Saturday 28th August
FIRST ANTIPODES
We are fast approaching Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. However first of all we wanted to stop at two specific spots south of the city. Our goal is to travel via the two opposing points in Chile, which is one of the specifications of the “gentlemen’s agreement” on what makes a true circumnavigation. And today we visited the first of these:
Latitude 45.893114 & Longitude 106.523265
We had to drive some 10 miles from the road straight across the steppe to actually get there. When we did we wiggled Landy around, couple of feet this way and then that, until our GPS gave our exact position as matching that of the Antipode we were looking for.
You will find it on our route map in between last night’s campsite and tonight’s arrival in Ulaanbaatar.
In the meantime it’s getting colder again as we rapidly move north.
A couple of days ago we saw a small herd of what we believe were gazelles. They literally bounced their way across the road in front of us at an incredible speed. No sooner had we raised the video to our eyes and they were gone, in an instant. So today when we started seeing more we were hopeful of another chance. No chance. They are so alert and move so fast we didn’t stand a chance. From several miles away we could just about make out a whole herd spread across the distant hillside, probably a thousand in head! We’d need to set up a hide and stay there long enough to smell like we belonged there to get a chance of a photo and so reluctantly we moved on, camping about 100 km short of Ulaanbaatar.
Campsite – south of Ulaanbaatar
Distance travelled – 235 km
