jrenich

Yesterday I went to the state environmental office to inquire about obtaining a piece of land for us to move to in the near future. The director of the office was very excited to hear about our projects and immedietly suggested that his assistant take us out in his 4x4 Toyota to show us two plots of land he had available. He said they were over the mountain and being that there was 6 inches of snow on the ground I was wondering how this would all turn out… We took the long route, avoiding the steepest part of the mountain but then started climing and invisible dirt road up the slopes. We stopped halfway to look over the land, a beautiful forested valley (with many stumps from logged trees…). The assistant was a bit turned around so he asked me to show me the map on Google Earth which I had used to show the director the land we were intrested in. After turning the map in every direction possible and squinting out over the snowy landscape to identify landmarks we finally found our position (oh if I had simply brough our GPS). Very pleased with this, and openly amazed at the detail of Google Earth the assistant turned to me and asked with 100% seriousnes, “When did you take these pictures?” I was speechless… as if even if I was rich I would be able to take satellite pictures of Erdenet and the surrounding mountains. What was even more compelling to him is that the photos were a couple years old and so the map showed trees that no longer exist which he used in his appeal for me to settle on this land and help restore it.

When we were done surveying the land, the driver decided to take the short cut home. You see, this land is only 3km from Erdenet but a mountain stands in the way. There is even a road over the mountain and in Spring - Fall people with trucks love to take this road to gather wood (illegally). However, we are not in spring, summer, or even fall… it’s winter. But we tried none the less. I was surprised we made it as far as we did, the Toyota was surprisingly agile and gripped the steep slopes well. However, about 100 feet from the top we lost momentum and started sliding. The driver tried to turn around and succeeded at getting the body of the vehicle stuck on a small rise, all four tires spinning freely, hardly touching the ground. The solution was to gather any logs or branches we could find in the snow and stuff them under the wheels and after a cold 30 minutes we were free and simply drove (more like skied) down the hill the way we came. That’s how we do it here in Mongolia…