The 20 Second Selfie!

With my digestive system playing fairly nicely I decide to join the morning shoot. Rendezvous time is set for 5.15. At 5.14 I walk into the car park as fast as my little legs, dodgy knees and metal hip will carry me, to see the jeeps pulling out! I have to wave dramatically to flag one down and get in. I know Lee’s trips don’t follow US Ranger principles, but this is a new extreme.

I needn’t have bothered. When we get to the location it’s blowing a gale, whipping up sand all around, and the light is very poor. Mike has his cameras protected by plastic bags and puts them down for a minute, and by the time he picks them up they are already covered in sand. We cut our losses, thank our models (at least the human ones), and head back to breakfast.

After breakfast we pack up and set out on the first stage of the long drive back, which we plan to break near the canyon at Tsagaan Survarga.

Lunch is taken at a Korean restaurant where for the first time in the trip we are met by customer-facing staff who have both very limited English and non-existent customer-handling skills. I get a beer, but the girl on the till is unable to either make the right amount from the various notes I offer, or make change, or explain the problem. Eventually one of the guides has to bale me out and I pay with a card, but then have to persuade the girl to return the correct notes I already passed her. I’m sure there’s no intent – the Mongolians I have met are all scrupulously accurate and polite in their dealings with me – but it does suggest that the restaurant needs to work on their staffing policies. On a positive note the soup I have ordered is tasty, but difficult to eat with chopsticks!

Another couple of hours brings us to the Gobi Caravanserai camp. The futuristic buildings are like something from a classic sci-fi movie set on Mars, and not unlike the Chilean observatory used as a location for Quantum of Solace. The new en-suite rooms are nicely appointed but there are no chairs and I am having to type this standing up and stabbing the keyboard like Rick Wakeman does, so that’s a few points on the clock…

The other big problem is that the newly-built rooms ("hereinafter referred to as ‘the ovens’, m’lud") have large glass windows and doors facing the sun for much of the day, but no A/C, no forced ventilation (e.g. a fan), and no means of natural ventilation such as an opening window. The only option is to open both the patio door facing the desert, and the main door facing the courtyard. Chance of invading creepie-crawlies 100%. Chance of invasion by something larger (e.g. curious camel, snake) non-zero.

There’s no WiFi in the rooms, and for the first time in the trip I don’t have a usable signal on my Mobicom Mongolian SIM. The bar beckons.

After an early dinner we head out to the canyon. Although these "badlands" are being bathed in beautiful late-evening light, they are almost impossible to shoot because of the force umpteen gale blasting up the canyon walls and across the top where we are trying to work. Regular readers will know how I boast of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/5s, or even multiple seconds for wider angles. I’m struggling to get a usable shot at 1/500s, and all the while worrying about taking a tumble.

As soon as the sun is down we head back to the hotel and sit outside waiting for the Milky Way, in the hope that at least an astrophotography opportunity might save the day. Sadly there is sufficient cloud that we’re unlikely to get a true and uninterrupted sky shot, but the conditions are sufficient to get a few memory shots. As I don’t have another model I opt for trying to get a "Milky Way Selfie". None is perfect (it’s really not that easy to run into position in less than 10s and then hold a pose for 20s), but I do get a couple of decent memory shots.