Somewhere between Olgiy and Khovd, Mongolia. Mongolians tend to be very curious and hands-on. Take the woman who joins us at our campsite in the morning. She's intrigued by an aerosol lying next to an empty vodka bottle, and sprays it into her own face from about 12 inches. It's a stimulating insight into the effects of pepper spray.
She's there for about an hour pouring water into her streaming eyes until Paul, the purveyor of said spray, emerges from his ambulance and points out that water only makes it worse. What she needs is milk. Something like this was bound to happen eventually - the people here do like to rummage. They've got their hands all over everything, asking if they can have it. Greg compares it to a jumble sale. 'You can't take that,' he says to one woman. 'My pants, my beans, I need those.'
We have a couple of women into our tent. They're lovely, but they're also very grabby. At the end of their little visit we've given away our jam, our bread, our penultimate packet of wet-wipes and one of our wind-up torches. Jeff then goes and breaks the other one.
At risk of sounding like a repetitive and irriating tit, the morning is beautiful once again. It's soiled only by the system people have developed for crapping in the wild flat landscape - drive your car off a few hundred metres, then dig a pit behind it and squat. Jeff takes Mr W off for a spin, and comes back beaming at having produced 'a foot-long', next to a mound with the body of a dead dog on top commemorating his efforts.
Before this trip I don't think I'd ever seen a dead dog. Now I've seen hundreds. I've also seen a dead horse. Paul makes a proud proclamation: 'I tea-bagged a marmot.' And then he mimes it. Pretty soon he's talking about going fishing, and doing even more disgusting things to a trout. Not sure why I'm telling you this, but it struck me as funny. I am falling in love with these Germans.
We drive off, again down incredibly bumpy roads, past vast lakes, yaks and more snow-capped peaks, covering ourselves in dust. Crank up the fans and you get a thick puff of choking white mist to the face. I point out there's a lot of traffic, given the fact we're off on this mental dirt track. 'This is the main road,' says Steve. 'It's the M5.'
This main road apruptly ends when we hit a river. There's no bridge or anything, you just have to pick a spot that's not too deep and hammer it across, hoping you don't get stuck.
There's much tense milling about and smoking of cigarettes as the Suzuki 4x4 blazes its way through as a depth test, following the route suggested by a local bloke on a motorbike. Greg wangs it through in his Daihatsu.
The water comes a fair way up the wheels, but it's our best hope. It's soon Steve's turn. Of course Mr W takes it in her stride.
Never in doubt. We finally wind up at Khovd, and drive past a sign advertising the 'Mongol Rally camp'. They've clearly spotted a cash cow. It's an opportunity for us to spend a night in a ger. Before that, Paul invites us to dinner, cooking up an amazing dinner of goat in a massive pan fuelled by cow shit. As a meal it'd be amazing even if we hadn't been living almost exclusively off army rations and biscuits.
It's another fine night of vodka and chat, before we experience the quiet warmth of a night in the ger. It's also incredibly dark in there - I wake up in the middle of the night, so confused in the pitch black that I can't work out where I am. In my semi-conscious state, I even call out to my comrades, to check that everything is as it should be. Cue a panicked cry of: 'Dudes?!' We laugh about that in the morning.
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