He hurried off and I was left standing by the roadside with my shopping bags, wondering uncertainly. I admire much about Christianity, and the material help they were giving must have been invaluable to the locals. But I’d always been dubious about zealous missionaries spreading mass conversion through ‘undeveloped’ countries. Now I’d finally met one first-hand and, try as I might, I couldn’t shake the image of this orange-haired Scotsman and his friends spreading their version of God across this land of age-old Buddhist beliefs like an infectious disease. With his words still fresh in my mind, it was hard not to picture churches and gospel-singing choirs popping up all over a country where once ancient Buddhist orders and monasteries had been.
Later, after returning home, I saw a documentary about the missionaries on television. The process was known as ‘Cash for Conversion’.
———
We rode south along the railway with only one more village and 220 kilometres of unknown tracks between us and the Chinese border. At lunchtime, the day after we left Sainshand, we were passed by a motorcyclist on an expensive Japanese machine. The driver said he was heading to the next town of Ulaan Ule and, as that was also on our route, I figured that we could forget about our own navigation and simply follow the distinctive tracks of his slick tyres through the sand for the next 100 kilometres or so.
It was a relief, for once, to forget about picking a route along the myriad intersecting tracks. We hadn’t seen a road sign since leaving Russia; and our map usually only showed one road where, in fact, there were many.
For the past month I’d been keeping an excited count of the days left until touchdown at Sydney airport. There were only twenty-nine and a half days to go before I would be reunited with Nat. In a week or so, I would let myself move on to counting down the hours …
Paradoxically, the closer we got to the end, the slower I felt like going. The plane ticket was booked and the urge to constantly keep on moving had disappeared. Beijing was less than 1000 kilometres away – we’d get there now, come what may. In the meantime, I was content just to cruise along, meeting people, daydreaming about the year ahead and enjoying the challenge of crossing the Gobi.
Tim, too, had resigned himself to going home. For both of us, the challenge of the past year had been an enormous physical and mental strain and I sensed that Tim was also ready to finish travelling – at least for a little while. He was still returning home to a large debt and uncertainty about his future, but in his own words, he was ‘ready to finish up, consolidate, then move on to the next thing, whatever that might be’.
I pedalled lazily under the sun, following the motorcyclist’s trail and gazing up at the long, fluffy trails of white jet vapour from an aeroplane that was crawling steadily across the sky. I kept going until I found a nice-looking camping spot out of the wind and close to the top of a low rocky hill, where I waited for Tim.
When he arrived, he was mad. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Huh?’
‘The railway tracks! Look back there at the bloody tracks, mate! The map’s got the road following along the tracks on the other side of the bloody railway line. And now we’re way to buggery off to the west.’
I looked at the map and saw that I had indeed diverged a long way from the line. I’d been in a dream world and had unthinkingly followed the motorcyclist’s trail through a major intersection and under the railway through a stock underpass.
‘I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking, I suppose.’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s just that you didn’t even have the bloody map! Next time, just wait for me can’t you, before you go making that sort of decision?’
It was fifteen kilometres back to the intersection where I’d made the wrong turn. The next morning we decided that we’d try our luck with the motorbike tracks, anyway. We pedalled on blind, still heading away from the railway, but we hadn’t gone far when we ran across a broken-down four-wheel drive by the roadside.
An elegant-looking Mongolian lady was sitting inside and a pair of male shoes and trousers were sticking out from under the car. The lady greeted us politely in Russian. Tim extended his hand and she winced a little as she shook it. I tried to look at Tim from her perspective and realised with a start that neither of us had washed for over two weeks! The man wriggled out from under the engine and carefully wiped his hands on the back of his well-padded trousers.
‘Where are you boys off to then?’ he asked jovially in flawless Russian. ‘I’m a trader – I import produce to Ulaan Baatar from over the border in China, and I’ve never seen anyone like you on anything like those out here before!’
We explained our story, then asked him whether the road we were on would take us to Ulaan Ule.
