horribly contorted, dust all over them, limbs at funny angles. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This was something from a movie, a video game, this wasn't real. I turned away, covered my mouth, held my head. I was in shock. Stunned and unable to do anything more constructive I for some reason decided I needed to move my bicycle, so I picked it up again and walked it over to the other side of the road. There was a blue pick-up truck parked there that had been involved in the accident somehow. One man, who was wearing yellow, I think was still sitting in it. Another man who must have been in the pick-up as well was now running around amongst the bodies, grabbing at rocks, tearing at his hair and throwing himself around like a man in severe shock.

A white vehicle came along the road towards us and I flagged it to stop, which it did. I told the people in it that we needed to call for help, which seemed like a pretty obvious thing to do. I don't think they did anything. They all just stared slack-jawed at the horror-movie in front of them. None of them were going to do anything, the men at the building that I'd called out to were nowhere to be seen, no one else was coming. The hysterical man from the pick-up was now shaking the bodies wildly as if trying to make them wake up. There was a sudden moment of clarity looking at the completely remote landscape when I realised I really was going to have to be the one to pull myself together and do something here. If any of those men were still alive the very least I needed to do was stop that idiot from shaking them to death.

I ran down the slope into the carnage screaming "STOP SHAKING THEM!" at the man. He was a short man, thirties, wild unkempt hair. He was all over the place and I couldn't tell if he was drunk or just in a state of severe shock, but at my shouting he went back to leaving the bodies alone and merely flailing wildly about the place. It was horrific, the whole scene. I can't even begin to explain, and you can't imagine, unless you've been in such a situation, you can't imagine. Trembling, I reached the first of the stricken men and was surprised to find he was alive and conscious. I tried to remember what to do. ABC. Airways-Breathing-Circulation. His airways seemed clear. He was breathing okay. He had a strong pulse. He was doing amazingly well on all three, and was beginning to writhe about a little, moaning and groaning slightly. Under the circumstances he appeared to be in great shape. He had even managed to land almost in the recovery position, and I moved quickly onto the next guy.

He was much worse off, lying on his back with his legs bent out at funny angles. His eyes were closed and his face was pale and covered in dust. He looked very, very dead. I opened his mouth to check his airways and saw some chewing gum floating around back there. I reached a finger into his mouth and scooped out the gum, aware as I did so that I could not afford to let this slip. With great relief I got it out first time and threw it on the ground. The man was breathing. I couldn't believe it, he was breathing. Whenever I let go of his mouth, however, his jaw clamped shut and his breathing became much worse. The only way to keep him breathing well was to hold his mouth open. But he was breathing and I needed to check the others.

I ran over to the third man, who was lying with his back to me. As I got close I saw a pool of blood next to him, blood on his clothes, blood where his face should be. From the angle I was coming at him from it appeared that he had been at least partially decapitated. He was dead for sure. I recoiled in horror, and couldn't bring myself to examine him, and instead ran to the fourth man who was lying further away. He was a good fifteen metres from the vehicle. He'd been thrown such a long way that I couldn't believe it when I found that he too was alive, breathing and semi-conscious. We had three people alive and breathing, and what we needed now was an ambulance.

At some point the white vehicle had left, but a motorcyclist had stopped by now and the rider came down to the scene. Like the other guy, this man seemed either to be drunk or in severe shock, running around in despair and to my utter disbelief he too started to shake the men. "STOP SHAKING THEM! NO!" I screamed at him and made it very clear that this was not a good thing for him to be doing. "Ambulance! Doctor! Phone Ambulance!" I said, making telephone gestures with my hand. He started trying to make phone calls. Other cars came along the road and I tried to get them to stop, but they just drove past. What was wrong with these people? I had no idea where the nearest hospital was. Altay? Khovd? Four or five hours away. But Tsetseg was so close. It was just five kilometres or so away across the desert. But it was just a village. "Is there anyone there who can help? A doctor?" I asked, pointing at Tsetseg. But nobody understood anything I was saying.

The first guy who had been running around madly got back in the pick-up and drove off with the guy in the yellow, who'd done nothing at all to help. They had been involved in the accident, might even have caused it, and now they were fleeing the scene. I was angry, but at least it meant he wasn't going to be shaking anybody about anymore. Now it was just me and the motorcyclist. I was spending a lot of time with the unconscious man, holding his mouth open so that he could breath. He was a lean man with a gaunt face and high forehead. He looked so much like death. His dust-covered face would be the one that would haunt me. But then I would turn around and see that the motorcyclist had rolled one of the other guys out of the recovery position. "Stop it! You have to keep them still! Is there an ambulance coming? Has anybody called an ambulance?" It was useless. The guy was an idiot. At one point I tried to get him to hold the unconscious man's mouth open so that I could do other things, but he couldn't understand what I meant. It was such a simple task. Instead he tried to start giving mouth-to-mouth. "NO! Stop it! He's breathing! You don't need to do that!" He meant well, he really did, and at least he was trying to help.

