Gobi Tsagaan Suvarga

by Biedjee

Nora had used last night's stay in the city to fix his car. And with fixing his car, I mean properly fixing it. Nora had the tendency to stop every 30 minutes or so and dive into the engine (under the driver seat) to twiddle a bit here and there because the engine wasn't sounding the way it should. In Dalanzadgad he had finally taken the car to a mechanic to do some really proper fixing, and the car was running smoother than ever. Nora too, I must say, as he was in the best of moods all day long.

Once again we had a day with constantly changing scenery. We lost count of the different kinds of desert we had seen, but we were all sure the Mongolians had not done the Gobi justice by only having 33 different names for desert - there are far more types of desert out here.

We stayed the night near Tsagaan Suvraga, a beautiful part of the desert which resembles the painted desert in Utah, USA. We drove up to a set of eroded limestone cliffs, from where you had a fantastic view over the desert floor down below, which bore colors from white and yellow to pink and deep red.
We spent a good two hours scaling the cliffs and exploring the area, before we headed back to the ger camp where we were staying the night.

We were pretty early, so we had a long night 'off' which we celebrated by drinking our last beers and vodka on a little patio the family had built for their guests. And then the horror - another jeep arrived. We had had it before that we weren't the only ones staying the night with a family - most families we stayed at had two gers for guests, and many times the other one had been occupied as well...