Ölgij to Hovd

We set off from the Gur at about 11am, after some great breakfast, it wasn't the biggest breakfast but after surviving on twix bars and boiled noodles, it was lovely! Half a peach, some sausage, an ommlette and a cup of tea! The breakfast of rally champions!

We headed out of the town we stayed at called Ölgij, and made our way to Hovd, some 180km away. This time there was no Tarmac to speak of. We met up with a couple of teams and ended up in a convoy of 4 cars, all heading to Hovd. The roads as before the Tarmac the previous day, were completely composed of sand, mud, rubble and gravel. The cars all want to shake themselves to pieces when you go faster than 20mph, but luckily we're not in an rush.

Along the route we came across plenty of obsticles including boulders, rivers and "puddles" at least a foot deep! One of the cars in the convoy, which happened to be another Suzuki Swift, went through one of these puddles after us, and managed to flood the engine compartment with water, this quickly killed it, so after a tow from one of the other cars and a big communal push it was out and the owner who happened to be mechanic got it all working again after 20mins.

The route followed the meandering of the landscape through the foots of the various mountains, and over several large hills.

Scattered throughout the landscape are various white gur's, where the nomadic Mongolians live. Reading through the lonely planet guide, there's 13 horses to every person living in Mongolia, so that give you an idea of the sparcity of the people.

The one thing that really sticks with you, other than the rocks that are in the middle of the road and aim to burst your fuel tank, is the amount of dust! I can't explain how dusty the car and I are. Other than to say I've got sunglasses dust marks! Everything inside and out of the car is caked in a layer of dust! Seeing that this was only the first full days drive in Mongolia, I think that it's going to be interesting to see how it affects both the mechanics of the car, and me.

We rocked up to Hovd in search of some form of hotel, but basically only needing the shower facilities, after being caked in dust we weren't looking for the ritz, just some where without fleas.

So we began the search of the local "hotels", most were strangely fully booked, and those that weren't didn't have any working baths/showers! We found a place, that we decided would have to do, the rooms had holes in the ceilings/floors, the windows were falling out and the mattresses were hard as stone, but at £2.50 a night, not all that bad! Then there was the shower, in the laundry room there was a hot water cylinder that took 40minutes to heat up then you'd stand between a washing machine and drier, and have a shower, I think health & safety would have a field day with that place, but it did the trick.

Once all settled in, we went in search of food, as it happened below the hotel was a restaurant that was recommended to us by an American charity worker we got chatting to. So we all went and started flicking through the menu, we all fancied a beer after the days drive, but we were told "no beer", we thought this was strange considering there was a fridge at the bar, stocked with tiger beer, we thought maybe they didn't want us drinking because of some bad experience they'd had before with westerners. With this road block on our well earnt beers we decided to try one of the places down the road. When we got there it turned out they had finished food service at 9.30pm, by this time we were all hungry and would have eaten the menus if we'd been given any.

The last place we tried was still open, and after ordering beers again and being told no beers we then found out that on Thursdays no where serves alcohol for some reason. We consold ourselves to having a dry evening and focused on food, but only had one dish left available, a kind of bubble and squeak mixture, but damn was it tasty.