Take another look the next time you pass a cupboard under the stairs. Imagine a small Macbeth style cauldron of steaming mutton with bones sticking out, a small, hunched old woman squatting on a three-foot-by-four platform, the disembodied voice of an old man buried somewhere in the bedclothes behind her, a portable television, and some family snaps stuck to the wall. I never got round to asking how much rent they paid.
The deal had been for exclusive use of the van but something must have been lost in translation, because by the time we cleared the stockaded ger (1) suburbs of Ulan Bataar and bumped back to the metalled road, there were five more Mongolians on board. A young couple with baby son, two women ‘traders’, one of them very large, and an older guy up front with the two drivers.
With the realisation that this would not be a straightforward trip beginning to dawn with the day, we headed west into the vastness of the great Mongolian steppe.
The interior of the van was basic; a sliding door allowed access, two three-person benches faced each other, with room for three more at the back squashed up against the bags and gear piled against the back doors. Into this space were squeezed the twelve assorted travellers. We soon discovered that some seats were better than others, that the van’s springs were shot, and that the drivers’ road manners had been derived from the Mad Max School of Motoring.
We started with a 4 - 4 – 3 formation, an all-Mongolian front line facing back, with the Brits and Nassa, our translator, mostly on the two benches at the back, apart from frequent bouts of weightlessness as the van lurched and crashed round, over or through the numerous potholes. With every passing vehicle and with every bone jarring impact, choking clouds of fine dust filled the van. Seats on the outside of things, where you could wedge yourself against the body of the van, and just the one other body, were best. Stuck in the middle was worst, every adjustment of position a complex unspoken negotiation with the neighbours, nothing much to hang onto, and the gnawing conviction that yours was the most uncomfortable seat in the van.
Not knowing when it would stop didn’t help. We’d wondered a bit at the various estimates of three to six days we’d been given for the trip. Now all became clear. There was a tourist version that involved things like stopping to sleep. Then there was the Mongolian version that didn’t. We had apparently booked the Mongolian version. Given that it was a fixed-price trip the drivers were not for hanging about. We hadn’t packed the bivvy gear for access, nobody wanted to be the one to call a halt, and so on and on we went trailing an impressive cloud of dust and doubts across the steppe.
The days developed a rough routine: breakfast about 6:00am, lunch about 12:00 am, dinner about 8:00 pm, tea about 3:00am. This latter break involved bowling up at some isolated ger, seemingly chosen at random, provoking a frenzied dog attack, shouting its occupants awake, and then piling in for a cross-legged encounter with a bowl of boiled marmots and some mare’s milk. The open handed and gracious hospitality with which we were received was such that offering payment often felt like offering offence. Steamed mutton dumplings known as ‘buuz’ quickly established themselves as the discerning carnivore’s snack of choice.
Get the worst seat for the night shift and you were stuck with it all through the slow small hours. For me the right back seat was the worst, especially when the driver or his mate retired to join us on the bench sometime through the night. You couldn’t see the road ahead very well in the dark and so couldn’t anticipate the jolts which smashed your head against the roof, or with a sharp crack against your neighbour’s skull. In front of you was an improvised seat which would slowly collapse and press harder and harder against your knees jammed up against it. With people on either side, the only way to keep yourself from repeatedly head butting the roof was to stick both hands between your legs and lock your fingers off round a sharp metal undercling.
I spent dusty desperate hours locked in this position, struggling with cramp, hunched up and swaying like some weird parrot trying to persuade myself that it was all ‘good training for the Alps’.
The first sun in the van would put the whole team to sleep, and then all heads would sway in synch to the broken rhythm of the road until dreams banged against bone and another day began. When the Mongolians woke up they would sing sad love songs and rummage in cloth bags filled with an assortment of dead animals bits; which bits of which animals we were never too clear about, but some tasted quite good. We drove for three days and two nights, covered well over a thousand miles, with the longest stop maybe three or four hours.
Apart from an agreement about the destination, details of the route were vague, communication with the drivers difficult, the maps sketchy, and one bit of the Mongolian steppe looked much like another to our untutored eyes. We rarely agreed where we where, where we were heading for, or when we were likely to get there.
In general we went a little north of west. The first morning crawling slowly up a rough mountain pass towards dawn, stopping now and then to let the engine cool. On top a huge ‘ovoo’, a sacred shamanistic cairn trimmed with strips of blue cloth, and raked poles fishing the wind. Wooden crutches and tokens of all sorts littered the cairn left by the faithful, the superstitious, or the just plain careful, who would all walk three clockwise times around praying as they went.
I’d had little sleep for three days by the time we’d left Ulan Bataar and the ensuing journey I remember as a rather dream like experience. Endless horizons of grass, horsemen herding goats, a scatter of white gers, some with satellite dishes. Impressive Japanese-funded infrastructure projects pushing roads through forests and over mountain passes. Huge yellow earthmoving machines carving up and flattening out the land beneath the black silhouettes of mysterious wooden tepee like structures standing starkly on the heights.
Broad rivers sweeping through the grasslands. Bottles of vodka with the drivers and their drunken pals on the edge of a desolate wood fenced ger settlement beneath a dragon-toothed black rock ridge. The kid who never cried or complained the whole way. A night of nosing through rough scrub desert and dried riverbeds looking for the way. Dendritic wanderings around the edge of lakes the size of Yorkshire, the shrunken remnant left by 11,000 years or so of postglacial evaporation. Recorded winter lows hereabouts of minus 56 degrees. Dromedaries, shrunken dried-up bodies of cattle, goats and horses left where they fell. The stripped-out carcasses of cars and trucks, the deserted ruins of Soviet settlements. A first glimpse of distant snow-capped peaks. A country where you could walk a thousand miles in any direction and never see a fence or sign that said ‘Private! Keep Out’.
© 2026 The Northumbrian Mountaineering Club
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