The Finish Line

by Sheila on 28 Sep, 2014 - 3 comments

After a night spent in a rather bizarre office building-cum-hotel in Ulan Ude, we awoke the next morning with Ulaanbaatar on our minds. It’d be a lie if I said we weren’t wimps by this point; we knew we were taking the “easy” route into Mongolia & we were quite relieved about it!

Because we had encountered some intense uphill mountain driving the day before going around Lake Baikal, Mom had me check the oil for the first time since we entered Russia. Ever since the oil was changed in Baku, the car had been managing quite well, so I was scoffing at the ‘extra work’. Mom’s intuition was right, however, and my eyes widened when I saw that more than half of the oil had burned off. At least this gave us a reason to empty more from the leaky oil bottle we had in back!

Further inspection of the car brought to light that our front tires were nearly bald. We stood looking at them for a bit, gauging how many potholes full of sharp rocks it would take for them to burst, then mutually agreed that we were too lazy to bother changing them. Crossing our fingers and butt clenching had worked for us so far, why change a working system?

We drove south from Ulan Ude towards the Mongolian border on an A road. We were first apprehensive of the route given our experience with the Russian M roads (construction, traffic, gravel nightmares, etc.), but we ate our fears not long into the drove. The A road was fantastic! It was smooth, scenic, had limited construction & even more limited traffic, the drive was the best we’d had since entering Russia! It helped that the weather was still cool, so we watched the landscape change from tall forests to rolling steppes without feeling the need to hide from the sun.

Before we knew it, we reached the border. We had honestly thought it would take us more than the 2.5hrs it actually took, so excitement all around! The border wasn’t terribly busy, but we were joined by a few Mongolian families that clearly had experience with this crossing. First came the waiting, as one-by-one cars were motioned forwards, divested of ALL their things, and drivers went inside a little office to speak to a guard. I am very much NOT a fan of constantly unloading and reloading our car, especially when the guard that asks you to do it stands nonchalantly back and smirks. These guards took it one step further and had us open our suitcases! The entire time, we wondered why on earth leaving Russia was more work-intensive than entering. Just let us go!

Once we had been deemed innocent of illicitly exporting goods from Russia, it was time for the entry to Mongolia. Unlike the Russian side, most of the form-filling formalities took place inside, which was nice as the bugs outside were just unpleasant. The process we went through was reminiscent of entering Turkmenistan, but thankfully it took much less time and the guards were more helpful. Seeing them enter our information by hand into ledgers while sitting in front of a perfectly operational computer is just bizarre.

After a few hours, it was done! We were in Mongolia! We exchanged some money, saw a couple Rally teams leaving the country (how far behind were we?!), and began our last gasp push to Ulaanbaatar.

The first thing I noticed that told me we weren’t in Russia anymore was a number of small rock shrines and blue scarves tied on trees on the sides of the road. The piles of rocks are ovoos, a kind of shamanistic shrine or cairn that people walk around to pray and leave offerings of money and/or booze. This was one of the larger rock ovoos we saw along the way:

Heading on the road south, we were both so glad that the road was actually paved! And smooth! It’s true that we may have been skipping out on the true ‘Mongolian adventure’ portion of the rally, but we simply didn’t have time to romp through western Mongolia at this point. Not to mention, our travelling gnome appreciated the smooth-ish road:

The other thing I noticed were all the yurts dotting the countryside. The rolling hills and grass are beautiful in their own way, and the yurts are constant reminders of the ongoing nomadic lifestyles of many Mongolians. That’s not to say that it felt like going back in time; many of the yurts we saw had Toyota Priuses parked outside! (We’re not sure how they off-roaded in a Prius, but then again we were in a 20-year old Polo so who were we to judge?)

By the time we reached Darkhan, the sun was setting and we still had over 200km left to Ulaanbaatar. The road up until then was great, but after Darkhan things rapidly went downhill.

