Roads? Who needs roads?
Flying high above Mongolia landscapes, you see wandering, braided tracks that look like animal trails. These are the roads. They are not improved. Not even a little bit. When the spirit moves a driver, he takes off on his own, adding a new, hopefully less-brutal route among boulders, bogs, and glacial pothole fields. Usually the new path is only a false hope, shattered immediately by the unvarnished truth of a rugged glacier-scraped, rock-strewn, hard-packed landscape.
This would be fun for a minute or so. For three hours, or even eight, they are just a bone-jarring, butt-battering trial. There’s plenty of wonderful scenery to compensate, riding in the Russian-made vans is not a cushy tourist experience. [My wife, who didn’t accompany me on the tour, but who saw the video, was captivated by the quaint, improvised purple curtains. This struck me as a quaint, charming, cheerful, and grotesque observation. Perhaps being dragged behind a pickup truck would be much nicer if there were purple curtains on the pickup truck.]