The Sea of Gobi

We are driven to our Ger camp, forty minutes outside Sainshand, in ancient Ukranian UAV vans. They are like ugly VW campers on steroids and Jow Ha, our driver, puts it through it’s paces.  It feels cold and it is raining in the middle of the day. I am not expecting this. The Ger Camp consists of   24 gers in neat rows (apparently all ger doors have to face the south) with a permanent restaurant and toilet block behind them in the shape of a giant ger, although it looks more like the mother ship of an alien race as we approach it, bouncing and bucking over the endless grass.

It is early morning and the steppe looks magnificent in the dawn. We are tired after another night of four hours sleep, so get our heads down for a couple of hours before a hearty breakfast. After this we are taken out to see temples, dinosaur fossils, meditation caves and a circular patch of red rocks that are said to have recuperative powers. To get to all of these places we cross the Eastern Gobi where steppe and desert mingle and merge. There are no roads and no signs, and in every direction it looks the same. We realise that it is more like the sea than land.

The similarities continue. On the top of one hill we easily make out the shape of a beach and the green waters of a massive estuary that are optical illusions. The tufts of grass look like the tops of waves to complete the illusion. At night a row of lights come on at the front of our ger camp which look like a promenade, and in the distance, lights from a couple of other gers and the very occasional car look like ships out at sea. Just like the sea at night, you can feel the immensity of the steppe and a desert wind moving through the scrubby brush sounds like waves breaking on a shore. This is all the more paradoxical as we are now in one of the furthest points from the sea that you can be on the planet.