Then we turned north and drove across the fields of rocks on barely recognizable tracks and pathways until we came to the river again. But now the river was deep and with steep banks. So we drove on along the river, hoping to find a place where the river widens and gives us a chance to cross it. Instead, we ended up in small hills with steep hillsides and boulders that grew larger and larger. Our Trabant was unable to climb the steep inclines and we knew that we cannot go any further. As we were discussing what to do next, two Mongols appeared out of nowhere. They say that if you get stuck anywhere in Mongolia, even in a totally deserted part of the country, in less than half of an hour at least one or two Mongols would appear. From our experience we can confirm it.
We asked them for a direction to Tsagannuur and found out that we have to go back. There was no way to go forward north of the swamp. Then we got stuck on a boulder and our new Mongolian friends helped us to lift the car from the boulder and set us on our way again. We came back to the place where we started in the morning. We slept there the night before as it seemed that the river was quite wide there. Now we knew that if there was any place to cross the river, there was nothing better north or south of this place. But we still did not believe it was possible even here.
We walked into the river, trying to find the best possible place to cross it. Ultimately, we figured out that by zigzagging up and down the river through some dry places in the river was our only alternative. Note that I am not saying "our possibly successful alternative" as we did not trust it too much. We offloaded the car and put our baggage, spare wheels, box with oil, sleeping bags and other stuff as markers on different dry places to delineate our zigzagging pathway across the river. Then we drove across, up and down the river, through the water and hard gravel and rock-hard dry mud where the car gained the speed, and through the soft gravel and mud where the car was bogging down, around our baggage and spare wheels and our box of oil, towards the opposite side of the river. As the car was almost across the river it came into a deep mud and almost stalled, but then the wheels got a few inches of solid ground a kicked the car onto the opposite bank. We have finally crossed the river.
Soon enough we found some tracks leading towards the mountain pass behind which was to be Tsangannuur. We drove without any problem through the canyon on a nice gravel road and we decided to stop and have something to eat. Soon a Mongol on a motorbike stopped and we invited him to a cup of tea. And then another two stopped and we invited them to a tea too. A little while later a local cowboy left his cows and joined us too. We were all sitting on the rocks next to the road having a tea party amongst the hills of Altai. Then without too many words spoken but with a feeling of good fun from all of us we parted our ways. We push started our car and soon enough we were in Tsagannuur.
From Tsagannuur to Olgiy is an actual paved road which was quite a nice change after the past few days. We came back to our Kazakh guest where we stored our engine before, got the car welded and fixed where necessary and spent an evening with his new Russian guests. Soon a guitar, tea and vodka appeared and we listened to some melancholic Russian song. I guess there are no other than sentimental or melancholic Russian songs. If you have enough vodka, you are in a mood to jump out of the roof of a highrise, all sorry about yourself and the world, after listening to just a few of these songs. But we did not drink the vodka and there was no highrise in sight. And so we just enjoyed this awesome evening, then thanked the Russians and went to bed.
On Monday morning we set for the Russian border. As usually we spent about 5 hours dealing with Mongolian and Russian border guards and border crossing bureaucratic procedures and suddenly we were back in Russia with only the memories of the dry Mongolian Altai mountains. Great memories I have to say.