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!