Thursday 5^th August

After a morning pottering around camp finishing off the domestics and giving Landy a shower, we made the mistake of trying to have a shower ourselves around lunchtime, intending to be ready to leave about 12.00 ish.  Good idea in principle but didn’t take into account the number of bike and horse riders that would stop for a coffee and a chat!!  And a peer in our tent!!  Some of them we had also seen yesterday, as they were going to work down on the marshes where they cut hay for the winter among the mozzies.

Still, by 4.30 we were ready and packed up and able to move on.  We tried to follow some directions we’d been given to detour past the marshland to the right hand side and on around the mountain. I say tried, because Paul had not yet got to grips with the sheer scale of this country and underestimated how far we would have to travel to circumnavigate the marsh.  Consequently we ended up in the wet and boggy marshland area after all.  Despite some heroic driving, against the backdrop of me visibly hanging on to anything I could grab on to and gasping loudly every other moment, eventually the inevitable happened and Paul dropped Landy’s rear driver side wheel in a large muddy hole up to the axle with the chassis resting on the surface of the ground.  At this point any off road drivers will be laughing their socks off.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of being stuck was the variety and number of large biting insects that were swarming around Landy waiting for lunch.  Showing extreme bravery, we both jumped out into the clouds of furious little beasties, dressed like ninja warriors!

A first attempt at self recovery with the winch and ground anchor only saw the ground anchor slicing through the bog towards Landy.  By now we had a small crowd gathered around us, with much laughter and banter going on in Mongolian that we could not understand but interpreted to mean ‘what a pair of idiots, we told you to go round the boggy bit’.  All that coffee serving over the last couple of days was now paying off as every one of them we’d met before at our campsite.  Still, they got stuck in and helped dig Landy out from all angles, one horseman galloping off into the distance at one point to bring back a large rock weighing about 40 kilos on which to support the hi-lift jack!!  Finally, with half the bog dug away around each wheel, both bridging ladders employed, the ground anchor deployed with the winch and the hi-lift jack raising the axle from the rear we lurched forward and out of the muck.  So much for Landy’s shower (and ours for that matter).   We hadn’t had the chance, with so many experts around us, to employ the advice of David Bowyer from Goodwinch and make a pot of tea before starting to dig yourself out.  If we had, Paul thinks he might have preferred to dig around the rear of the stuck wheel (firmer ground) and reverse out.  Still, we’ll never know if that would have helped or not.

With darkness already showing signs of falling we got onto dry ground, around the bog and set up camp for the night, on a col between two mountains.  Despite appearing to have reached dry ground we found our campsite to be home to half the world’s mozzie population!!  Dressed like SAS troopers, armed with fly spray and swatters, we quickly headed into bed and the sanctuary of the mozzie netted tent.

Campsite – somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, way off the main road we’d previously been told to avoid as it’s closed (and reason for going near the bog in the first place), probably near Achit nuur, a large lake.

Distance travelled – 54 km (every one painful!)