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.
This was our desert diet, the food we carried eight days' worth of into the emptier end of a country already notorious for its cuisine.
We didn't each much. Not because the food was bland or limited--i'd lived on worse for longer as a student--but because we soon realised how subordinate hunger is to thirst. When cycling it's the done thing to eat two or three times as much as anyone else; here, without enough water to feel like I was every really drinking enough, my appetite plunged to pre-cycling levels.
We weren't particularly worried by how quickly our bodies prioritised. It was more a curiousity than concern. We knew Sainshand wasn't more than eight days from Zamyn Uud and in the meantime we told ourselves that even if each mouthful was predictable, they still lightened our loud.
Day three had been uncharacteristically hot. We encountered the unsealed basis for the road that will soon enough link Zamyn Uud and Sainshand with asphalt—currently raised and ratted stretches that drop off every few hundred metres or are blocked with piles of dirt—but not without compensation. It began with a long climb, showed us horses for the first time, took us past rising sand dunes and dropped us down windy packed clay at speeds we'd forgotten existed.
By late afternoon we had stopped next to an abutment skirted by paused construction. We were looking for the best spot to pitch our tent before a looming storm hit when a Toyota 4WD passed, stopped, then reversed alongside us.
The couple motioned to the ominous clouds nearby, looked at our bikes and offered to drive us the nearly 700 kilometres to Ulaanbaatar. When we insisted we'd be fine they gave us each a banana and a bottle of water.
Luckily the windstorm lacked the texture and force of what we'd seen at Zamyn Uud. After anchoring the tent with our bikes and scavenged blocks of concrete, we rewarded ourselves with our treats.
The banana was blackened with heat and it was only 600 mL of water.
No banana will ever taste so good. No bottle of water will ever contain so much.
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.
This was our desert diet, the food we carried eight days' worth of into the emptier end of a country already notorious for its cuisine.
We didn't each much. Not because the food was bland or limited--i'd lived on worse for longer as a student--but because we soon realised how subordinate hunger is to thirst. When cycling it's the done thing to eat two or three times as much as anyone else; here, without enough water to feel like I was every really drinking enough, my appetite plunged to pre-cycling levels.
We weren't particularly worried by how quickly our bodies prioritised. It was more a curiousity than concern. We knew Sainshand wasn't more than eight days from Zamyn Uud and in the meantime we told ourselves that even if each mouthful was predictable, they still lightened our loud.
Day three had been uncharacteristically hot. We encountered the unsealed basis for the road that will soon enough link Zamyn Uud and Sainshand with asphalt—currently raised and ratted stretches that drop off every few hundred metres or are blocked with piles of dirt—but not without compensation. It began with a long climb, showed us horses for the first time, took us past rising sand dunes and dropped us down windy packed clay at speeds we'd forgotten existed.
By late afternoon we had stopped next to an abutment skirted by paused construction. We were looking for the best spot to pitch our tent before a looming storm hit when a Toyota 4WD passed, stopped, then reversed alongside us.
The couple motioned to the ominous clouds nearby, looked at our bikes and offered to drive us the nearly 700 kilometres to Ulaanbaatar. When we insisted we'd be fine they gave us each a banana and a bottle of water.
Luckily the windstorm lacked the texture and force of what we'd seen at Zamyn Uud. After anchoring the tent with our bikes and scavenged blocks of concrete, we rewarded ourselves with our treats.
The banana was blackened with heat and it was only 600 mL of water.
No banana will ever taste so good. No bottle of water will ever contain so much.
...I bet you even started to miss those raw green bean lunches at school!
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