Friday, May 16, 2014
There wasn’t much to Sainshand, so after breakfast we didn’t hang around and headed north to Ulaanbaatar. The road was good and fast for most of the way and we arrived at the ‘Oasis Cafe and Guesthouse’ just before 4pm, only to find Ivor was already here. Shortly after us Kuipwagen also pulled up. This does seem to be the preferred place for overlanders, so no surprises there :).
We plan to cool our heels and wheels here for a few days, do some route planning, sort out a visa for Kazakhstan and possibly also for Uzbekistan.
Saturday, May 17, 2014
The first order of the day was to pop into the local Land Rover garage to investigate a “Check Engine Soon” light on Sterlin. Unfortunately the garage was closed for the weekend, so that plan was dashed.
The second order of the day was for 2 lattes at the Amsterdam Cafe. The coffee was great, but even better was some information we got from Craig and Klaus who we met at the cafe and who had recently overlanded from The UK/Germany. We had seen them earlier at the Oasis Guesthouse, and they just happened to be in the cafe when we showed up. They are traveling in a very nice Land Rover Defender. Craig’s website: BermudaRover.
We headed back to Oasis Guesthouse via a huge traffic jam. Apparently bad traffic is a feature of Ulaanbaatar. We spent the rest of the afternoon working hard on our itinerary that we plan to take through Mongolia and Central Asia. Turns out route planning is quite difficult and very time consuming. Usually there is only one obvious way from point A to point B, but we were faced with numerous good places to go and see. And we were trying to optimize our route. In addition, the application form for the Kazakhstan visa requires a detailed itinerary with fixed entry and exit dates. So we had to commit our plans to paper and try and make the best guesses around dates as we could. Fortunately Kim and Vaughan were working with a local jeep rental firm who had a local driver with local knowledge if Mongolia’s roads. We eavesdropped on the conversation they had and got some very useful information. Much of the driving we will do will be on tracks and the digital maps we have don’t provide any useful information about the state of the roads. So any information is like gold dust.
At one point in the planning we read somewhere on the Internet that Kazakhstan does NOT have an embassy here in Ulaanbaatar. So we desperately searched online for it and couldn’t find a reliable address. This added to our fears. We started to get quite worried, if no embassy existed then it would be very hard to get a visa before we’d get to Kazakhstan, to the point we might not be able to go. After talking to the owner of the guesthouse, we regained confidence that there is in fact an embassy here. We just need to find it.
Dinner was in. Just too exhausted to go out after all the hard work.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
We headed back to town to find the Kazakhstan Embassy. It took an hour or so of driving around half the city, but we were successful. We would be back on Monday when it opens. We rewarded ourselves with a coffee at the Amsterdam Cafe.
The activity for the day was a visit to a massive statue of Chinggis Khan riding a horse standing on top of a multistory building. Although the statue has been created for tourists, at 40m high it is still quite impressive. There was a man offering his 4 eagles for photographs and Stephen had to see what it was like to have a huge bird of prey rest on his arms. Turns out they weigh quite a lot. Inside the statue is the world’s largest boot, as certified by the Guinness Book of Records. It was a day of huge things.
Stephen managed to sneak in a quick haircut. Our guesthouse had an on-site hairdresser, how convenient.
For dinner we headed into town for a very nice steak and fish and chips. We also got to have a last meal with Kim, Vaughan and their two friends who had just flown in and will now travel with them for the next 2 weeks. It was a nice way to spend the final evening with them. We wish them luck as they head home.
Monday, May 18, 2014
The goodbyes continued. Over breakfast we said goodbye to Coen and Marijke. They plan to travel to the east of Mongolia before turning around and starting their journey west and back to their home. It was so nice that they invited us to join them through China. We plan to see them again in 4-6 months once we are back in Europe.
