Off-Grid and Off-Road:
Touring Outer Mongolia Without a Net Outer Mongolia in the 1990s was not a tourist destination. Entry visas were difficult to secure, and there was very little tourism infrastructure outside of the capital, Ulaanbaatar. The Berlin Wall had fallen, but a Communist party was still in power here. The grocery store shelves were still largely bare, and shopping consisted primarily of the stolid State Department Store and a black market that popped up occasionally in the northern part of the city. In those days, there was little for the foreigner to do to pass the time other than drinking to excess at the Bayangol Hotel bar, frequented by mining executives, freedom fighters, and smugglers working the China-to-Eastern Europe route. This is where I spent most of my time in those days, and I found ready acceptance. Being alone on the edge of the world is an insular existence, and any new faces like mine were enthusiastically welcomed (read: interrogated) by the older hands—new grist for the rumour mill. It was here that I met Mike and Mike, a pair of German adventurers cursed with the same name. After conducting various experiments on who could imbibe more alcohol, Germans or Canadians (Germans, it turned out), we were about to go our separate ways at closing time when they announced that they were heading south the following morning, to the Gobi Desert, and would I like to come along, to share the cost. I readily accepted their kind offer, 16
and rushed back to the apartment I was renting to pack. I only hoped that, once the effects of the alcohol wore off, they would remember inviting me. The following morning, we met up as arranged and boarded the train to Sainshand, the capital of Dornogovi Province. There we met our guide Oktai and driver Altan, and threw our baggage in what was to be our home and chariot for the next week: a UAZ 469 Russian jeep. At the time, I was unfamiliar with this model of offroad military light utility vehicle, but by the end of the trip I would be a convert to the excellence of Soviet automotive engineering. It was like a Kalashnikov rifle: it was reliable, it never jammed no matter the conditions, and it had few moving parts you couldn’t fix with the most basic of tool kits. Moreover, it could handle any terrain.
