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.
We lumbered back to the road, another piercing headwind and the knowledge that, barring any game-changing sandstorms, we'd be in Sainshand that afternoon.
Maybe it was the luxuries of the previous 12 hours. Maybe it was our bodies reaching their limits after long days, borderline hydration and food to make a nutritionist weep. Probably it was the middleground. Regardless, we could have counted in metres how long it took to realise we really, truly needed the respite.
Plugging along with the sun and the wind and Ennio Morricone's tumbleweed gravitas, I thought of what I’d do in Sainshand. My mental checklist sounded to me like the 10-point plan for a utopia:
When I get to Sainshand I'm going to drink water like it's beer.
When I get to Sainshand I'm going to dine on food served warm.
When I get to Sainshand I'm going to change out of these sweat-stiff clothes and wash dirt from my inner ear.
As we climbed the long ascent towards where we thought Sainshand should be we were both on edge. GPS said it was meant to be only a few kilometres away but we'd seen little evidence of a town and our coordinates were hardly surefire.
There had been far harder days and our nerve had never faltered; instead we'd tentatively extended the cycling route all the way to Ulaanbaatar. That was before day five. By then we were close enough to let ourselves see that we were worn down, sitting on the first tantrums of Mongolia; if the approaching lip didn't reveal a town where we could rest for a few days, this whole riding-a-bike-in-the-desert business was going to stop being fun.
We rode. We hoped. We crested.
Sainshand.
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.
We lumbered back to the road, another piercing headwind and the knowledge that, barring any game-changing sandstorms, we'd be in Sainshand that afternoon.
Maybe it was the luxuries of the previous 12 hours. Maybe it was our bodies reaching their limits after long days, borderline hydration and food to make a nutritionist weep. Probably it was the middleground. Regardless, we could have counted in metres how long it took to realise we really, truly needed the respite.
Plugging along with the sun and the wind and Ennio Morricone's tumbleweed gravitas, I thought of what I’d do in Sainshand. My mental checklist sounded to me like the 10-point plan for a utopia:
When I get to Sainshand I'm going to drink water like it's beer.
When I get to Sainshand I'm going to dine on food served warm.
When I get to Sainshand I'm going to change out of these sweat-stiff clothes and wash dirt from my inner ear.
As we climbed the long ascent towards where we thought Sainshand should be we were both on edge. GPS said it was meant to be only a few kilometres away but we'd seen little evidence of a town and our coordinates were hardly surefire.
There had been far harder days and our nerve had never faltered; instead we'd tentatively extended the cycling route all the way to Ulaanbaatar. That was before day five. By then we were close enough to let ourselves see that we were worn down, sitting on the first tantrums of Mongolia; if the approaching lip didn't reveal a town where we could rest for a few days, this whole riding-a-bike-in-the-desert business was going to stop being fun.
We rode. We hoped. We crested.
Sainshand.
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