Vehicles and navigation

The camp is being invaded by camels! For the last three days, a pack of 20-30 Bactrian camels have been hanging out in and around camp. They are a little shy but not enough to stay away from the little flower bed at the patio, bastards… I have discovered that camels are very hungry individuals that will eat almost anything, fast. I have always wanted a camel and I think that I wrote earlier that apparently one needs to have at least two camels, otherwise they will be unhappy. Well, I studied my immobilization guide book to see if we have any good drugs to knock down a camel. Midgi thought that it was a very good idea but I realized that it would be hard to hide the camels in case their owner would come looking for them. I will have to investigate how much a camel costs and if there are any requirements involved in owning and driving one (Tom said that it’s pretty hard to learn camel-handling). I actually have a Mongolian driver’s license. There are some categories that we don’t have back home but I have not found camel so I think that I will be fine from a legal standpoint.

Sorry, this was suppose to be a vehicle post, I think that camels can count as vehicles though.

When we came here Tom said that when he worked here he had seat belts installed in his car and everyone who saw that thought is was funny since the first thing that most people would do when they bought a car was to cut the seat belts off and throw them out (assuming there were any, Russian vans don’t have any I think).

Well, a couple of days after our Delica (which is a fairly modern car) came Midgi asked me what the warning light on the dashboard was. I explained that it meant that at least one person in the car didn’t use seat belt. He thought this was extremely funny and laughed for a long, long time. One time when we came to Gurvantes we passed a police and Midgi put on the seat belt immediately. I think that you can get a ticket if you don’t wear seat belts in case the car is equipped with them, which might be why they throw them out…

I have killed our motorbike. Feels bad but it was probably not suitable for this terrain, we tried to improve it with bigger tires but I think that meant that the suspension had too little space to work in. The back wheel hit the “bike body” in some bumps and the metal sticks that runs from the central hub to the outer ring got bent (I am not very good at English vehicle terms, hope that you understand). In the end, the metal sticks got loose and the entire tire got instable. With my usual luck, this happened about 16 km from camp, straight line distance, about one and a half hour before sunset. I took a look at the tire and realized that we will need a new or take this to a garage to have it fixed. As I am taking off clothes to prepare for a fast march back to camp a guy comes by on his bike. We “talked” about the situation and the bike and then he offered to drive me to camp. Only problem, as I see it, is that he already had his wife and kid on the bike. Now, I don’t want to act spoiled or anything but that seemed a bit crowded to me. I reckon that he thought the same so he just left the wife and kid and off we went. I suppose that he thought that I was an experienced motor biker because he drove fast. And I mean fast. I held on hard to the bike, sure that this would be it, no way that I would survive this. At times we were doing somewhere 70-80 km/hour on a little dirt trail… Well, I don’t know how to say “slow down” and I felt bad for the wife and kid so I kept silent and held on as hard as I could.

They say that Mongols are “born in the horse saddle” but this guy must have been born in a motorbike saddle because he could drive. I thought that I had started to get a hang of this biking thing but I admit it, I am a sissy who doesn’t know anything about riding motorbikes in terrain.

We made it to camp and Oyuna and Midgi was both very happy, they said that they were about to leave to start searching for me, well that would have taken a while. We gave my driver dinner, 10 USD for gas and the trouble and a large can of apricots and some candy for the wife and kid. He seemed happy with this. I am not sure but I think that he didn’t expect anything in return. The Mongolians are extremely friendly and will always lend a helping hand. Well, it seemed fair to me that he (and the wife and kid) should be reimbursed for the gas and have something for the trouble. Only downside is off course if the rumor spreads that the Swede is really dumb and pays good for help and all of a sudden everyone will expect money for nothing at all.

As we were having dinner Midgi asked where the motorbike was, we had decided to collect it with our car the day after, and the man pointed at the map. Only problem was that he pointed at a place maybe 20 km north of where the bike actually was. “No, no” I said, “it’s here” and pointed to where it was. They all thought that was very funny, apparently the man lived near where the bike was and you would think that he knew if he lived in the northern or southern side of the mountain range. I agree with that, it’s just that he pointed at the wrong place so I persisted. They all had a good laugh at the stupid Swede who not only wrecked the bike and couldn’t fix it but he didn’t even know where he was. Well, I am not an expert at many things but I know some stuff about navigation and in my world the sun sets in the west so I knew we had travelled northeast from the bike to camp.

