Our Trip to the Gobi (Andrew)

Cameron and I just returned from a week long trip to Gobi. It was truly awesome. We went days seeing only the occasional herd of goats or distant Ger to remind us that people were around and the scenery was breathtaking. To set the scene here are the characters we traveled with:


Mount Zorgol, the mountain you climb to destroy the one ring to rule , a mountain in the Altai Range north of the Gobi

Rita: a 69 year French-Canadian old double knee replacement retiree who's been backpacking the world for most of the last six years. Rita is an inspiration. Toilets or no toilets she wanted to see the Gobi. Next up she heads to China. Unfortunately we didn't have good news for her on the toilet front.

Chris: a 27 year old english teacher originally for the UK currently living in Japan. Chris taught Cameron and I about the UK. When someone is being annoying or easily offended they are being "Larry". 'Knacked' is tired. Chips are 'crisps' and fries are 'chips'. Chris also had a very useful and amusing Mongolian language guide which included:

"How old is your daughter"
"Your family has many animals"
"I like meat"
and
"My leg is broken"

unfortunately we didn't get to use as many of these as we would have liked.

Cameron: see 10 of the last 12 posts (or recall that he's your son, brother and/or canim lake camping companion)

Andrew: see 2 of the last 12 posts or see the note on Cameron.

"Oggy": Our 22 year old female Mongolian cook and guide. The vast majority of our interaction with Oggy came during meals, when we said "thank you" and made vigorous efforts to show how delicious we thought her food was. Towards the end of the trip she also started making jokes like, "we camp here tonight!", when we'd been waiting in the middle of nowhere to change a popped tire, or "lunch!" when I showed her a lizard I had caught. Cameron and I hypothesize that her role as "guide" was more for the driver's benefit than the guests since we we're pretty sure our driver would have gone crazy with no one to talk to during the 16 hour days of driving and car repair. That said, if Moosh had gone crazy its hard to say if we would have noticed.

Moosh: our 55 year old driver. Moosh is a pretty amazing guy. We would wake each morning to find him under the van or sifting through the jerry can of random parts he carried and fall asleep to the same. Our vehicle was at least 30 year old by my estimation, but that number alone doesn't do justice to the "blueberry". I'm not sure, for example, how far you have to go back to find a North American car who's oil gauge is a plastic jar sticking out of the dash. What the 'blueberry' may have lacked in "modern technology" or "western safety standards" however, Moosh made up for in sheer persistence. At our first tire change I went for a jog down the road after a few hours of waiting and found one of the bolts that had fallen off the wheel casing. Moosh treated it like a "piece of treasure" (Rita). We were back no the road in no time.

In addition to driving a van, Moosh is also a doctor, once had some role in Monglian politics and raced horses in his youth. Its hard to verify these claims but I think they are entirely possible. I've never seen anyone as resourceful at patching a "made in USSR" tire, as certain of his direction while driving in a rainstorm that obliterates the road and obscures all landmarks or as ferocious at scaring away unwanted young Mongolian men during our "urban ger" experience. And after 8 hours on the "road" and three hours under the car beside the road, Moosh still managed to have a glass of Chenggis vodka (read Genghkis), or 5, and sing songs with the locals until he needed to be carried to his bed in the trunk of the "blueberry".

some memorable Moosh quotes:

on the condition of our vehicle:
"brakes very good today! yesterday brakes verry bad"
on driving in Mongolia during the winter:
"wintertime? sleep only 1/2 hour. Sleep 1 hour? Engine verry cold. Road home 1500km. Sometimes fall asleep. Sometimes lose road. Verry dangerous!"
on working in Mongolia during the Communist era:
"doctor, no pay well. Drive car with pig skins to Russia, buy new car in one year!"

other notes:

We will no longer be giving away the Canadian Kite. Cameron took it for a test fly the other day and it got caught in a tree. How did it get caught in a tree in a country that is almost entirely grassland? You'll have to ask Cameron.

Guess who else is on the transiberian? Kim Jong Il! In his armoured train no less. Apparently he's afraid of flying.