Mike Novacek, Mark A. Norell

When we were kids we loved maps travel and all that stuff. Be it Roy Chapman Andrews doing what we do now, or in later years crossing Asia with Paul Theroux, going down a river with Ed Abbie, or visiting Las Vegas with Hunter S, seeing what is left of our parents' planet is an addiction. We have been in this business for a while and have learned that travel includes the entire spectrum of human emotion. Yesterday was a hard day-- traversing a lot of new country for us. Going to new places is a double-edged sword-- it is wonderful to see them, but at the same time we are not travelling here simply for pleasure. We have much work to do. So, we left our camp feeling confident after traversing the mountain passes after the hail storm.

But the next day's journey had its surprises. Going south we passed the last habitation, a lonely ger (the Mongolian description for what is incorrectly called in the West a yurt.) From here it is an alien landscape. With yesterday's road adventures behind us we are sitting in camp enjoying a beautiful moon in one of the least inhabited places on the planet.

It was a good day-- finally able to stretch our collective legs after too many long plane flights, jarring drives, and idle hotel days. We set our camp at the base of an eastern face of a huge volcanic cone called Dosh. This is the white hot core of the Gobi. In the central most place on any continent, the farthest place imaginable from atolls in a cool Pacific. At an elevation of only three thousand feet above sea level the place is usually a skillet in July-- temperatures exceeding 105° F. Today was mercifully cool though, barely reaching the 90's. We drove seven miles east of camp over a number of bush-choked washes, and headed for the rim rock that formed the capitals of fossil bearing cliffs. Setting out from the cars we were at last walking in cool, ephemeral rain, blasted by hot wind. Today we looked at some new places: Cretaceous outcrops of white and red sand, preserving dinosaurs and other animals more than 70 million years old. We did not find much. But it is important to look everywhere. The places we field checked did not pan out. But we did find a few things including a great champsosaur skull found by Guillermo Rougier -- a champsosaur is a crocodile-like creature that is found throughout the Northern hemisphere during the age of the dinosaurs through their extinction and the rise of the familiar animals of today. But we doubt that we will be coming back to this stretch of the desert. Tomorrow we look at new places.

Dinner tonight included dried mushrooms, coconut milk, eggplant, onions, noodles, prepared by Mark Norell . Delicious.

A shooting star arched over a nearly spherical moon.

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