We woke up at 6:45, double checked that our bags were packed, drank some cold brew coffee (again using my undies as a filter), and stepped over the pile of clothes and trinkets (jettisoned to save weight) out into the crisp Mongol morning.

A short walk brought us to the Altay bazaar, where characters of all shades of shady convene to barter, haggle, and observe and confuse the business transactions of others. I was reminded of Obi Wan Kenobi negotiating safe passage with Han Solo – “I can give you 2,000 now and 15,000 when we get to Alderan.” The night before we loaded the Justy onto a truck full of goat skins and had arranged to meet the drivers here. The market was mostly empty in the early morning and when it started to rain, we wondered briefly if we’ve been stood up and our car hi-jacked. Just then the driver rolled up.

With literally no common ground between our English and their Mongolian we miraculously managed to be driven to the nearby bus depot. The “buses” were actually Soviet vans slightly larger than a minivan but slightly smaller than a fully qualified van. We were told 30,000 tugrugs by our driver but prices here have a tendency to increase between the original price quoted and the actual payment – we settled the fare at 40,000 each. Josh and I said goodbye to Andrew and Jon and plopped down on one of the buses bench seats.

The bus depot was swarming with extras (people with no apparent purpose who like to crowed around useful people or events to offer advice, observe, or just get in the way). We wondered how many would end up in our bus. About ten climbed on. The bus looked full. Then another four hopped on. It was tight. When we left, 18 people, including the driver, were squished in and our legs and shoulders overlapped. Then the bus chugged its way out of town and five minutes it stopped again. Two more people jumped on with their own crowd of waving extras. With Josh, myself, and eighteen staring Mongolians we set off for the open Gobi Desert.

We had no idea how long it would take, what route we would take, or when we would stop for food, however, nobody seemed to be eating or drinking anything and it soon became apparent that our driver would stop at any opportunity he could conjure up – his favorite was smoking cigarettes and talking to the other driver in our “fleet.” We stopped about once per hour, usually at a nondescript point in the desert, for somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes each making what could have been a tidy 30-hour trip seem to stretch on into a spirit-breaking eternity. The utterly unchanging landscape of jagged rocks, dust and tumbleweeds only compounded the sensation of driving yet not moving at all. Each time the van stopped, people would fan out forming a perimeter of urination or would squat on the least windy side of the van to enjoy a cigarette. At one stop, the sunset was just hitting the horizon and through the rain, a massive and complete double rainbow appeared. The radiant sunlight made the peoples faces glow and the many streams of pee glisten magically.

Amazingly, we stopped for groceries once at 4 pm and didn’t eat an actual meal until 12:30 am. It was, as per usual in Mongolia, a choice of some combination of potato, goat and noodle. Josh and I chose noodle, goat and potato, and potato, noodle and goat respectively. When our food arrived at the table some local kids advised us about the quality of the meal by yelling “cheap meat” then laughed hysterically. As hungry as we were, their words were like a flavor enhancer bringing out every nuance of gristle and bone fragment. We meekly smacked a few bites then gave our leftovers to some fellow passengers who were scooping noodles into blue plastic bags.

Back on the van, there was music. A concoction of American pop hits and Mongolian hip-hop played on a loop. You could always tell which songs were favorites because the passengers would feebly sing along under their breaths in rough hissing whispers. After dark, the driver switched to what must be classic Mongol love ballads from the 70’s where the entire van murmured along in unison. The cheesy vibe of these songs made me wish I was in some grotty lounge enjoying a sidecar.

The people squished into and under every corner of our bodies became our second family. There was a man with two young, fascinated daughters we called “dad and the staring girls”, their uncle (?), a middle aged man who chain-smoked and once at a pee-stop threw up – we called him “uncle vomit.”The two other guys next to them were so quiet and motionless we barely noticed them. Then there was “the balladeer,” a guy with a motorcycle jacket who sang along to all the cheesiest songs, his girlfriend (?) and her sister(?) who both had large earlobes, rosy cheeks and never spoke. Next to them, two jocular teenage boys, probably best friends, were constantly hugging, tickling and touching each others legs in what we could only assume was an appropriate-for-Mongolia way. Nevertheless, we called them the “bromance brothers.” One of the drivers hung out in the back wearing a baseball cap with the Engrish phrase “New Generation – Life on a Mars”. He was wizened and greasy. There was a boy with a mullet who spent most of the trip with his head under a Mongolian style coat called a Deel (pronounced “dehthshjthss” or something close to that). In the front seat sat a mother and her daughter. The daughter would hide under the mother’s coat by her legs at every police checkpoint (we assumed this was due to some breach of a maximum capacity rule). Next to them was the chain-smoking driver at whose mercy we sat hopefully. We called him “Captain Butts.”

The other passengers were two sisters aged 18 and 19 who were constantly banging out text messages on their mobile phones with unparalleled speed to their friends in Ulaanbaatar. During a desperate attempt to communicate with this ogling bunch of strangers, I barked out questions in every language I could muster – “Does anyone speak English?” – “Ktonibud Pa-Ruski Panimayit?” – “Nihongo wo hanashimasuka?” – “Hablan ustedes Espanol” – “Parlez-vous Francais?” … “Oui!” said the elder of the sisters. A breakthrough! We proceeded to speak in absolutely terribly French for the rest of the trip. I haven’t ever studied French before but I’ve somehow absorbed enough of it through my travels to get our general story across to a Mongolian. Since I’m crap at speaking and understanding, we spoke to each other by writing text messages and passing her cell phone back and forth. I imagined that this is what instant messaging must have been like in caveman days.

“Do you like to sing and dance? I think you may be a good singer. ” Or at least that’s how I interpreted the French text. Before I knew what happened, I was singing “Michelle, ma belle” to a puzzled audience of Mongols followed by light applause. We carried on like this for a few hours and the uncomfortable bunch of strangers started feeling like an uncomfortable bunch of friends.

As night fell, the people began repositioning themselves into an interconnected snoring mass. My new French-speaking girlfriend offered herself as a cushion but fell asleep on my shoulder. Soon, her sister was snoozing in my lap. Josh fell asleep on my other shoulder. One of the homoerotic guys rested his head on my knee. A guy in the seat behind me was leaning his head on my back. Including legs and arms, I counted 8 different people touching me as I wrestled with sleeping through the bumps and bad Mongol music.

The next morning we woke up one by one. I wiped off the drool from three or four people and we bumped along through the desert. Having spent 24 hours in the van, the time seemed to go by much faster. We passed part of the day by showing each other tricks with our hands such as the famous severed thumb trick. I was delighted to see that some of the most standard American gestures, such as the unpleasant handshake with folded middle finger, were novel and hilarious to the people of Inner Mongolia.

We stopped again for another meal in the afternoon. It was “gulyash,” another variation on goat meat, starch and root vegetable but this time with the notable addition of GRAVY. This sent our palettes soaring in ecstasy… relatively speaking. After some public relief of fluids, we set off again.

At this point, we were all tired and smelly and becoming increasingly agitated. My French, except for the phrase “Je ne comprend pas,” was exhausted. We waited impatiently until the bus finally rolled into town around 9 pm, 41 hours since we boarded. We said goodbyes to our new friends and took off with an annoyingly tenacious taxi driver who charged another mysteriously inflated fare.

I must say, with the exception of the deep-vein thrombosis, I thoroughly enjoyed this bus trip.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 10:59 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.