Tsagaan Sumgiyn Gol

After Nadaam and a bit of stomach bug recovery we stocked up the jeep and headed out into the steppe proper. There weren't any roads from this point on, just routes marked on the map and a few track marks where people had driven before us. We spent 5 days driving into the middle of nowhere and discovering what it's really about and why you really do need a 4x4 in Mongolia, although it is true that most locals drive Priuses everywhere, and we still don't know how they do it.

The woman who rented us the jeep had been insistent that we see the "sights" because that is what you "do" but after discovering that most of them are only mildly interesting, several are hilariously bad and all of them are crawling with tourists, we concluded quite happily that the best bits about Mongolia are the parts with noone in them and the endless and amazing landscapes. It is like New Zealand but bigger, emptier and more incredible, and you actually can camp anywhere and not see a soul for days.

Luckily for us we were still relatively on the beaten path, which meant that we could be rescued by a friendly and very capable family when our tyre started deflating (which it did every day, thanks to a fault with the valve) and we could rescue a Russian couple whose car got stuck in a ditch.

There is a wonderful mentality among the Mongolians of straightforwardness and kindness which doesn't carry any expectation with it, while simultaneously having basically no manners at all (everyone walks into each other and never asks permission for anything, but when you get used to it it's actually very refreshing).

We both learned lots of new driving skills including how to assess how to drive across a river, how to reverse down a narrow mountain path surrounded by trees, and how to herd sheep and yaks in a jeep.

5 days was about our limit before we needed a shower and a bed, since the back of the Jeep was pretty painful even once we'd stopped sleeping on the tools, but if we hadn't already booked our train tickets we might have been tempted to stay longer and just enjoy the endless nothing.Read more