The Gobi desert - part 1

For a desert, this place is pretty green... We left Ulaanbatur in the morning and drove south into the desert. Interestingly, about 95%  of the cars are right hand drive, which makes driving on the right hand side of the road interesting. It's interesting enough anyway as the main road south is littered with potholes which require constant dodgem car action. It can be exciting when something is coming the other way. And not any tame little potholes either, some of them can do serious damage. We passed 3 cars changing tyres and one (nasty looking) accident during the morning. But Turgey, our driver, is an expert and we came to no harm. There were even a few side quests onto dirt tracks on the side of the highway to avoid the worst of the sealed section - it was faster!

The landscape is fascinating, undulating with few features of note and no trees at all. It's been wetter than usual the last couple of years (this is a relative thing), and so it all looks quite green. Stepping out of the car and into the landscape quickly shows you that its still very dry, with little moisture in the soil. One of our stops introduced us to the ground squirrel, which lives in burrows in the ground and scampers about too quickly to be easily photographed. There were also the obligatory horses, camels, goats and sheep all along the way.

After lunch, we headed off road and headed into the desert itself. The countryside is criss-crossed with dirt tracks, often several in parallel where alternative routes are found after a section has become too worn. They weave around all over the place, but mostly head to the same places, at least as far as we can tell. We were headed to the Tsagaan Suvarga cliffs, which were the first notable geographic feature we had seen since leaving Ulaanbatur. The are mostly wind eroded, and expose the time from when the Gobi was underwater, and then a floodplain, with alternating layers of white, pink and red. We drove to the bottom and got out and proceeded to climb to the top while Turgey took the car around the long way. We spent some time mooching around and trying to ignore the Insta crowd getting closer to the edge than seemed advisable in search of the perfect shot. 

After the cliffs it was on to the tourist ger camp where we spent the night. It was pretty well set up, better than we expected with an electrical outlet in the ger we were in and hot water for the showers (at least for a couple of hours each day, anyway). It wasn't super busy and we got some amusement at dinner from the kids of the family running it who were doing the serving. They proved brilliantly that brothers and sisters are the same everywhere! The ger was very comfortable and admirably weather proof. A pretty strong wind came up for a few hours after sunset which made us glad to be inside. And while the beds were a bit harder than usual, they were perfectly comfortable and we slept like logs as a result.