From the Flaming Cliffs, we took the fastest way back to the main road and further in the direction back to Ulaanbaatar. It was not that easy to find a camp spot on the way: for a couple of hundred kilometers, it was not possible to leave the very good asphalt road because on the sides of the road were big trenches.

But we found a nice, calm spot, and our archery skills got better and better.

Back in Ulaanbaatar to pick up our Chinese visas, we found a quiet camp spot in a backyard. I thought that somebody would send us away, but Racki was right in guessing that nobody would care.

After we picked up our visas, we met Merel and Leon to have some pizza and drinks. Drinks became more and more important for our stay in Mongolia.

Merel’s and Leon’s car was now at the second garage, and the next day, they got the message that the new spare parts might be ready to be picked up at the customs office.

So we took them in Rosinante out of the city to the mechanic where their car was waiting for the repair.

The mechanic’s home and garage was an interesting place. He and his family were real Mormons, and they had a couple of strong beliefs. For us, it was interesting, and the mechanic was a very friendly and skilled guy.

Tanja and Marcel joined us as well, and together we prayed and called upon the universe to make it possible to pick up the needed spare part for our friends.

Leon went to the customs office with the mechanic, and we found a nice camp spot near the garage.

And in the evening, after an adventurous time at the customs office, Leon came back with the spare part! Time to celebrate.

The next morning, the mechanic and Leon started installing the spare part, and it all went well! The opposite of the first garage that broke their first spare part while trying to repair their car.

So we all prepared to leave Mongolia! Finally.

We started separately, but on the way, we met Merel and Leon again. They had an issue with their turbo. But because they had gotten used to that specific problem with their turbo pipe, they were pretty chilled while dealing with it somewhere on the main road to China, while still in the vastness of the Mongolian steppe.

The result was very pretty and worked very well.

We found a nice spot for the night and some practice.

And played around with our new binoculars, which Leon’s parents had brought with them from Germany.

On the way to the Chinese border, Rosinante reached 150,000 km!

And we visited our last sightseeing spot in Mongolia: a very famous spiritual place with temples and an interesting set of rituals you can perform.

We prayed…

…sacrificed the incense sticks, …

…water, …

…and prayed some more with the locals while listening to a spiritual Mongolian song playing on a smartphone.

After that, we visited the famous meditation caves next to the temple area.

For me, this visit felt very refreshing. It was something different and helped my mind rearrange—a real purification. Writing this, I’m not sure what created my heavy feelings about Mongolia, but at that time being there, I did not like being there. Our first two weeks had been wonderful and surprising. Racki and I had thought that all of Mongolia would be boring steppe, but the north was mountainous, diverse, and beautiful. Our time with our friends was very nice, but at some point, I started to just not enjoy Mongolia anymore. More car topics, the (from our experience) high level of grumpiness and drunkenness of the locals, broken cars all around, our car suffering on the tracks, the experiences with mechanics we had ourselves and the ones our friends had, the boring and (for me) uninteresting or unbeautiful endless steppes of the “not north”…

A part of me felt it was only me creating this heaviness, while another part looked for something else to blame. Either way, I was happy for some purification.

The next day, we went to meet our group for the border crossing to China very close to the border. Two of the six cars and their humans we already knew, and the rest were very friendly as well. All together, we were twelve people in six cars, from four different countries, sharing one destination: China.

We finished preparations for China, like installing apps and continuing to try identity verifications on Chinese apps. This is me trying to nod in the right way to confirm my identity on WeChat and its payment service for the 59th time (not kidding, I counted my attempts over the last four weeks).

We had a nice evening together, and the next morning…

…we set off for the last few kilometers in Mongolia, heading to our next adventure: China!

We went as fast out of Ulaanbaatar as we could. I really didn’t want to stay in that city anymore. We even drove the Mongolian roads in the dark. It was a good tarmac road, but it was still challenging to see and evade the occasional axle-breaking potholes with the headlights of oncoming traffic flashing in our eyes.

I felt very heavy about driving and being in Mongolia; I just wanted to go to the next country in the hope that I would feel better.