I knew I had to man up and go and check on the bleeding man. I expected to find a corpse, but to my astonishment he too was still breathing. He wasn't as bad as I first thought, it must just have been the angle. He did have a head-wound, and a lot of blood around his ear, but he wasn't bleeding heavily. His breathing was rasping and gargly though, clearly he had a lot of blood in this throat. I wanted to clear his airways, so I rolled him over and tilted his head gently so that blood flowed out of his nose and mouth. I wasn't in shock now, wasn't scared or disgusted, I was just doing things by instinct, trying to keep these men alive.

It was just me and the motorcyclist for a long time. I don't know how long, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe an hour. Cars did come along and I ran up to the road to stop them. I remember one, it was a Chinese family. "Please help!" I said as they stopped, "Please call an ambulance, call for help!" The man rolled up his window and drove on. This happened two or three times. I gave up and let the motorcyclist stop the cars, and concentrated on alternating between holding the unconscious man's mouth open and periodically running around to check that the other men were still breathing too.

So now there were four breathing men and if it was going to take four or five hours for an ambulance to arrive then so be it, I was going to do what I could to keep them all alive until then. I ran up to my bike and grabbed some clothes, with the idea that I now needed to check for wounds and stem any blood losses. I went over each of the men in turn and amazingly couldn't find any series external wounds. The bleeding man and the one who had been thrown a long way both had head-wounds, but they weren't bleeding a lot. I was sure they all had serious internal injuries, especially the bleeding man, but there wasn't anything I could do about that, and the clothes were used to prop heads and try to keep people still in the recovery position.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of this, I got a vehicle to stop. It was a minibus filled with people and a couple of young guys came over to the scene. They seemed a little more educated about what to do and managed to phone for help. I think one of them was finally on the phone to the emergency services, who were probably telling him not to move anyone, because he was trying to get me to move away from the scene. I couldn't believe it. He was trying to get me to go away. But before I had time to argue with him a convoy of vehicles came along the road. I really hoped they were here to help and felt an enormous surge of relief to see three women with stethoscopes around their necks and big bags of doctor equipment running over. I pointed to the bleeding man and said "He's the worst" and they ran over to him, and started checking his heartbeat and injecting him with drugs and setting him up on a drip. There were lots of people suddenly. I could take a step back. I noticed the man from the pick-up truck was back, running around crazily again and realised that he hadn't fled the scene, but had gone to Tsetseg to get help.

Before very long an ambulance arrived from the other direction. It had come from the mine. A male doctor jumped out and started treating the man who had been thrown a long way. I felt a sense of relief. There were now four medics and the pressure was no longer on me. But with that came the first feelings of hollow emptiness, the first sense of 'did all this really just happen?' I stared vacantly. Then I noticed that there was a police detective wandering around, smoking a cigarette, not doing anything to help. He was pretty old, surely the only policeman in Tsetseg, and rather seemed like he'd seen all this too many times before. I went over to him to try and tell him what I'd seen but he seemed rather disinterested. Then suddenly I was greeted by the Safety Officer from the mine, who could speak perfect English. As the bleeding man and the man who was thrown the furthest were being lifted onto stretchers and carried to the ambulance this man translated what I told him to the detective. I pointed out the guy from the pick-up truck, said that he had been involved in the accident. The detective remained disinterested and I never even saw him try to speak to the guy. I think he just wanted to get home for his tea. I really thought the detective should at least speak with the man and I added "I think he might be drunk" to the Safety Officer. "A lot of people are drunk" he replied rather matter-of-factly. It was true. There was a bottle of vodka that had been lying in amongst all the men throughout, very likely thrown from the vehicle at the same time as they were.

There was only room for two in the ambulance, and the other two men had to be taken in other vehicles. The first man, the one who appeared in the best condition, was moved carefully by a dozen hands into the back of a van. But I watched in absolute horror as the man from the pick-up and the motorcyclist, the two idiots that had been running around shaking people and whom could both be drunk themselves, picked up the unconscious man and carried him dangling limply over to a jeep where he was hurled onto the backseat. This actually happened. With four 'doctors' and a police 'detective' on the scene, this actually happened. A man who had been lying motionless and unconscious on his back having been thrown from a vehicle, who could have had untold spinal damage, was moved to the backseat of a jeep with such carelessness. And then all of the 'ambulances' took off in the direction of Tsetseg across the desert tracks, the crowds dispersed and the police detective went home for his tea. And there was just me left, staring blankly at the wrecked car and the bottle of vodka that lay as it had landed, motionless in the sand.

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