Roads

We'd arranged to spend our first couple of nights in Mongolia in a traditional Ger camp some 50km outside Ulaan Baatar. Our car journey there took us through the centre of the city, where the deeply potholed roads often brought traffic down to walking pace and had drivers swerving across the road to avoid the worst craters. Our driver Bolt, perhaps the most joyful man on the planet, just laughed each time the underside of his Camry received another beating.

By the time we had escaped the suburbs, the surface of the main highway was so poor that drivers preferred to follow the dirt tracks on either side of the asphalt, each vehicle choosing its own path across the grass.