u-drive, i-pod

tonight we stay at ganna's house in tsetserleg. well, a ger in his back garden anyway. the guys we're traveling with have observed that ganna and i seem to have a bit of a raport going. i speak a couple - literally a couple - of mongolian words, ganna knows a few english to do with his job (road, photo, stop, that kind of thing) but somehow between us we've seemed to be able to share information on this trip.

ganna is a funny guy. last night while the guys rested in the ger, ganna and i pissed off the family cat, we nearly killed it at one point by jumping out on it from behind.

maybe we bonded over my weird over-enthusiasm for off-road driving. i've also patted the van fondly a few times while putting my thumbs up at him. i don't know.
i am hoping that he will use this time at home to refresh his cassette tape collection in time for the ongoing journey tomorrow. so far he's been limited to 2 tapes with little more than 10 songs on each, and i'm certain some of them are doubled up. maybe while mongolia has the lowest population density of any country (at 1.4km sq per person), it is also the lowest density of music that's any good.

ganna has played those two tapes, about 30 songs at the most, repeatedly throughout the whole last 4 days. it's nearly driven me a little bit insane.

to counteract the musical torture, for todays travels i succumbed to temptation and noise-canceled the whiny cassettes with my ipod. aaahh, it was like the best music i'd ever heard. my lovely sennheiser ear-buds for a start reminding me - after the van's horrible speakers - that music can sound good as well as be written good.

we spent the morning driving back to the volcanic moonscape. the ground littered with black, sharp igneous rocks; each one filled with holes like a sponge, from where lava had cooled and hardened. a very harsh and inhospitable landscape so it was, but somehow nature had done its thing and found a way and grass, trees and wasps grow between the folds of solidified magma. in places you could see the shape of the flowing liquid rock caught forever in time. the van in all its prowess, managed still on this terrain and carried halfway up the volcano. we climbed the rest, discovering a huge inverted coneshaped crater. you could trace what the eruption mast have looked like from close up; a huge pillar of red hot molten rock, an incredible force it would've been. as our travels continued we kept seeing bits of spewed black rock for miles.



for a little while it seemed that ipods are a lot more intelligent than apple would have you believe. as always, i put it on shuffle play and let the random song selector do its work. as we drove from the lush green grasslands around the lake, into the nearby volcanic world it played
"this is the land (i travel through)" - the bees
"holiday road" - limp bizkit
"lava" - silver sun
"valley of jehoshaphat" - willi williams
and
"every day is a winding road" - sheryl crow.
in that order, all in succession. also kinda weird that as we pulled into ganna's dusty whispering hometown it played the prodigy version of "ghost town."

i'm glad i played my own music. while i have this weird idea that it compromised the authenticity of the landscape, in some ways it enhanced the way i experienced it. if you're planning a road trip of mongolia (and you should), i'd recommend you enhance it with any or all of the following bands:
led zeplin
guillemots
faithless
jack johnson
regina spektor
the bees
kings of convenience
leningrad

it was so hot today i could feel my skin getting crispy.

and the van nearly broke down in the middle of it. which was briefly worrying. it coughed and faded under the midday sun. after a few pumps of the accelerator it started again, faded and cut out. but a little more pumping, a roar and a rev and we were back on the gravel, headed for home.