First stop, Mongolia!
Mongolia is the first true destination country on our family overland expedition across Central Asia this year. This article was written from Mongolia, and though at the time of writing we’ve managed to explore quite a lot here, you’ll note that the GPS track map provided remains incomplete.
Being land-locked deep within Central Asia means just getting to Mongolia, especially with your own 4WD, is an adventure in itself. As it happened, I shipped our Mitsubishi Shogun (Pajero) from New Zealand to the Russian Far East port of Vladivostok in late April. My family of five (myself, wife Sylwia and kids aged 10 (Marcel), six (Anastazja) and four (Kornelia) then travelled overland up Vietnam in time to unload our shipping container when it reached Russia. From there it was a more than 3,000 kilometre journey through the heavily forested Russian Far East to reach our chosen entry border into Mongolia.
We greatly enjoyed that ‘on-road’ part of the journey too; camping each night in the seemingly endless forests and exploring the remote cities and villages of the Russian Far East. It’s just as well that the bears reside much deeper into the forests than we ventured to set up camps. Fortunately, so too do the tigers – I must admit I didn’t actually know about them at the outset, but indeed there is a population of full-sized tigers living deep within the forests of the Russian Far East/Siberia.
The plan
I was poised for an adventure on this trip and not afraid to tackle some of the more remote routes in Mongolia. Some time
