At dawn on 24th September, I left UB in the VSO jeep, heading east. Chukka, the VSO driver, was also taking Tsolmon and Urnaa, VSO programme officers who were researching placements and giving workshops.
For the first hour or so, the road was paved and the journey very smooth - we passed beautiful mountains with clusters of gers on their slopes, villages surrounded by wooden pallisades, and occasional mines, but the landscape was clearly becoming more and more empty. After a couple of hours, the tarmac ran out and we were driving on worn tracks across the ground, with Chukka our driver weaving right and left to find the most even ground. The land really is very very dry - our vehicle created a tremendous dust, and when (very very occasionally) a vehicle came close to us going in the other direction, we were blinded by the dust from their tyres. However it was amazing watching the landscape slowly change: the mountains became lower and further away, the rivers dwindled, the predominant colours shades of brown ....
At lunchtime we stopped at Ondorkhaan in a cafe. It is a collection of buildings and huts, with a population of (I'm guessing) around 2000, but with at least one school. Mongolia is a very "young country" - half of the people are below 25 years old. Anyway, we stopped just long enough to eat, and then got back in the car.
I really enjoyed the journey - it gave me a real sense of where I was, and how the climate really affects how the land looks and how people live. Also, we saw steppe eagles, a vulture, wild camels, and as the sun fell, gazelles. It was Tsolmon who spotted them first - they seemed to just rise out of the ground in front of us, probably around a thousand of them. Amazing.
We reached Choibalsan around 9pm, after 15 hours driving.
No comments:
Post a Comment