Murphy Stein

Word of the Day:
n. uulh

1. Clouds

I guess I just like the way this word rolls of my tongue. It's soothing.

Didn't wake up this morning. Pete had to rustle me out of bed so that I could get my tent put away and my gear packed. Everyone had their duties. Guillermo, who could easily pass for a Russian Military General given a pair of fatigues and a few war wounds, stood under the carriage of the Gaz supply truck, commanding his army of dirty campers to heft this and repack that. It took him and 6 others to lift one of the plaster jackets up onto the bed of the truck. There's some dispute, but that thing easily weighed over 600 pounds. For something that heavy they'll probably ship it back to New York by sea-carrier which takes almost half a year to arrive. They can get things back in a matter of weeks if they use air freight but it's much more expensive and only worthwhile for the most important specimens. I was a little late getting over to the workcamp because, as usual, my tent didn't cooperate. I learned too late that I folded the thing one too many times width-wise and came close to ripping the stuff sack. Next time I'm investing in an inflatable igloo or something. Yet one more reason to sleep outside. Aargh.

Thanks to brilliant organization, we were saddled in our chariots by 12:45, blasting music and ready to ride. As we pulled over the hill, heading towards Zos Pass, a pack of jet-black horses came to see us off. They galloped beside us for a few hundred meters then stopped and bobbed their heads goodbye. Such beautiful, beautiful animals. We snaked through the black mountains, the ones that I've been so taken with the past week - climbing up and over the pass and into yet another unbelievably wide valley. It looked like a collage of all the most beautiful desert photographs I've ever seen. In one tiny corner there was a splotch of orange sand dunes, rising precariously hundreds of meters in the air; Mark says they "sing" when the wind blows across them. Nearby there was a rainbow of colored mountains, bleeding from black, to brown, to red, to yellow, to green. It was a hodgepodge of scenery, constructed as if by a four year-old who hasn't quite mastered the concept of transition and scale. All this, subsumed under the same blue ceiling, stitched together by streaming cotton clouds. There's really nothing like driving out here. It's hands-free eye-candy, bouncing by at 30 kilometers an hour. The closest thing I can compare it to is IMAX, but even the 3D spectacular in mid-town fails miserably by comparison.

Around 5 o'clock, we stopped to stretch our legs and Mike calmly pointed out that we were going to be overtaken by a wall of sand, hurtling towards us. I watched it for a while, saw it erasing whole mountains, smudging them to oblivion behind a brown blur, blotting out the sun. It just kept growing, chugging towards us like a steaming locomotive. I guess I got my wish for a bigger sandstorm. When we felt the first breaths of it, we ran back to our cars and rolled up our windows. If it had been bad enough we'd have had to wait it out, with the comfort of our favorite beverage and warm tunes. The sand started whipping across the windshield, leaking in through the window cracks, and there was nothing but this brown haze surrounding our cluster of vehicles. Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as it looked and the sun reemerged an hour later.

Around 9 o'clock, we stopped on a flat, bushless plain to spend the night. "Where do you go to the bathroom if it's all flat," you ask? The more bashful among us throw a shovel and a roll of toilet paper in one of the cars, drive a couple hundred meters from camp, and run around to the shielded side. Use your imagination from there. The evening was as nondescript as it can get out here. Most people went to sleep early to rest up for tomorrow's drive.

The next morning, Mark, Jonathan and Bolor woke up earlier than anybody else to rid themselves of a few scorpions. They're heat seekers, and I guess the rest of us just weren't warm enough for them. Their loss. Mark assured me that these weren't deadly, and that he'd been stung a number of times over the years without "serious consequences." Needless to say, the ambiguity of his phrasing wasn't very reassuring. I'd rather a little lizard's greeting in the morning than a barbed, poisonous spear through my big toe. I wouldn't mind seeing one, though, as long as he kept his distance.

The second day of driving was equally splendid, but understandably less exciting. Our caravan shimmied across the steppe, waving to the ger-dwellers and racing the gazelles. As we continued moving north, the ground grew greener and the air smelled sweeter. (I might just faint from eye-watering happiness when I see all the lush green mountains in Ulaan Baatar.) The caravan stopped on a sprawling green hill to eat lunch and hang out, while the paleontologists went prospecting at some red outcroppings they'd spotted a few kilometers back. I pulled a lawn chair out of the truck, and cracked the spine of Skipped Parts, by Tim Sandlin. He's hilarious. My laughter was probably the only sound for miles around. An hour or two later I heard a car rumbling towards us and assumed it was the paleontologists returning. To my surprise, a sinister, black Mitsubishi rolled up and a towering German stepped out. Were it not for his tan cap that read "I Love Mongolia," I might have felt a little intimidated. He introduced himself, and the best I could do for conversation was, "Come here often?" Believe it or not, he does. This is his twelfth time to the Gobi in as many years. We exchanged needless information until his companions reeled him back to the jeep and sped away. Talk about random.

Eventually the others did return and we made it to Chimney Buttes -their name, not mine - in a few hours. We parked in the shadow of a large, eroded mountain sporting considerably less character than Ukhaa. We celebrated our new base camp with a mix-tape called "The King Goes to the Gobi" and much fox-trotting. The air was cold when I finally made it to bed and I pulled the cinch tight to keep the heat in and the scorpions out.

Murphy

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