An amazing day! The cars all left Erenhot together to reach the Chinese-Mongolian border. That was the boring part, which lasted about three hours. As soon as we passed the border the world changed from the bustling growing Chinese town to a sleepy Mongolian village. The asphalt was replaced almost immediately by a multitude of dirt tracks all leading more or less in the same Northen direction. The idea is that when a track becomes over used and corrugated by lorries drivers, people choose to open a new one. Sometimes we drive parallel to other participants in a way that would be difficult to imagine on standard roads. It’s a little confusing at first but we soon get the hang of it. The GPS system clearly helps in providing point to point directions. In fact we could probably just follow the train tracks or the telephone wires, similarly to what Borghese did over one hundred years ago.
The ride is sometimes relatively smooth over soft sand and light corrugation. It’s enough to drive above 50Km to overcome the vibration. Other times it gets very rough and we have to slow down to almost a crawl to avoid demolishing the car and losing our tooth fillings. Vibrations nevertheless loosen some stuff. We have to stop to tighten a headlamp and our outside rear mirrors. Later, one of the participants stops us to inform us that our rear box is shaking a lot. We check it and realise that a bolt has come off. We try tightening it but realise that its thread is shot. With a ratchet we secure it and drive on.
The scenery is breathtaking, open spaces without a soul in sight save for some rare vehicles, the odd shepherd with his herd of (cashmere?) goats and, clearly, other rally participants. From time to time we spot some wild horses and camels (the ones with two humps). Out in the middle of the desert they are an amazing sight.
We reach our final time control, outside of our target time but within the maximum allowed time. We cross the village of Sainshand and drive on to the camp. Despite our satellite navigation we, and a bunch of other cars, miss the right track and end up about 4Km off course. The GPS points us East and, as the sun starts to set, we decide to do a Borghese and abandon the track to drive directly across our camp over some hills. It’s an exhilarating experience as we lead a convoy of 5 or six cars driving over smooth untouched desert terrain dodging small bushes to finally reach (not without a little apprehension) our camp few minutes later. To celebrate the success of the day we get together with our camp neighbours sharing espresso, whisky and cigars under the stairs next to our tents.
