30days30years

Cat and mouse

Last night was like a tactical game of battle ships.

A young guy ,who appears not to feel the cold at all, (everyone else was covered head to toe with anything warm they could find) decided that every half an hour or so he would take it upon himself to open the air vent on the roof of the bus. It worked perfectly for him because he was sitting behind the driver facing backwards, thus allowing him some nice air flow without the arctic freeze which blasted the rest of us.

He’d get up, open it, sit down and fall back to sleep. I’d get up, close it, sit back down and fall a sleep until the next cold blast hit me like a bullet. Eventually the dude sitting next to him did it on my behalf and I just gave him a nod from under my scarf, which I have been forced to make into a makeshift balaclava.

Somehow we managed to survive the night, although I’m not entirely sure how given the driving prowess of the man behind the wheel. His method of tackling the big craters in the road was just simply to swerve. I thought the bus was going to tip at least six times as we skidded across the ice one way and then violently back the other on a lean.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting Mongolia, there really isn’t such a thing as roads. Once you hit the desert you simply follow the path that someone else has carved out before you or make a new one. The result is an amazing web of tracks that seemingly end you up in the same spot although you can never really be too sure given there is no signs.  The driver had to divert more than once last night as his chosen path simply vanished or ended at the base of a mountain.

When you Google Map UB to Bayan Olgii it doesn’t even come up as a defined route but by my rough calculations it is only 700 or so kilometres away.  I’ve been trying figure out how it can possibly take us 50 hours to travel such a small distance. Even at 50km an hour and going over mountains it should take less than 24 hours. Turns out we don’t drive line of sight and instead head south for ages making our journey 1700km. The driver and his father seem committed to getting us there in a timely manner though. To swap drivers they don’t even bother to stop. One simply slides in behind the other who then jumps across to the front dash, which acts as their seat and bed simultaneously.

This morning we had breakfast in a Ger, which consisted of the Mongolian version of Chai (water, milk, a minute amount of chai and salt) and these stale donut-type things. Outside, goats and horse grazed freely on the snow-speckled landscape. Truly amazing scenery.

It reminded me of the Peter Weir film The Way Back which I saw at the Jerusalem Film Festival when I was in Israel earlier this year. The film chronicles the 4500-mile journey of a group of men who escape a Russian gulag in the frozen wastelands of Siberia and make it across Siberia, Mongolia and the Himalayas all the way to India.

Check out the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87kezJTpyMI

After lunch we stopped at another ger surrounded by dozens of horses. I was reluctant to get out because I want to hold off getting sick as long as possible. So while I stayed on the bus everyone else piled into the ger for some airag (fermented mare’s milk) which has the strength of a light beer. When they reappeared about 40 minutes later they were all noticeably more jovial! Lucky things!

The dance with the air vent continued as night fell. At dinner I asked Erkan, a Kazakh man, if anyone wanted to swap seats with us so they could enjoy the fresh air and we could avoid getting frostbite. There were no takers. Instead they were content to let us suffer. The dusty terrain we were traversing made things worse. The hole in the bottom of the door I mentioned previously acted as a nice vacuum for sucking in what felt like half of Mongolia’s mountainside so the vent was opened to combat the dust. I personally was happy to put up with the dust.

Everyone is also getting a bit ratty in general after sitting on a bus for two days. The woman sitting across from me and one row in front has now decided it is no longer acceptable for me to put my feet on the package next to her, even though about six people have for the entire journey thus far. She basically barricaded me off from it meaning I had nowhere to put my feet but tucked up in the air (there is a man sitting in the isle next to me and boxed under my feet). That position is no fun when faced with kilometre after kilometre of what feels like driving over a cattle grate!

I have to take my hat off to the Mongols though. They don’t complain. There are two young children – one about 1 1/2 and the other about 2 ½ – on the bus and we have not heard boo out of them for the past two days. Put a Western child in that situation with barely a break and they would be climbing the walls. I guess if you are used to having nothing you want for nothing….