On the way to the Gobi
10 August, somewhere in Mongolia. We’re 50 km north of Mandalgobi, one of the towns that herald the start of the dreaded Gobi Desert. 6 in the morning, official wake-up call in the camp. At 6:30 we fall on breakfast like hyenas: we’ve got 101km ahead of us. Well, it doesn’t look like much, just a warm-up. At 8:30 we’re sent off on the first stage of the first edition of the Mongolia Bike Challenge 2010. 10 metres later there’s already a rider on the ground bleeding from the mouth, and the prize for biggest idiot goes to… With 1400 km still to go, you have to take it easy… anyway, I swerve round his bike and press on. A tough, rocky climb to whet the appetite and then easy going all the way to the finish. Nothing to it, this is a piece of cake.
I try to latch on to a big group to tow me along, but everyone sets off at breakneck speed. The guy who crashed shoots past me; it turns out he’s actually good, on top of everything. Anyway, I do my own thing, little by little and without revving the engine, there are plenty of kilometres still to go. We ride through patches of sand and tôle ondulée (or washboard, or corrugated iron… rippled ground, basically) to the feed station at kilometre 50. Just over two hours, and the exhaust still cold. So far so good. We go through Mandalgobi, with 2 km of very welcome tarmac. I miss the GOBI sign from the Mortadelo y Filemón comics; maybe it was on another track…
I join a group of Spaniards I know from other adventures; better to ride all together, it’ll make the going easier. 10 kilometres further on a terrible headwind springs up and our average speed takes a hit… a big one. We take turns at the front but we’re getting nowhere. The track is in poor shape, the tôle ondulée and the sand slow the bikes down, and the wind does the rest. On the better stretches we reach 15km an hour, on the worse ones we don’t get past 10. The landscape is monotonous, ugly; the sand lashes us and gets in everywhere. We run out of water and there are no more feed stations; some start to have a hard time. One of my companions in misery says he can no longer see out of one eye, and can barely see out of the other. In the end we decide to split the group: I go on ahead with the girl, who has a chance in the women’s race, while the others stay behind to guide our half-blind biker. The girl and I push hard (with what strength we have left) to try to claw back time on the leading woman after our stops, and we go flat out for the last 15 kilometres. After 6 hours and 6 minutes we cross the finish line of the warm-up stage. I can’t even speak: 48th overall and a beating my body won’t be able to take for many days. Our companion arrives 20 minutes later, almost blind, and the procession of people coming in behind us is a sight to behold.
After eating something and having a shower (a cold one) I spend what little strength I had left putting up the tent (with help); you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to pitch a tent in this wind. All I want is dinner and sleep, and luckily the night is warm. If every day is like this… this is going to be very tough.