‘To Ulaan Ule? Ho, ho, ho. No, it won’t! Ho, ho, ho,’ he laughed. ‘This road takes you directly to China. Ho, ho. If you want to go to Ulaan Ule, you have to go about twenty kilometres back along the way you’ve come and then follow the railway. Ho, ho, ho.’
Tim gave me a meaningful look and I swore at the motorbike rider under my breath. We weren’t carrying enough water to go directly to China.
‘Do you know if there are any other roads which might take us toward Ulaan Ule from here?’ I asked hopefully.
He chuckled again and waved an arm expansively in the direction of the featureless plains to the east. ‘There are lots of tracks out there, boys. I’m sure that one of them might take you to Ulaan Ule, but which it is, I cannot say.’
He said goodbye, his wife gave us a couple of fat, red apples and they drove off, leaving us in a cloud of dust. We discussed the situation briefly, crunched the delicious juicy apples, then pedalled on – still towards China – and ready to take the first turnoff we could find.
Later that afternoon I sat at yet another junction in the wheel-tracks and waited for Tim. We’d turned off the road onto a track that had quickly dwindled and split up into many tracks. From there, we’d made decisions according to the compass and, occasionally, with the toss of a coin. We’d had lunch in a valley a little way back and had been passed by a curious mob of wild camels. Tim had gone off chasing them with the video camera, while I’d carried on, leaving a trail of tyre tracks for him and trying to make sense out of our position on the plain.
I considered the options for a moment, but all of a sudden I was startled from my thoughts by a weatherbeaten old woman who came wandering over the rise, waving a bright blue jacket around her head in giant, helicopter circles, yelling, ‘Oiy-oiy-oiy-oiy-oiy!’ She broke off when she saw me and stared. I pedalled over to her to see if she could point me towards the railway.
We communicated, as usual, in sign language and my few Mongolian words. She understood my impression of a Thomas the Tank Engine, and said that yes, the ‘chuf-chuf-chuf-chuf’ was certainly over that way, but (I think) that it wasn’t due till tomorrow! She invited me back to her home for tea and I willingly accepted. As we walked over the rise and down towards her ger, twin boys of no more than five converged on us, each dragging a large hessian sack full of dry horse poo. They were her grandsons, it appeared. She’d been out looking for them.
Tim joined us, and we were treated first to tea, and then to a glorious lunch of noodle soup and chunks of meat. To me, this was a big improvement on the standard autumn fare of freshly boiled gizzards with the blood poured in. These people appeared to be civilised nomads and I was most impressed. Sure, they still had a few cultural peculiarities, like stirring the food with the dung-shovelling utensil, but every Mongolian we’d stayed with seemed to do that. These people washed their hands with soap!
An older boy in the family had a physical and intellectual disability. Instead of a wheelchair, he moved around on a homemade plank on wheels. The constant love and care of his family was deeply moving. Out here, it was all that kept him alive.
After lunch, the man of the family treated us to a magnificent display of horsemanship. He galloped around, wheeling his stocky mount hard and chasing
his herd of unwilling horses until he caught an unruly young colt with a long, wooden lasso pole. The horses threw up billowing clouds of dust and their hooves shook the ground like thunder. The whole scene was magical, and I rode away later in the afternoon with the images of stampeding horses and Mongolian warriors etched firmly in my mind.
We stopped that night under a broad, leafy tree. We were in the middle of the desert and it was the first tree we’d seen in 1000 kilometres! I could think of no explanation for its presence and it was so unusual that we called an early halt to camp under it.
Over dinner, we were treated to a spectacular show of colour as the sun sank below the desert horizon. I sat mesmerised, watching the drifting grey clouds beginning to cycle through an incredible, fiery spectrum of reds and oranges. Tim was frantically hurling clothing from his panniers in an attempt to find a fresh video camera battery.
