Get those 2 out of Mongolia

I don’t know how this keeps on happening, but somehow, we keep losing the Wall or following the wrong bit of Wall and every time we do it we end up in inner/outer somewhere called Mongolia.

 

We were on a bad day; we had lost each other as well as Pete (the camera man). The weather was turning and starting to rain. The worst was we had a few hours to get to our collection point as well as to find a way through the yellow river canyons. By some miracle we managed to all find each other and now it’s time to get a pin from the crew so that we can move to a point where we can be extracted.

 

Andy, who is the go-to-guy on the map app, sent off our location. It was an almost instant reply from the crew.“What the hell are you guys doing? You’re in Mongolia, on the wrong side of the Yellow river, and we can’t get to you. It’s a more than 200 km round trip by car.”

 

It’s a few weeks later and we had been running village roads for hours, there was no Wall in the area, just the odd tower. I remember commenting to Andy that the village set-up had changed, no more walled clusters as is the norm in China, things are more spread out. Then there were strange round tents scattered around all over the place. On we went. It was now about 4 pm and time to send in our location to see where the crew were set up that we can head to them for the evening. In came the response: “Where are you guys going, you are 30 km off track, in Mongolia again.”

Yesterday we had a hard Wall day, hot as anything and just sandy scrub land, but beautiful mud Wall all the way. We were running next to the Wall and suddenly we were confronted by a big blue security fence, blocking us from following the Wall. So, we did the obvious: if you can’t go over, find a way under it. We did and on we went, 10 km down the Wall we hit a big resort area and on we ran. People were shouting at us to stop but we pretended we did not understand.

 

Twenty minutes later we were deep in the “dwang” – police on a bike and that was it. As usual, no one could understand each other so we called the crew who spoke to the policeman to see if they could get us out of this mess. After a while the policeman gave us back the phone: “Where the hell are you guys? I can only understand 30% of what the policeman is saying. Have you guys veered off into Mongolia again? Send me a pin, I will have to come sort this out.”