With our temporary fix for Rosinante’s front differential, we made it to the volcano. But we did not take the offroad track because our friends Tanja and Marcel, who had taken this route about a week ago, told us that it’s pretty offroad-heavy and 4x4 with low gear would be good to have.
The volcano was beautiful, and the surroundings were very interesting as well.
There were lots of stone formations.
And still, after thousands of years, you could see the big lava field from the last eruptions of that volcano.
But the topic of Rosinante’s front differential was far from solved! After we had accomplished our temporary fix (see the last post), we felt really good about it, were happy, and thought we had done the right thing! We had sent photos of our temporary fix to our mechanic friends and all seemed very good. But then one more guy replied to our Reddit post and raised the point that without the outer CV joint, our whole wheel could basically fall apart! After more research, we came to the same conclusion as he did. So, our temporary fix could have really killed us.
I felt very, very bad and mistreated by the universe.
From the parking lot at the volcano, it was only about ten kilometers back to the next village. But that track was almost entirely a Mongolian construction site, and I felt very bad about driving it again. But putting the whole CV shaft back together was not possible with only one car jack—at least not for us. We thought about what to do next: asking other volcano visitors for a car jack, just going back to the village, burning Rosinante down…
In the end, we drove very carefully back to the first garage we had seen when we took the track for the first time. Even Priuses die at some point.
At the garage, we were happy that we had made it and that there was no obvious damage to Rosinante’s wheel bearings, etc. We put the CV shaft back in, but did not feel very good about it because even driving in 2WD will spin the part that had the play. Nevertheless, Racki and I worked very well together. Almost like a pit stop.
So we continued via the shortest route to Ulaanbaatar to find a good mechanic and spare parts there. On the way, we came across this beautiful canyon.
Racki managed to get a…
…respectable fuel consumption rate of 9.9 liters per 100 kilometers.
And then we reached Little Gobi. It’s a pretty small area that looks part like a savannah and part like a desert.
There were some camels, and for us it was perfect: close to the main road, no 4x4 needed, and it was beautiful!
Like the birds!
So we enjoyed our savannah time.
And did a small hike to the real sand dunes.
The dunes were nice, and Racki made a Bendy heart.
Some dunes were quite steep, so we ran and slid down them. We met some other tourists who lent us their sandboards, and we had great fun.
Back at Rosinante, we had another goat and sheep invasion.
After Little Gobi, we continued to Ulaanbaatar. This city… I guess it will never become my favorite. The traffic was almost painful after we plunged into it for the third time in search of a good mechanic and spare parts.
We found a fitting inner CV joint, the part that had play when touching it. But we decided to ask around a bit more to get a second price and a second opinion about what was causing the play.
A real, big supermarket after weeks of Mongolian remoteness.
We went to the local Ironman shop and picked up some bushings for free. I had asked where to find these bushings in Mongolia via official Ironman support, and that went really well. Support gave me the contact for the shop, and the shop offered to give us the bushings for free.
We got contacts for other mechanics and searched and researched more. Communication with one of the mechanics was especially unique: super friendly, but extremely confused… We went to different Toyota shops and garages, but had no luck. In the end, we went back to the first garage where we had found the spare part and had them start the repair.
It turned out that the part we thought was causing the play was almost perfectly fine! I was not happy about that, because it meant that we had to deal with the differential itself. And that did not sound good to me at all.
So we checked our options. The garage did some “whatever not so good” diagnostics and ultimately proposed swapping the differential for a used one for about 2,400 Euros. They were of the opinion that the pinion inside the differential was causing the play, but they were not able to get spare parts. So their only option was swapping the differential for a used one with a completely unknown level of wear.
We did not feel good about this at all! Our differential had this play, which nobody was sure how bad it really was. And swapping this for a 2,400 Euro black box?
Another option would have been to have the Mongolian mechanics open our differential for a proper diagnosis, but we did not feel good about that either. Having no way to get spare parts in time, combined with our experiences with mechanics so far and what we had heard from other travelers, kept us from doing that.
We had had enough. This time was not easy. I got more and more frustrated with the situation regarding Rosinante’s front differential… Racki got more and more frustrated with me being frustrated…
So we wanted to clear our heads a bit and do some rock climbing. We had found some tiny rock climbing sectors in a national park close to Ulaanbaatar and checked them one after another. But none were climbable. Most of them were on private property and not reachable.
We found half a climbing route on this so-called Turtle Rock…
…where some visitors get a bit stuck.
But all in all, this national park was just not nice for us. No climbing, everything was packed with yurt camps… This photo was one of the few possible ones without any hotel, yurt, or other attraction.
So we decided to keep going—and boy, the next decision I made was one of the worst so far!