From Altai to Bayan Khongor, Mongolia. Like a true pro I'm checking our instruments - we've gone 10 miles in three hours. Now I'm no Clarkson, but that is rubbish. Today we finally have to break out of the convoy. We're all for hanging out in a crew, especially as everyone's a really good laugh, but we've clearly got different aims. And we start to go a bit mental if we don't feel like we're moving.
Lunch illustrates the problem perfectly - we roll into a roadside ger in the middle of nowhere, and the woman offers us meat and noodles, which she has to make entirely from scratch. It takes an hour and a half before we're done. No-one's bothered at all, which is fair enough. But Steve spends the whole time out in the car. Different aims.
The ger woman is also cooking up tea - in a huge wok-thing cooking on a ferocious flaming cow-shit stove. I want to adopt this system for making a brew at home:
'I'll just pop the kettle on.' WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFFFF!
Her job done, she sits down on a stool next to us and starts breast-feeding. Waitresses tend not to do that in restaurants at home. I'm tempted to profer my tea-cup but I realise, as gags go, that would be desperately immature. Plus she may well oblige, which would be weird.
It's a hell of a lunch spot (and that's not a reference to the breast-feeding) so it's a shame we've soiled it slightly by being angsty about moving. Especially as everyone else is just having a laugh and going at their own pace. But things get worse after lunch with a river crossing that takes ages, and pre-empts another bout of hanging around. We sit in the Punto sulking.
All of this is made worse by today's weather. After two months of largely glorious sunshine, we've hit a day of cold dank grey, with a howling wind whipping sand into our faces. It's rough. Not the kind of conditions for hanging about in. Better to be on the move watching from inside a warm Boobleyoid.
Pretty soon we are away again - the roads have turned from perilous hard corrugations to sand tracks, which is a good laugh to slide about in, and not deep enough for us to get stuck. So we can finally get some pace up. We're following the jeep, which pulls to one side to wait for the others and waves us on ahead saying they'll catch up. Which is highly likely, as I'm driving.
So it's a surprise to find an hour or so later that we're still out on our own. We figure they must have got caught up helping one of the other teams, but see it as a chance to recover our own feel to the trip so instead of hanging about we press on. The plan was always to drive 80km to the next town and camp just outside, so we figure they can catch us up.
We've got no map, and haven't worked out how to get M Waller's GPS thing going, so now we're out on our own for the first time in ages, in the middle of nowhere, which makes everything feel more vital again. We've got the tunes on loud, and our mood brightens, mainly at once again being in control of our own destiny.
After a few hours, just as it's getting dark, we see the town of Bayan Khongor lying nestled at the foot of the mountains ahead of us. That'll do for a camping spot - absolutely stunning. We leave the car in a prominent place on the hill and camp next to it, so if the others catch up they can see it.
Our 'calculations' put us about 100 miles from the start of the tarmac road which is supposed to lead us all the way into Ulaanbaatar, a further 250 miles down. With an early start tomorrow, and the freedom to move and stop as we please, we realise there's no reason why we can't pull that off in one day. Especially if the road is as good as people say.
All being well this will be our last camp of the trip. Which is ideal, as it's fucking freezing.
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