The Gobi desert

Before I start to remember sunsets or the kindnesses of nomads. Before only the staggering beauty of this desert lies serenely in my memory, I must say this - the Gobi is a terrible place!

I feel now, writing from Sainshand, like my body has been tied to a pneumatic drill for four days.

As the road from Ulaanbaatar dissolves into a confusing myriad of jeep tracks, each with its own design on the destruction of skeletal systems, the landscape seems to loose everything that grants sustenance to life. A sparsely populated country becomes almost completely empty. Grass withers. Becomes yellow. Tough. And then disappears completely. Replaced only by rocks and sand.

One becomes aware, here, of the things one truly needs. The water bags, and the packets of food became the most valuable of my possessions. But the lack of people too had an effect upon me I could not have imagined and cannot explain. I have never been so terrified of a natural landscape in my life. And yet, at the end of each day, as I watched the sun set and felt its relentless heat cool, I felt an incredible freedom. No-one could be seen and, though I have never been more than 50 miles from a permanent settlement, I felt completely alone. With enough food, and enough water, when bicycle wheels no longer sink in sand, and the sun no longer stifles, the desert can seem like a very beautiful place indeed. But as water supplies begin to diminish one becomes very aware that one is not Ray Mears - and a gratefulness emerges that some people possess an incomprehensible hardiness that allows them to live here.

I have taken the easiest route possible through the Gobi. The train tracks never lie more than a few miles away and villages stand, tiny against the vastness, never more than a day's cycle apart and always promising water. As I near the Chinese border I am also aware that 300km of this desert remain to be crossed on the other side. It is perhaps, the most exciting part of my journey so far, but the Gobi is a place which makes you appreciate the richness of other places. And it is a place I will be happy to leave behind...