[Day 49]
We will not leave Ulaanbaatar by car


Today we had the devastating news from the garage that Tim and Isabel’s car will need a new engine. The team at the Wagner garage did a thorough job, and concluded that it would not be safe to drive the car any further. A sad group at the garage, where we also met the Swiss couple that we met at the border coming in to Mongolia (also with a car that had experienced the hard conditions of the roads in Mongolia)

So we are back to Plan A: our original plan, which was to drive to Mongolia and ship the cars back from UB. Plan C was to drive through China and to Hong Kong, but (as if broken down cars were not enough) yesterday we also had the message that we need an additional document to get into China – a document that it will take 2-3 months to get! The list(s) of documents needing to be sorted before entering China did not mention this document. Since we now are shipping the cars back anyway, we stopped any work being done on the cars – including our diff (which it turned out was more difficult to find than first expected). The pace of our journey changed, and we had time to go looking at other overland cars and to have a nice lunch (Yes, there was also a Plan B, which was to drive home through Russia)

Found an excellent Indian resturant nearby the hotel: the Hazara. Great food, service and interior/decoration

We still have a lot of things to sort out before we can get the cars into a container, and not much more we can do before next week. Guess we will have time to explore UB for a couple of days…

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