We quickly finished breakfast as we had another working day. The morning was spent sitting around doing nothing at the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan. We waited more that 1.5 hours to be served, which seemed like a long time as we were the only people there waiting. But once someone showed up, it all went very smoothly. We have no idea how long it will take to get the visa, or if indeed we will even get it. Our application is multi entry without a sponsor and therefore is at some risk of not being issued. But we got no hint from the consular official that we will be denied a visa. Should know something in the next few days.
Next up, we headed over to the local Land Rover service center to have Sterlin’s spark plugs inspected. Another 5 hours spent waiting around. Finally we decided to replace the current ones which showed a little wear. Hopefully this will address any potential misfire issues. We also had a full inspection, and just as well. Two small issues were found, a nut had failed on the exhaust manifold and there was a loose drain plug on the engine. Both were fixed within minutes, but the drain plug issue could have been very serious had it come off (all the engine oil would have drained in seconds). Otherwise, Sterlin is in great shape and is eager and ready to roll west across Mongolia.
For dinner we enjoyed steak at Grand Khaan Irish Pub, same place we went to the night before. After weeks of Chinese food with hardly any real meat, steaks again were lovely!Tuesday, May 20th.
That morning we went in search of ‘third party insurance’ for the car while in Mongolia. We’d got the coordinates from Coen and Marijke of a company that sells this to overlanders, so finding the place was easy enough. Traffic was horrendous as usual so it took a long time to get there; walking was not really an option as it was too far away. 54 minutes after we started the buying process we walked out with insurance (no, there was no line, just a computer that didn’t want to cooporate) and braved the traffic back to our hotel.
And then we could finally start walking around and seeing some of this city. We walked to Chinggis Khan Sq, and had a quick look around the museum in the building. Not entirely what sure what the museum was called, but it was not the National Museum of Mongolian History (which we found a few days later).
On the way back we found Heinz baked beans in a British Shop, a great addition to our camping food stock 🙂
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Caroline spent the morning with her favorite stylist in Ulaanbaatar. One has to look good when camping on the Steppe. Stephen sort of worked on a project to secure the license plate from being stolen. The project did not get very far along and is still a work in progress.
Caroline bumped into and started chatting to another hotel guest (Anthony) who had taken an interest in Sterlin. We all ended up in the cafe sharing stories over a coffee. Anthony was particularly pleased to see a Land Rover Discovery being used as an overland vehicle and was very supportive of our decision to take a Discovery over a Defender (which is typically the Land Rover model people choose). Anthony plans to make his own overland trip from Beijing to Oxford in a MG crossover.
We dined at Le Bistrot Français which was recommended by Philippe, the Belgian restaurant owner we met in Georgetown, Malaysia. So nice to have a good steak, and the duck confit was not bad either.
Thursday, May 2, 2014
Had a late start before heading to the Kazakhstan Embassy to get an update on our visa application. There was no definitive news, but we got the sense the visa would be issued later in the day, as the consul was “at the airport” and presumably heading into the embassy. Time for a coffee.
We extended our hotel stay for an extra day and had to do a little room shuffle as they were fully booked. Then we headed into town for a little more sight-seeing. First stop was Xanadu Art Gallery, which we couldn’t find. Second stop was the Museum of Natural History with a Paleontology Hall containing a large dinosaur skeleton. Unfortunately the building had been condemned and the museum was very much closed for business. Our third attempt was the National Museum of Mongolia. Success! And not a bad museum. It chronicled Mongolia from before man existed until the last decade or so as Mongolia emerged as a self governing nation. The transition away from Kremlin rule in 1990 to a democracy was very interesting.
Back in our room the KZ embassy rang and let us know that our visa were ready for collection. More success! So we drove back to the Embassy just after 4pm. The whole picking up process still took about 45mins, but hey, this is why we spent the extra days in UB, so we were pretty happy. Would you believe they granted us a dual entry with each stay up to 30 days! Yay! We could now stick to Plan A! Plan B would have meant: forget about the ‘Stans’ and stay in Russia and go north via Moscow and St Petersburg. We even got a nice looking brochure and photo booklet promoting tourism in the country. This all seemed to be inline with KZ’s bid to become a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in 2017.
