Olympic tug of war Mongolia style

Our car is the 1st white one.

We had planned to visit a family near the Khongor sand dunes today, but an extremely unusual amount of rain made the road impassable, worse we got stuck halfway, and we didn’t just get stuck once we got stuck multiple times, I think seven in all. Luckily, this happened on a day when 3 car drivers who knew each other decided to travel in convoy.
On 3 occasions, other cars pulled us out of the wet sand. In return, we pulled out several cars, but sometimes, where we were stuck was too risky for other cars, and so we had to resort to manually pulling the car out. No mean feat when the car weighs two tons, and when Mongolian drivers don’t understand that to get out you need to reduce the revs on the wheels. Often, they started by making the situation worse, and then they would dig the wheels out by hand. Oh, I missed out the part where they would take 30-40 minutes sometimes to decide what to do. In the three cars, we had 11 adults, so 10 plus the driver for getting the cars unstuck. So we had about 5 pulling like a tug of war team and the rest pushing from behind. Somewhat amazingly, we managed to get the cars out each and every time, though sometimes it took several attempts and additional digging.
So we were lucky that we didn’t have to overnight in the dessert in the car. Only 14 hours to progress about 100km. We learned the next day that many others had not been so lucky. Top subject on Mongolian Twitter and Facebook!Read more