Mongolia > The road is being paved

Absolutely nothing. Just steppe and desert. We have no idea if we’ll make it over the bad roads. We’ll see. We stock up on food and prepare for a possible overnight stay in the tent along the roadside. As we drive out of Khovd, the road turns out to be paved. Every good kilometer is a bonus today. Even through Khar Us Lake National Park the road is paved. At the side of the road two boys are stranded. We stop. Their timing belt has broken. Do we know how to install a new one? That’s not an easy job to do on your own. We can’t help them with that. But we can leave them some water—they have none left. We drive on asphalt until kilometer marker 175. This means we had good road surface for nearly half the distance. From here they are working hard to pave the rest of the road. The unpaved section is immediately much slower. We regularly hit potholes that launch the back of the car into the air.

Mongolia - Busy paving the eastwest connection

All our stuff rattles around inside. Will everything hold up? A huge cloud of dust trails behind the car. Inside, there isn’t a single spot left untouched by dust. The main route is as bad as yesterday. A washboard pattern has been worn into it. It’s impossible to drive on. Because the front wheels lose grip, the rear wheels push due to the four-wheel drive, making the car uncontrollable and causing it to drift. We drive carefully over these sections—or better yet, try to find another track next to the road. Sometimes there are dozens of parallel tracks across the plain. It doesn’t really matter where we drive. All tracks lead to Altai. Where possible, we switch onto the new road under construction. It isn’t paved yet, but it’s flat. Sometimes we have to leave it again because sand piles block the way. For kilometers at a time we alternate between the unfinished road and off-road tracks. Eventually, around half past seven, we drive into Altai. The guesthouse marked in our navigation system can’t be found. No one has heard of it. We decide to take the hotel at the entrance of the village. The rooms look good and there’s Wi-Fi. At the reception we see that it’s an hour later here—they already use Ulaanbaatar time. Quickly we head out for something to eat in the town. When we ask about restaurants, it turns out there is exactly one. The menu is in Russian. We point to a dish on another table: a kind of fried noodles with meat and fries. It actually tastes quite good. When I go to bed, Milko still hasn’t arrived. He is still an hour and a half from Altai. I wonder how his journey went. It can’t be pleasant driving the last stretch in the dark.