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.
It didn’t take long to ride crushed gravel to the point we’d turned back from the day before. What we saw convinced us we'd made the right call. The 'road' went from bad to worse-- flattened ropes whose unravelled threads criss-crossed sandy plains.
It was hard and heavy work as we left Zamyn Uud behind. Semi-trailers, four-wheel-drives and high-bodied Russian vans churned past us on tires that mocked our narrow wheels. We rode occasionally, pedaling furiously as sand sucked at the wheels or robbed them of purchase; mostly we leaned into our handlebars and put one foot in front of the other, sometimes needing to push two to a bike, cutting 15 cm troughs that swerved with the effort.
We weren’t dismayed. We had a near-empty expanse in front, a blue sky marked only by the perfect white contrails of planes flying to Ulaanbaatar above, and Kanye kicking on a handlebar-mounted speaker. We told each other that conditions had improve. How else could others have moved their bikes 230 kilometres in five days?
Sure enough, after what was probably only ninety minutes but felt like much longer, we came across scattered crusts of small rocks. With these under our fat tyres we found something like traction, upgrading from pushing our bikes to heavy-resistance cycling and slow-motion tumbles. After the whipping of yesterday and the sand of the morning, this was basically tarmac. We spent the rest of the afternoon grinning into the desert and marveling at all its nothing.
We laughed when we pulled out our tent that night, pitching a few hundred metres from the path most trucks took; although I'd been carting the tent around for four months we'd never set it up before, and it became quickly obvious just how impossible it would have been to camp in the yesterday's wind. This struck us as hilarious.
After months of hotels rooms and spring-coil mattresses I was tucked into a sleeping bag beneath some plastic in the Gobi Desert. My shoulder overhung my narrow foam mat to be prodded by a half-hearted root. Still, I was comfortable.
Day one arrived like an apology.
We woke to limp flags and a brilliant blue canopy, spring-brisk weather better than any since Thailand.
It didn’t take long to ride crushed gravel to the point we’d turned back from the day before. What we saw convinced us we'd made the right call. The 'road' went from bad to worse-- flattened ropes whose unravelled threads criss-crossed sandy plains.
It was hard and heavy work as we left Zamyn Uud behind. Semi-trailers, four-wheel-drives and high-bodied Russian vans churned past us on tires that mocked our narrow wheels. We rode occasionally, pedaling furiously as sand sucked at the wheels or robbed them of purchase; mostly we leaned into our handlebars and put one foot in front of the other, sometimes needing to push two to a bike, cutting 15 cm troughs that swerved with the effort.
We weren’t dismayed. We had a near-empty expanse in front, a blue sky marked only by the perfect white contrails of planes flying to Ulaanbaatar above, and Kanye kicking on a handlebar-mounted speaker. We told each other that conditions had improve. How else could others have moved their bikes 230 kilometres in five days?
Sure enough, after what was probably only ninety minutes but felt like much longer, we came across scattered crusts of small rocks. With these under our fat tyres we found something like traction, upgrading from pushing our bikes to heavy-resistance cycling and slow-motion tumbles. After the whipping of yesterday and the sand of the morning, this was basically tarmac. We spent the rest of the afternoon grinning into the desert and marveling at all its nothing.
We laughed when we pulled out our tent that night, pitching a few hundred metres from the path most trucks took; although I'd been carting the tent around for four months we'd never set it up before, and it became quickly obvious just how impossible it would have been to camp in the yesterday's wind. This struck us as hilarious.
After months of hotels rooms and spring-coil mattresses I was tucked into a sleeping bag beneath some plastic in the Gobi Desert. My shoulder overhung my narrow foam mat to be prodded by a half-hearted root. Still, I was comfortable.
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