But Racki still felt like exploring, and I didn’t want to block her wish to visit the famous Gobi Desert, so we went in that direction.

And because we needed to pick up our Chinese visas in Ulaanbaatar in about ten days, the route was set: 700 km from Ulaanbaatar to the Gobi Desert, 700 km back to Ulaanbaatar, and from Ulaanbaatar finally another 700 km to the Chinese border. 2100 km of Mongolian roads and maybe a bit of offroad tracks… We talked with a couple of people about this trip and they were all very sure that the main roads we would take were in very good condition.

And so we went to our first stop: Mandalgovi. We went there to meet our friends Merel and Leon, whose parents came to visit them from the Netherlands. Our idea was that we would go to the famous Naadam in a bigger town, but not in Ulaanbaatar.

Racki and I found the stadium where most of the festival activities would take place, but it looked absolutely deserted.

And our friends, who had come to Ulaanbaatar a week ago with a serious clutch problem on their car, had big trouble trying to have it fixed. They had found a workshop that was confident in its capabilities to fix the issue, but they could only organize a used clutch of unknown condition for a couple thousand Euros. So they had ordered the parts to their parents in the Netherlands, who got them just in time and brought them along by airplane. But the garage fucked it up badly and broke the spare parts while trying to install them. So their car problem story was not about to get solved, but to intensify in the next few days, and we were not able to meet.

Racki and I found a place to camp in Mandalgovi, but for me, it was one of the ugliest places I had seen so far in Mongolia: boring steppe, dried-out river, animal cadavers, lots of trash, and industrial buildings not far away. We did the best we could, practiced archery, I started a new EDM song with the name Ugly Mongolia, and I was happy about drinking more beer than usual.

The next morning, we headed off in the direction of the Gobi Desert, and out of nowhere, we came across a car accident near a fuel station in Mandalgovi. A truck had hit a car. Only two people were at the scene, standing next to each other, and one dead woman was sitting in the car. I don’t know why, but we just rolled past the accident and continued on our way. I was very sorry for everybody involved in that accident, and at any other point in time, we would have stopped and tried to help or at least tried to ask if help was needed, but at that moment, we didn’t. At that moment, my brain just said: this is it, this is Mongolia, nothing you can do about it. Later, Racki and I talked about it, and we were both absolutely sure that the woman was dead and there was nothing to do, nothing to help. But still, I feel bad about this even months later.

We continued our way and drove a whole lot. The roads were very good asphalt roads, and we only came across two Mongolian construction sites. A Mongolian construction site means: everybody goes off the road into the steppe and finds their way to the end of the construction site to re-enter the road. Sometimes there is one track beside the construction site, sometimes there are ten.

In the last big town before the famous sand dunes of the Gobi Desert, we went to a big supermarket and tried to find out when the Naadam Festival would take place in that town. This was not easy either. I don’t know why, but sometimes in Mongolia, we tried asking a couple of locals something and no one was in the mood to deal with us and our translator app. They were just grumpy. So these things can become a marathon of asking people until we find someone friendly. Eventually, we found a very friendly Mongolian girl, and she told us that Naadam had ended a couple of days ago.

So we decided to just skip the idea of witnessing another, bigger Naadam and continued in the direction of the sand dunes.

At the start of the offroad track, we checked the play in our front differential again and decided to install the outer CV joint we had bought in Ulaanbaatar to detach the front differential from the driver’s side wheel in a safe way.

It was already getting pretty late, but we decided to continue because I just wanted to reach a place where we would love to stay for a few days to rest.

This 100 km offroad track turned out to be the worst we had ever taken! In the beginning, it was an ordinary Mongolian steppe track, but soon it became a route leading through dried-out, bumpy, and narrow tracks. It got darker and darker, but I just did not want to stay somewhere and drive again the next day, so we pushed on.

