I felt numb. Completely empty.

I started cycling across the desert towards Tsetseg. What else was there to do? I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was on the bicycle, but it felt like I was just floating vacantly over the sand. A little tractor-trailer thing came past me at one point that was filled with young children. Of course they had no idea what had just happened, and they waved at me and had big happy grins on their faces. I forced a smile and a wave back and realised in this moment just how precious life was.

I began to wish that I'd asked the Safety Officer from the mine for an email address or something so that I could find out what happened to the men, and got annoyed with myself for not doing so. I decided I'd go straight to the hospital in Tsetseg to find him and ask. But as I arrived in Tsetseg I knew there would be no hospital. It was just a village, maybe a couple of thousand people at the most. Dusty streets, run down buildings. At best it was going to have a little clinic. These men were all seriously injured. They needed operating theatres, emergency surgery, intensive care units, life-support machines. What were they going to get here? A place to lie down and be given drugs until they either got better or died?

I searched for the hospital, clinic, whatever it was that they'd been taken to but I couldn't find it. Instead I ended up on a street of shops. I needed to buy supplies, but going into a shop and buying three days worth of food wasn't an easy thing to do. I felt sick. I felt guilty, like I was abandoning the men now I was no longer helping them. Eating was the last thing on my mind. I managed to buy some things, but I spent a lot more time just standing in the street, staring blankly ahead of me, trying to process what had happened and not being able to. Then a blue pick-up pulled up in the street opposite and I recognised it as the one that had been involved in the accident. The man in the yellow, who'd done nothing to help, got out and walked towards me. I acknowledged him and for a moment felt we were in this together, and he was going to tell me where the hospital was and how the men were doing, but he looked straight through me and walked into the shop. I couldn't tell what it was that he was buying, but I could take a good guess.

That shop didn't have everything I needed so I had to go to another. By the time I came back the other man, the crazy one, had come from somewhere and was with the one in yellow at the pick-up. Somehow they had managed to reverse it over a raised kerb and had got it stuck and were looking at it wondering how to free it. There was nothing left for me to do but leave.

I cycled off on different sandy tracks that looked like they would cut across to join the paved road in the direction I wanted. I was still lost inside, I really needed someone to talk to, but it was impossible. Instead I had to cycle a 250 kilometre road of nothing but desert, all by myself. I'd needed to be mentally strong to overcome a few obstacles on my trip, but this was something else.

A motorcycle came along the track behind me and I moved off onto the desert to let it past. I hoped it wouldn't stop. The last thing I wanted was to have to try and communicate with anyone in Mongolian now. Of course it did stop, and the driver actually decided he had to pull off the track as well and as he hit the edge of the sand almost lost control and ran into me. Getting run over by a motorcycle really would have topped the day off nicely. The two men on the bike tried to talk to me. I looked at them blankly. I felt dead inside. "Yes I am going this way. You can see that I'm going this way. I'm not in the mood for this sorry." And I cycled off. They overtook me and then a short while later I saw them parked up on a little hill, sitting and taking big swigs from a bottle of vodka.

The sun set without me even noticing it. As it grew cold and dark I realised I was still in the desert and the track wasn't going to join the paved road and I was going to have to push across the sand to get there. I had nowhere good to camp but I realised it didn't really matter if the wind flapped noisily at my tent all night, it wasn't like I was going to be sleeping anyway.

I put the tent up and lay in it, and spent the night replaying everything that had happened, over and over and over in my mind. I beat myself up about things. Things that I could have done, things that I shouldn't have done. Eventually I realised that it didn't really matter. All of the men were going to die. They were so badly hurt, they needed proper hospitals, proper surgeons. Where was the nearest hospital? Khovd? 300 kilometres. But even that was only a town of 20,000 people. Probably the only place these men could be treated was Ulan Bator. It was days away, across those terrible roads. And no doubt the hospitals there were overrun with drunks that had crashed in the city.

Mostly I thought about how terrible everything was. The fact that probably everyone involved in the accident was drunk. The fact that so many people didn't care. Right through from the cowards at the building who did nothing, to the cowards that drove past without stopping, to the detective who couldn't have cared less about investigating what had happened. My whole world-view had been changed by this. And not for the better.