Travelled to Mongolian border today saying goodbye to our Chinese guides.
It took three hours to complete all the paper work for leaving China.
While waiting at the boarder a Landcruiser and mini van arrived laden up with produce. Six and eleven people respectively also got out of these vehicles. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. We then travelled one KM through no mans land to the Mongolian Border. We were met by a Mongolian interpreter who helped us with the paper work to get the cars through. We were through in two hours. He said “This was a record”. Within 15 mins we were at the end of the seal and being faced with three different sand tracks into the desert and nothing around us other than power lines and a railway track. A daunting sight!!!!!
The lead car chose the mid track and within a short time was stuck in the sand. What a start, and we had the Gobi to face. We then chose the right hand track which was a little better. Graeme and Dianne in one of the Saabs then got stuck and when trying to back out broke their differential. They were towed back to the border town. Five hours later a decision was made that they would leave the group and put their car on the train to Ulaanbaatar. A sad day for us all.
So at 5pm we again set off into the desert driving for an hour and 50kms later we were running out of day light, so pulled off the track about 100 meters and set up camp. Cooked dinner and all wondered why we had decided to take on such a daunting journey. During the night huge trucks rumbled by and we were visited by some locals. Non of us slept particularly well.