The tracks on OSM were pretty accurate and Rosinante’s high beam was amazing, but the track led into dried riverbeds with lots of fine sand, and driving became more and more demanding. Without 4x4, in the dark, we took a wrong turn and ended up in a narrow side arm of a dried riverbed with lots of sand. Slowing down was not an option because that would have caused us to get stuck, so we pushed through. Rosinante was jumping around, and we made it back to the main track.

But the main track led into another riverbed that was wider and easier to navigate, but had even more fine sand. We pushed and pushed. At one point, we came across a stuck limousine and some guys trying to free it. I slowed down just a bit, but realized that without 4x4 and proper low gear we would get stuck as well very soon, so we pushed on.

In the dark with the high beam, we lost the track once more and ended up on a field of big stones. Rosinante rumbled over the stones, and again, slowing down was only an option to a certain amount of momentum, so we kept pushing and finally, after about fourteen hours of traveling that day—including the last four hours spent on those final 100 km—we made it…

…to this nice spot at the sand dunes. We went to bed, and I was so happy not to be driving the next day—to just rest and enjoy.

And so we played around, worked on our archery skills, played frisbee, and did our own thing. It felt so good to just be there and especially to have no car topics on our minds regarding Rosinante.

One day, our friends Tanja and Marcel visited us. They took another route to the sand dunes and told us that their way involved crossing very long fields of very fine sand, and that they thought it would not be possible for heavy cars like ours without 4x4 and proper low gear. So there they were again: the car topics…

Not being able to take their route left only two options: going back on the four-hour, 100 km track that we had taken to get here, or taking another unknown one… Tanja and Marcel said they would try the other option in the coming days, so we agreed on them reporting the conditions of that track to us once they did it.

We talked about our differential as well, and Marcel was of the opinion that detaching one front wheel would potentially be even more harmful to the differential. Car topics… I researched it more and found out that, in our case, the actuator assembly would automatically detach the passenger’s side wheel from the differential in 2WD. This, combined with detaching our driver’s side wheel like we did, was most likely the perfect way to ensure no harm came to the differential, because now both wheels were detached. Honestly, it was hard for me to trust in this after all the back-and-forth… But I tried my best to convince myself…

This was the biggest dune around, so Racki and I set off to climb it for a sunset.

It was a nice climb up the dunes.

And the dunes looked astonishing.

The sand made interesting sounds and vibrations.

And by the minute, the colors were changing.

At the top, we had a fantastic view and enjoyed our time.

Tanja and Marcel had found a nice spot in the dunes, and from above, we could see them. Marcel sent his drone over to capture this nice shot. The background music is one of my EDM tracks, “Occurrence,” which I published some weeks later:

That’s the full track.

The sunset was amazing!

On the way back to Rosinante, we had lots of fun trying to slide down the dunes on our old picnic blanket.

And the nights were calm, and the stars looked amazing.

We hit a new low humidity record of 15%. I think at one point it was even 14%. And we had two or three pretty intense sandstorms. They did not last long, but there was a lot of sand! If we were too slow to close Rosinante’s hatch, we ended up with lots of fine sand inside our cabin.

But I just liked staying in one place for a couple of days—not moving the car, just enjoying and resting…

During our time in Mongolia, Racki and I became pretty lazy when it came to exercise. There were almost no nice hikes, and climbing was not possible either. So we started exercising again. Here is me jumping in a fairly intense sandstorm.

Tanja and Marcel reported that the third option to leave the sand dunes was actually not too bad, so we took it as well. On the way, we heard an increasingly bad metallic scratching and bumping sound. Car topics again…

We decided not to ignore it, but to investigate. After half an hour of driving slowly with one of us hanging off the side of the vehicle while standing on one of the rocksliders, we found it! It was a big washer scratching against one of the rocksliders.

Later, we lost another screw from Rosinante’s underbody armor and decided to bend the body armor back into its original shape. We were very happy with the solution we found to bend it back precisely.

The track was really fine, and we arrived at the Flaming Cliffs.

These cliffs were a very famous tourist attraction, and they looked very nice.

There were all kinds of shapes and ever-changing colors.

The view from our camp spot: on one side, the cliffs…

…on the other side, the sun.

And there were stars all over the place!