‘Quick, Chris,’ he barked, firing off rapid instructions. ‘Get your bike and get up to the top of that rise asap I want a silhouette shot in the next minute. Come on, mate!’ he urged. ‘Can’t you see it’ll be gone soon? We absolutely have to catch this scene on film!’
The next evening we camped a little way outside of Ulaan Ule. We’d equalled our longest-period-without-washing record of eighteen days, and were planning a special celebratory dinner with the only delicacy we’d been able to buy – a jar of pickles. When I sat down to fire up the stove, however, I saw that we were in trouble. ‘Shit,’ I said to Tim. ‘I can’t get this bloody stove to work.’
‘Huh?’ He hurried over. ‘Here let me have a go.’
Tim carefully disassembled, cleaned, then reassembled the stove before banging it on a rock for good measure. He pumped pressure into the diesel canister, opened the valve and struck a match, but we could only watch blankly as again the yellow flame chuffed a few times and died. It appeared that after months on life-support, our struggling little MSR stove had belched its last.
There was nothing for it. We swallowed our western pride, stalked out to scan the ground and did as the locals do. We collected a big pile of dried horse crap and, after much time and effort, produced an exotic-flavoured, lukewarm meal on a campfire made of poo!
The next morning we entered the town of Ulaan Ule. I let a few kids clamber up onto the back of my bike, and they sat behind me on top of my packs as though they were simply climbing onto the back of a horse. I raced up and down the main street a few times with passengers on board. The little kids were loving it but one little girl took the horse riding analogy a bit too far and started yanking hard on my hair when she wanted me to turn. Enough was enough, I decided, and the game came to an abrupt stop.
We filled up our water bottles and food bags and were given some vague directions to get us to the border. When we set off, the kids set off with us. There was a mad scramble as my gang struggled into position behind the bike to help push me along. The only problem was that they didn’t push straight. I had several near misses as a result of over-enthusiastic, sideways shoves from one or other of my helpers. What’s more, after the first 100 metres or so, the kids who were still hanging on started to tire. It seemed that they weren’t willing to let go! Before long, I felt myself dragging a chain of little Mongolians, despairing at the thought that they’d stay clenched to my panniers, unwilling to give up their new toy until I’d towed them all the way to China!
We pedalled along the dusty road and soon found ourselves in the familiar position of sitting at intersections, deciding which direction to take. We chose to follow a route that would take us along the railway line, even though this meant taking the less established track, and soon found ourselves riding on narrow wheel ruts that were becoming increasingly sandy.
A fat man in a tight T-shirt jumped the fence near his ger and scrambled across the train line to greet us. He wanted to invite us back for tea and horse milk but we decided that we really should press on. We’d been in the desert for almost three weeks, and with only 120 kilometres to go until the border, we were itching to move right along.
I smiled politely, Tim declined, then I got in with a quick question: ‘Which way to China, please?’
By mid-morning the road was deteriorating and by lunch, after many frustrating falls, we had been reduced to pushing the bikes through deep sand. We must have hit the deck a dozen times each in less than an hour. During this time, I’d noticed an interesting comparison. Tim liked to swear loudly at his bike when it flipped him into the dust, whereas I preferred to kick savagely at mine.
We pushed on for an hour, still following the rails, until it became obvious that the track we had chosen saw very little traffic.
‘Doesn’t anyone go to bloody China around here?’ Tim cursed. ‘If this track doesn’t improve, then we’re going to be walking the next hundred kays to the damn border. And if we have to walk, anyway, I reckon I could go four times as bloody fast without having to lug this useless bike along, too.’
We kept on slugging away; the road got worse. Tim stopped at a point where the track petered out in a vast sandy creekbed. He looked hot, sweaty and pissed off. ‘It looks like a bloody beach!’ he exclaimed. ‘How the hell are we meant to get these things through there?’
‘It’s worse than the beach,’ I corrected him. The heat and falls of the past hour had sapped my energy, making me feel demoralised. ‘You get hard bits on beaches. This looks more like the place where they make the sandpits for all the kids in the whole bloody world!’
