Day 39: Mongolia, Day 3 — Fleetwood Yak

Miles driven: 178 miles

Time in Car:12 hours

Borders crossed: 0

When Tom Morgan inherited an old Fiat, he decided to drive it as far as he could before it broke down. He made it from London to Mongolia before the car haz had enough. Shortly after, he founded the Mongol Rally.

Mongolia is known among ralliers for its lack of roads. It’s off roading at its finest. The “highway” consists of countless dirt tracks that kind of all go in the same direction-ish. One or two will suddenly veer off to the middle of nowhere though. The trucks make massive ruts and the tracks are filled with giant rocks. If the track you’re following gets too rough, create your own track. It’s a choose your own adventure in which all options leave your car screwed. To make matters more interesting, the landscape is unbelievably vast and empty. Grasslands and deserts as far as the eye can see.

Let’s just call this the day Mongolia threw the kitchen sink at us. Call it cockiness or call it blissful ignorance, but our high confidence in cruising across the Mongolian Steppe was tested today. Spoiler alert, we won the day. But now let’s walk through the ups-and-downs of the day.

None of us really had a good night’s rest thanks to the gusty winds and seemingly every truck driver in Mongolia rolling past our campsite every 15 minutes. We were up early and eager to navigate to the small town of Buutsagaan in hopes that there would be a mechanic or someone with a tool to cut off our dangling, mangled sump guard. Again, the sump guard currently was fastened to the underbelly of our car. The rear left flange weld had sheared off. The center front bolt had also torn clean off. Only the right rear flange weld held true. Some chicken wire held up the left side of the sump while we ratchet strapped the right side over the roof of our car and front doors. We meticulously climbed in Stevie from the rear doors and carefully drove off. We had gone maybe 100 yards before our sump slid off our ratchet strap. After a quick readjustment, we continued on. 20 minutes in and we were actually doing quite well avoiding major rocks and bumps until we hit an unavoidable dip in the road. A loud bang and we saw the ratchet straps lose their tautness. The sump guard’s sharp sides had cut through the ratchet straps. Annoyed, we tried to rip the damn sump guard off. We again hitched our tow top to the folded over metal brackets and pulled. No use. We tried anchoring the tow rope to rocks and driving off. However, we just unearthed the rocks instead. We were thinking of waving down a car to anchor the tow rope to in efforts to tear it off but no cars drove by. Fed up, we decided again to re-ratchet strap the sump to our car and drive extra careful to the town. To top it off, our ABS light was on and remained on. We carried on, extra careful. Eventually we reached the town which showed no promising signs of having a mechanic in town. We asked a few locals to no avail. However, when we checked on the sump guard, to our surprise, the last remaining weld connection had finally sheared off! A bump we hit along the way must have been the final nail in its coffin. We were relieved. We tossed our mangled piece of sheet metal in a dumpster and carried on.

After Buutsagaan, there was a split in the road. One carried directly eastward while the other carried south and then east; both still met up with the Southern Route that would take us to Ulanbataar. Maps.me directed us to take the latter route - we had no idea which one was better so we followed blindly. The off-roading to this point had been a collection of gravel and rock paths. There was no one “main” road. The paths zigged and zagged and moved in a general direction. Some paths branched off the collection of roads. Navigating was really just following the general direction and trying to pick the road that seemed to have the best surface and least bumps and rocks. After Buutsagaan, the roads changed. All we had now going south were two tire tracks through the bush. These weren’t roads. Long ago some person with a truck decided to cut through the Steppe. Other people followed in those same tire tracks and eventually a road formed that meandered through the grass with no rhyme or reason. We followed the tracks cautiously trying to keep our suspension above any rocks or ruts in the road. The road winded over hills and through valleys of the Steppe and across dried river beds. These river beds posed an issue. The first one we came across we got beached and pretty deep. We dug our tires and undercarriage out as well as we could and gathered grass to give the tires traction. After 45 minute of the failed efforts and faces full of sand, we got the car out. We continued onwards.

We reached the point the road were we finally turned east again. On the map, we knew we’d cross a river and expected we’d have to ford it. Soon enough, we came across a river called the “Baidragiin gol”. No bridge, we were going to ford it. This wasn’t a typical river that had one main artery and two shorelines. The river was shallow with a relatively strong current. It was made up of branches of water that connected intermittently in between small islands of clay, rocks, and mud.

Our car has about four inches of clearance. The water in front of us was about a foot deep and moving quickly. A team we knew had mentioned crossing this river in their Skoda earlier in the week, so we knew it was possible. Still, we spent some time exploring the river, wading across to test the current and the stability of the river bottom. It was roughly a 50 foot crossing. We went for it. We made it. And we saw that this was just a small branch of the much wider, quicker and deeper river.

We were at a loss. We spent a long time wading up and down the river, desperately trying to find a spot where we felt comfortable crossing. We couldn’t. We didn’t know what to do and we hadn’t seen a soul since that small town our sump fell of in. By some grace of God, a Mongolian couple pulled up to the other side of the river to do some laundry. Mike waded over and solicited the man’s help. The man showed us how to jerry rig the intake to avoid flooding the engine and showed Mike the best route to cross (even jumping in the passenger seat to give mid crossing guidance). We made it, thanked the man repeatedly, and gave the man a pack of reds as a sign of our gratitude.

Shortly after, we hit a rock and had our first flat of the trip. This was a much anticipated part of the rally. We quickly changed wheels and went on our way. We now had no spare tire (our second having been stolen off our car in Turkey), no sump guard, and the ABS light was still on, but we were on our way...at least until we got beached in another wash. This one took us awhile to get out, involving a lot more digging, gathering grass, and pushing. We eventually got out and kept going. Finally, we stumbled upon a sweet, sweet, blissful black strip of asphalt. We would be more or less in asphalt all the way to Ulaanbaatar. The first portion of off roading was over. We stopped at the next town to resupply and repair our spare. We drove an hour or so further and found a beautiful campsite surrounded by grassy, rolling hills. The next day we would drive north towards a national park just outside of Ulaanbaatar. Asphalt the entire way. - FWY