Gobi Day 7: Apri 29

Gobi Desert

Final Stretch

On day seven we rode a measly 10 kilometres before we found another truck willing to take all the way to Ulaanbaatar, still some 400 kilometres away.

The driver had been more eager to accept us than his passenger. By the time we hit the sealed road at Choir I understood why: the passenger was the one who had to hide whenever we passed a traffic police checkpoint.

Gobi Day 6: Apr 28

Gobi Desert

Thumbs Down, Thumbs Up

The ride out of Sainshand began perfectly. Within an hour the only reminder of civilisation was the train track to our left and the arrow-straight road that dropped us into a shallow depression; from here, rolling forward through a treadmill-disconnect of pared-back uniformity, the near crests of desert met the sky like the sharp edge of a shrunken world.

Sainshand: Apr 25 - 27

Gobi Desert

Sainshand

Sainshand is a sandblown collection of gers, hotels, rundown restaurants and never-full bars that ekes out a living from the train line snaking through. It has neat rows of windbreaking trees and no grass. It's about as much town as it's fair to expect in the middle of a desert.

Gobi Day 5: Apr 24

Gobi Desert

Kaput

After a carton's worth of fried eggs and a track crew's worth of introductions, we left Tuvshihbat 's and went to pack the tent. The afternoon before we'd done our best to clear some of the broken glass we would discover covers the ground of every Mongolian settlement and city; it looked like dew in the low morning light but put a few holes in our groundsheet nonetheless.

Gobi Day 4: Apr 23

Gobi Desert

Mongolian Homestay

"Horsey!"

Tuvshihbat was leaning towards me, the one English word he knew especially incongruous coming from his heavy Mongolian face. In his hand was a camera which showed him standing proud in thick snow, resplendent in a traditional Mongolian deel. He was next to his 'horsey', outside the house we'd been beckoned into.

Gobi Day 3: Apr 22

Gobi Desert

The Culinary Circuit

Imitation Nutella on bread that started out stale and got no better with time; two-minute noodles eaten dry and without flavour to minimise thirst and avoid the added weight of stove-fuel; baked beans carried from Beijing; Mars Bars that hit like they'd been injected; sardines whose overwhelming salt and oil assumed a better taste than the memory of the choicest panfried salmon.

Gobi Day 2: Apr 21

Gobi Desert

Rewired

It took a moment to get my bearings when I crawled from the tent on day two.

Morning stillness sat heavy. All was quiet. Wrapped around us were low rolling hills, sandy stretches and rocky patches, a landscape of horizontal bands painted with a rationed palette of autumnal yellows, oranges and browns. With no dustcloud-trailing trucks, and forgetting the east-risen sun, it was easy to be disoriented by the emptiness.

Gobi Day 1: Apr 20

Gobi Desert

It Felt Good to Be Out of the Rain

Day one arrived like an apology.

We woke to limp flags and a brilliant blue canopy, spring-brisk weather better than any since Thailand.

Gobi Day 0: Apr 19

Gobi Desert (Sainshand)

Dry Run

We could have done more to know more.

We had made it to dusty Zamyn Uud after a sleeper train from Beijing, passing the spaced-out mudbrick houses of Inner Mongolia before being stamped through the border town of Erlian and into the real Mongolia.

Beijing: Apr 10 - 17

BEijing (sleeper train)

Climbing up the Walls

When I was eight or nine we bought a kitten.

Cat I was a slow-moving ball of orange whose care was meant to steer us children away from lives of wanton selfishness. Dad ended up feeding it most days and all I really learnt was that I prefer dogs. Nevertheless, when it shuffled off its mortal coil some years later, we were soon at the pet shop, lined up for a replacement.

Hunan: Apr 5 - 9

Yongzhou

The House that Jack Built

We met Jack in Yongzhou.

We had just arrived and were beginning our daily game of looking for a cheap hotel. When he called out, 'Hi, how you going?'--he was sitting on a motorbike parked in front of a shopping centre--his face was so honest, his English so clear, his demeanour at seeing a black and white guy riding past so refreshingly calm, it was all we could do to stop.

Guangxi: Mar 24 - Apr 4

Wuzhou - Daoshu - Taiping - Mensheng - Yangshuo - Guilin - Quanzhou

Last in Translation

The language barrier is set higher in the Middle Kingdom.

In Hong Kong numerous travellers warned us that it stopped being easy once we entered China Proper. You have to communicate on their terms, they said. No one speaks English. In a world where everyone else I meet speaks three or four languages and looks bored with each, the Chinese would, with a few exceptions, be stubbornly, trend-buckingly monolingual--well, at least we'd have that in common.