Gobi Bayanzag

by Biedjee

We stopped in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere for gas. We were surprised to even find a gas station out here, and watched amused how Nora had to honk his horn for a full minute before someone came out of a nearby ger to serve what might be his only customer for the day.

Because the roads had been so smooth we had made good progress and arrived at our destination at Bayanzag mid afternoon. Bayanzag is the site where the first dinosaur fossils in Mongolia had been found in the 1920s.
The many, near-intact fossils of skeletons and eggs found at Bayanzag are world renowned, and can be seen in museums around the world, like New York and London.

Bayanzag is also known for its flaming red cliffs and large bushes of saxual shrub - a type of tree that grows so slow that it takes over a hundred years to grow 4 meters, and the wood is so dense it sinks in waters (and hardly burns, as we would later find out).