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20 July 2004

The Kingsmill's Trans-Russia-Mongolian Overland Trip, Part 4: Tashanta

Geoff Kingsmill
2006-04-26 09:11:40

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After driving 5800km through Eastern Siberia we have now travelled another 4100km through Mongolia. Travelling around Mongolia is unlike any other country we have been to. We had four different maps of Mongolia all of which did not correlate. What looked like a main highway on the maps was usually little more than tyre tracks in the dirt, sand or mud. There is hardly a sign post in the whole country. In Mongolia, roads connect nomads, most of whom by their nature keep moving so even the roads are semi-nomadic. While motor vehicles are an intrinsic way of life in the rest of the world, many Mongolians still embrace the horse as the most practical way of transport. Mongolians are very skilled horsemen, a legacy dating back to the glory days of Genghis Khan and the massive empire he established from Europe to the Far East. Due to the popularity of the horse and the lack of road funding there are few established roads except in Ulaanbaatar and a few major towns. The rest of the road infrastructure is predominantly little more than jeep tracks. Remote tracks quickly change into eight-lane dirt highways devoid of any traffic making navigation very difficult. At each town or village there are tracks radiating out in all directions. Knowing which track to take is very difficult and requires collaboration between the GPS,maps and constantly asking the locals which track to take. We soon discovered that if we asked for directions we would often be told how to get there by horse rather than road. Despite summer being the rainy season we have had very few days of rain. We thought the tracks might be a quagmire but in fact the tracks were not muddy at all, much to our relief.

We found the GPS to be extremely useful, but often only to validate that we were going in the right direction and confirming the directions the locals had given to us. Even with a GPS one still needs to know which road to take. The Mongolians have their own GPS system (Ger Positioning System) which ...