I know that at least three people will now go “What, I remember a time when Orjan screwed up navigation big time”! So to prevent them from writing funny comments of my failures I will do it myself (and leave out the funniest parts).

First time is on survival training with Johan. Our platoon was loaded on the back of a truck, 40 persons cramped up under a canvas with almost no air. In intervals, the officers stopped and dropped a five man patrol, gave the leader (which happened to be me) an A4 page with something that should look like a map with locations and times. We were supposed to make it to these locations on time without being spotted by anyone. We didn’t really know where we were but we started walking and eventually came to a road crossing that looked like the first meeting place so we waited there. For a long time. Eventually an army car came by and two officers jumped out, really angry. We had only covered half the stretch (not easy to know since the “map” didn’t have a scale) one of the officers said- “you better walk all night”. We tried that but since we didn’t have any equipment at all and the nights in September are dark we stopped when we were in a spruce plantation. We couldn’t see anything and decided to break some branches, make a bed under a spruce and sleep for a while. We were lying there hugging each other to keep warm (didn’t have any warm clothes either) and when we woke up; we realized that we had made our “bed” in a clearing between five trees.

Second time is a kayaking trip with Peter, Lars and Daniel. We had paddled on the mainland side of an archipelago for a while and were going to cross over to the Koster archipelago (it consists of two bigger islands and lots and lots of small islets quite far out from the mainland), none of us had been there and I was navigating. As we passed the last covering island the waves hit us with full strength and from that point we could only see the others if both happened to be on the same wave. I’m not going to say how big the waves were because mom is reading this and I am not sure anyways, they always seem bigger in a kayak. The waves were “old” though so they were long and rolling and not too bad. Well, I had the map in the kayak and the compass around my neck but I couldn’t let go of the paddle to check the map since that would likely have resulted in me flipping over and it’s really hard to read a map when upside down under water. The result was that I aimed for a big island and when we eventually reached it and went ashore I checked my map and uttered the now infamous words “I am not sure, but we might be at the wrong place”. This was ten years ago and they still remind me…

Sorry, back to the vehicles. Just want to point out that eventually we ended up in the right place in both of the above mentioned occasions.

I find it a bit funny that I am a wildlife, or conservation, biologist and one of the categories that I have learned most about since I started working is vehicles and how to get through terrain. I had an image of a more organic way of working but it’s with regret I write that I have spent some hours polluting this poor planet. I have never been much of a vehicle lover, didn’t have any posters of Ferraris or race bikes in my childhood and I still don’t know much about engines. But I have learned to drive and ride snowmobiles, ATVs, four wheel drive trucks, motorbikes and to dart from helicopters.

I will not deny that I have lots of funny memories from different types of vehicles, like when Katie and I was travelling on a snowmobile along mountainsides in the Rocky Mountains to search a possible cougar kill site. We were hanging from the side of the snow mobile to keep it from flipping over sideways and rolling down the mountain side. Or when we got stuck with ATVs, once in a frozen bog where Kyle and I lifted it up. I admit that I didn’t think that it was possible but the “cougar guys” do not know the meaning of Knapsu and so they did a lot of things that I didn’t really think was possible, at least not in a civilian life (I have grown weak and soft in the latter years).

I guess that some of you want to know where the bike was. Well in the morning, Midji and Oyuna wanted to go to the place that the man said and when I objected they were laughing and shaking their heads so I plugged my GPS into the computer, pulled up our map program and showed them the waypoint of the motorbike (I saved the coordinates since I knew we could not take the same road with the car as I did with the bike). It was more or less exactly where I said it would be. We drove there in silence, loaded the bike into the car and when we were finished the guy who drove me to camp turned up. I think that he said something about it being a good thing that they didn’t listen to me and poor Midji didn’t know what to reply, he looked very awkward.

At the moment, I am scouting the new trap area, deploying cameras and looking for a place to set up a temporary camp. I have found one great narrow ravine with lots and lots of scrapes. The ravine is on the border of our area but unless I find some really good spots I think that I must put some traps in it.