We pushed our cycles tentatively forward and they promptly sank. The bottom bit of my front wheel was completely buried, leaving the spokes extending upwards as though they were growing out of the sand.
‘Fuuuck,’ Tim breathed, dismayed. ‘My bike won’t move! What the hell are we going to do?’
I heaved again, exhausted, and my bike moved forwards five centimetres. ‘Jeez, mate, I don’t know. At this rate it’ll take us a bloody week to reach the border!’ I said, dejectedly. ‘You know, maybe they were right.’
‘What?’
‘Maybe they were right, you know, all those people who said we’d never make it.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Tim fixed me with a level stare.
‘Well, I dunno. It’s just that if it does take us a week … well, there’s no way we can carry enough water for a week and maybe we’d just have to bail and …’
‘Chris,’ Tim cut me off. ‘We’re nine hundred kilometres from Beijing. We have made it!’
‘Huh?’
‘Think about it. We’re a couple of weeks from Beijing. Not even the pit of hell is going to stop us now.’
His words pierced my gloom and snapped me back to reality. He was right: we virtually had made it. Through all the snow and ice, past the ticks and mozzies. We’d been struggling away for over a year – rarely a moment without its challenges – and now here we were, only a few weeks and one more challenge away from our grand finale. I shook my head as I realised the simple truth. Of course nothing was going to stop me reaching Beijing. After all, a ticket home to Nat was waiting for me there!
‘I guess you’re right, mate.’ I laughed. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. All those people and all their warnings – every one of them predicted that we’d be dead by now! Like a pissy little bit of sand’s going to stop us! Right!’
Tim grinned and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘That’s the way; good to see. Now that you’ve got your head screwed back on …’ He nodded towards the sandy creek bed. ‘I’m afraid it’s time to start pushing!’
A routine emerged that reminded me of school footy training with the scrum machine. We’d pack down, right arm and shoulder braced around the rear packs on our respective cycles. Then, bent down, left hand extended to clutch at the handlebar, we’d bury our heads into the smelly, dirty covers that had kept the dust and the weather out of our gear for the past year and start pushing.
Laboured steps. Thighs and calves pumping. Driving forward with heaves that buried my tattered sneakers
under the surface and filled them with sand. Breathing hard, my legs burning as I inched my bike slowly forward. It was unsustainable. Unendurable! Thirty steps, max. Then a rest. Pausing, slumped over the bike now. Sweat streaming off my face and my heart hammering maniacally. Like it was trying to escape! Wishing it was already in China?
Then again. An endless cycle that seemed to go on and on. A taste of the ultimate punishment. A taste of hell.
I started out following Tim, but later he was behind me. Hours and hours, and I was still able to look back to the hill near Ulaan Ule where we’d begun!
Suddenly, somehow, it was dark. The torment had ceased and we were making camp. We’d come about five kilometres in the past five hours. That, I thought, was flying!
‘Well, mate, what do you reckon?’ Tim asked as he took a slug of water from one of the dirty old soft drink bottles he’d picked up beside the road in Russia. ‘At one kay an hour, that’s about …’
‘Ninety hours to the border!’ I completed his thought. ‘And we only have enough water for …’
‘Two more days.’
‘Yeah.’
We sat and watched a passenger train go past. It was the Beijing-Ulaan Baatar Express. It had probably crossed the border a couple of hours ago and now we saw a blur of snapshots as lighted windows flashed by: men playing cards and drinking beer. Kids jumping up and down on their sleeper beds. A girl – just a glimpse, but she was probably a foreigner – drinking orange juice and reading a novel. The dining car: a fat man in a suit with a meal and a laptop in front of him.
And then it was gone. The clickety-clickety-click of the train was receding into the distance and we were left staring past the tracks at the dark shadows of the dunes and the saltbush extending into the gloom. It was back to us again: just the sand and the isolation.
Off The Rails Page 30