September 25

We awoke with everything frozen in the tent, shoes were covered in ice.  It was nice to see the sun out and I walked down to the river and spotted a few gers only a short distance away - the irony wasn't lost on us.  After waiting to dry the tent, boiling some water and packing up we rode to the gers where they let us dry our shoes and socks so we could keep going.  There was more river crossings to start the day and the locals were telling us that the river was high.  One crossing was almost waist deep, we managed to get across but the river was really cold so it took a long time to warm up again.  Eventually we entered a desert like valley, it was warmer and slightly better road but we were exhausted having eaten very little in the last few days.  Eventually we saw a truck who agreed to give us a lift to Otgon.  We didn't realise it at the  time but we were loading our bikes on a truck carrying a load of dried cow shit.  We drove for a few kilometres and stopped to load up more crap.  They then had lunch and we squeezed the six of us into the front of the cab, two of the girls in one seat and Marty on my lap - it was hard to block out the pain in our legs being in such tight confines.  Once in Otgon, we tried to organise a lift to Altai, which is on the main highway to Russia, about 140km away.  After changing price and departure times several times and another five false starts we crammed into a jeep with one guy catching a ride by lying on top of the bikes and luggage.  We had one tyre blowout, no surprise at the pace he was hitting some rocks.  There was one river crossing where the water went up to the top of the doors but we made across, albeit not convincingly.  We found a dodgy hotel to crash at about 4am.  We met another team on the Mongol rally and these guys were officially last.  They were travelling in a fire truck and we couldn't imagine how slow their trip through Mongolia had been - they told us they were at customs on the Russia/Mongolia border for 28 days.

Studying the phrasebook

The dung express

Desperately trying to escape from Otgon