#4: [13-Jul-17]

#3: [03-Aug-12]

#1: [04-May-06]

23-Jul-2006 --

Story starts at 37N 137E

Last week, by lack of public transportation, I couldn’t continue to follow on that woman’s footsteps who, in 1862, went from Beijing to Moscow through Mongolia on horseback. I decided to hitchhike to Ulaanbaatar to rent a Russian jeep with a driver and to go back into the Gobi to make the three stages through the desert which I hadn’t done.

We left the capital on July 23rd at around eleven and drove on an asphalted road to Choir where we arrived shortly after four o’clock. This is where the road ended. We took one of many tracks that were going south. Thirty kilometers later, I asked the driver to cut through the desert to make a small detour and go to the confluence 46N 109E which was some twenty kilometers away. So far he had been very careful to always keep the railway line, which was on our right, on sight. I showed him the GPS that I had just turned on. He seemed to have been reassured and we drove straight to the confluence in less than an hour.

There was a small landmark with a flag on it that had probably been built by a previous visitor to the point. It was already six o’clock and we had to arrive to a small mining town before sunset. I entered that town’s coordinates into the GPS and again we drove straight across the desert to that place in about two hours.

Story continues at 47N 109E