After taking a little rest, we headed towards the Sand Dunes. No lens can do justice to the sense of awe you get from the sheer magnitude of this pile of sand. I understand it runs 180 km in length (more than 110 miles) and varies in height from 320 feet to 990 feet (about 30 stories tall to 100 stories tall)

I am still a little confused about how a very long and huge sand dune gets formed with no other sand dunes around it. I will need to find this out.

We reached a high spot and could see the Hongor Sand Dunes for the first time. The road below was endless and it eventually would take us to our camp for the night but the dunes were impressive to watch.

Since yesterday, we had all been looking for an Ibex. We found none up and down Yol valley. Our driver – who is the best spotter among us all – was trying his best. He slowed down once we reached some big mountains and kept constantly scanning the mountains. Like I said, he is an incredible spotter. Suddenly he said something in Mongol and stopped the car.

We all got out and looked where he was pointing. Indeed, there was an Ibex on top of the mountains. Then two more came along. Got a good shot of them even though they were very far because of the position. Against the mountainside, they would be difficult to spot. But against the sky, they were easy to capture.

We finally caught up to the pack of camels that we had seen before. Most of them were completely unperturbed by us. A couple just curiously looked on…

As the tire was being changed, I strained my eyes on the mountains behind us and I thought I saw an animal on the top of it. Trained my 300X zoom lens and took a shot. Magnified it and realized it only a cow.

Here is the thing though. There was one solitary cow. The whole time. It was just off the top of the mountain. And it did not budge one single foot from where he was. I took quite a few pictures to see what it was up to. It had only two poses – it was either looking towards us. Or it was looking towards the top. The whole twenty minutes or so that we were there!!

Strange!

We had a flat in the middle of nowhere. We were back on the road in 20 minutes but it gave Roger and myself a good chance to be out there to realize once again what vast nothingness and eerie silence is all about. We spotted some local insects, some really big flies, a yellow butterfly and a heard of camel about half a mile away.

I took the picture to keep for my memories a sense of the vastness.

Next we spotted antelopes. Actually our driver spotted them. He has incredible eyes. These antelopes were a little more brave than the gazelles. They let us come a little closer and then ran away. I learnt something from the driver. I asked him (translated thru Sara) how he recognizes a gazelle from an antelope. Apparently, you look at the tail color. A white one means a gazelle. A black one means an antelope.

Saw a bunch of gazelles in the distance. They are very skittish. We were not even within a quarter mile of them but they hightailed it immediately. Th picture is not great – I had to take it quickly from inside the car.

There is absolutely no wifi and virtually no phone connection in the areas we have been for the last couple of days. Between Roger, Sara and the driver, we have two different phone companies covered and everybody is checking ever so often if anybody has some connection. The best we get in certain areas is an Edge connection (very poor data connection). But enough to do WhatsApp.

Headed out about an hour back from our camp to go to the Hongor Sand Dune. It is about a three and a half hour rough ride on some really tough terrain. About an hour into bouncing along the hard surface, suddenly we heard the familiar “ding” sound on a couple of phones (notifying messages have been received).

Everybody yelled “There is connection”. I have no idea why at that spot we got some connection. We were surrounded by nothingness. Not even electric poles. And that had been the case for the last one hour. How did we manage to get connection in that area? Heaven knows!

We immediately pulled over (which is very easy since you do not have to watch out other traffic 🙂 ) and started checking out phones.

I am used to pit stops for bathroom and for food. Now I know that internet is the other basic necessity for which we need pit stops!!

It was in incredible experience watching four of us outside our vehicle pecking on our phones in the middle of nowhere!