In Mongolia the question is not if something breaks on your car, it is only when and what.
Well, the “what” is simple to answer in our case. Our wheel bearings on the front axle went to hell after so many bad tracks during the last couple of weeks and months. Okay and we also had some air in the break circuit and the rear suspension bearings lost their gaskets. But that is something we are going to fix in Vancouver, as they should still last about 10.000 kilometres until they completely pass away.
So we enjoyed a great service provided by Toyota in Ulan-Bator. Always amazing to see that they take care about your issue straight away, without a need for an appointment, like in Europe.
Using the car maintenance break in Ulan-Bator also to get some laundry done and the car cleaned-up overall, we spent two nights at the River-Point-Lodge. As they had some issues with too late delivered motorbikes, the place was completely crowded. Not what we usually prefer, but kind of experience and in the end we got all done and got some excellent support by Rene, the manager to get our roof fixed (one more issue we had with our car after working on our solar system).
Still we prefer places like this, getting a friendly wake up by some horses…
… or a local nomad coming by to help us lightening our camp fire. Would not have been needed, still a nice experience. In the end we also had a glass of rum together, bit of funny as we were not able to understand each other, but a drink works everywhere as it seems. 🙂
Well and again we were lucky with some wildlife on our journey towards the monasteries in the North of Mongolia.
Finally we made it to the monasteries, nice places for sure, some a bit too touristic in our opinion, but there are so many other religious places around. Some even next to the road, so that you have plenty of opportunity in the region. Unfortunately most of the monasteries were destroyed by Mr. Stalin, but some are nowadays active again. So enjoy a couple of impressions on that side of Mongolia as well.
From here we are now exploring the North-West a bit more on our way back to Russia, but more on this next time.