I should note that it’s obvious Mongolians have a nomadic heritage, because they aren’t very good at cities. Despite having spent many decades under the industrious Soviet thumb, their cities just aren’t laid out well and make basically no sense. Furthermore, Mongolians just aren’t very good at driving cars. It’s hard to describe the precise ways in which seeing them drive gives the impression that they’d be a lot more comfortable anywhere else, so take my word for it. The lack of driving skill is compounded by the fact that the majority of cars in Mongolia are imported from Japan without adjustment, meaning that they’re mostly right-hand drive. Mongolian traffic is on the right hand side. This becomes like a fun, heart-gripping game, as we watched a right-hand drive car try to pass a truck and pulling out all the way into the lane of oncoming traffic to pass only then to realize that a car is 10 meters away, then zoom back behind the truck with seconds to spare! This happened more often than we were comfortable with.

After Darkhan, the road immediately became crap. Really, really crap. We aren’t sure WHY it became so crap, but the road honestly looked as if it had been systematically shelled. We began to regret not changing our bald tires in Ulan Ude, and increasing the number of muttered prayers to facilitate car survival. The truly fun part came well after sunset and the landscape was pitch black. Large signs appeared indicating construction and a detour, but what we thought was just a short drive-around we quickly realized that the road was just gone. Soon, we found ourselves in the black of night off-roading in a valley with no signage & cars & trucks EVERYWHERE. There was no rhyme or reason as to where we were supposed to drive, or where the construction was. We just followed the sandy tire tracks in front of us praying that it was the correct direction, when in fact we saw car lights across the valley above and below us in all different directions! We weaved everywhere to avoid sudden ponds, pitfalls, mounds of grass (sometimes we just drove over the grass (everyone else was doing it shhh)), and oncoming semi trucks. At one point, we were overtaken by a coach bus and we figured it would be a good idea to stick behind that bus to lead us back to the paved road. Yeah, no, that bus just plowed right through the grass and sand at top speed regardless of the terrain and we couldn’t keep up. By some miracle, after an hour of complete insanity in darkness, I saw road signs again and we had found the paved road again! Our happiness was short-lived as, once again, the road was hardly paved and more systematically shelled. Since we apparently had luck to spare, our tires managed to stay in one piece throughout!

Exhausted and sandy, we drove into Ulaanbaatar and arrived at the official Mongol Rally finish line on August 27th at 11:50pm! The Finish Line was closed, and we were not allowed to drive into Ulaanbaatar proper with our rally cars, so we were at a bit of a loss as to what we could do for the night. We didn’t realize that there was an official Mongol Rally hotel HQ (Hotel Office) and that the one guy stationed at the finish line was trying to get us a car to take us to the hotel, so we stubbornly slept in the car at the Finish Line lot. This was an unfortunate plan as the temperature just plummeted overnight and we didn’t have much to keep us warm. Still, we woke up on the 28th and were the first team to check in at the finish line at 8:30am!

We finally made our way to the Office Hotel in Ulaanbaatar and booked our flights home. I got to confirm that we were the 150th team across the finish line out of a possible 247! Not bad considering I had thought we were far behind:

In the midst of packing all of our things, I noticed that we still had the bags of marshmallows that Mom had brought for the express purpose of roasting at the Door to Hell. Since we never made it there, and being reluctant to waste quality marshmallows, I decided to bring them down to the hotel lobby to eat. The Adventurists had hired a great young girl as a translator at the hotel for people wishing to book tours and things, but we struck up a long conversation and we decided to treat her to the great All-American Snack: the S’more.

She grabbed a candelabra with candles and a bar of chocolate, we had the marshmallows and some biscuits, and we let the roasting commence!

An overall great way to end our adventure. 🙂 We gave her both bags of marshmallows and the biscuits so she could enjoy the S’more love at home. I think we made her day!

In retrospect, it’s a shame that we didn’t give ourselves a chance to explore Ulaanbaatar or Mongolia in general, but the entire trip has given us both a lifetime of memories. Perhaps one day we’ll go back and explore smaller areas like Bukhara in-depth, but until then we can give ourselves a big pat on the back for having driven over 17,000km across 15 countries in 35 days!