DAY 53 - Ulaan Baator, Mongolia

Crossing the border into Mongolia took eight hours, two "Magnet" ice creams and one particularly threatening scowl (from the Russia border guard – I smiled, only weakly, at her when giving over my passport. Clearly I wasn't taking the situation seriously enough). Like the previous train, it was full of vodka drunks with dubious personal hygiene, all wanting to be your friend (provided you had some more vodka).

The countryside in Mongolia is incredibly beautiful – even in the pouring rain. Miles and miles of undulating hillsides covered in green grass, broken only by the odd river and mobile phone mast (well, you're got to build mobile phone masts). It's like the Yorkshire Dales only on a much, much bigger scale. There are no fences or walls dividing the land into fields and there are few trees. Ulaan Baator on the other hand is a Soviet inspired, soulless dump of an eyesore. Think Westminster council deciding to open a landfill site in Regent's Park, and you're not far off. There's supposed to be a large programme of knocking down the old stock of high rise housing and rebuilding it from scratch, but they've clearly got a long way to go. The situation wasn't helped on Monday when we drove through that Mongolia had won a second gold medal at the Olympics. There had clearly been quite a party. Although it was difficult to work out where the long term urban decay ended and the newly added debris from the previous night started, I'm pretty sure the crashed bus was fairly recent.

We were to spend the first two nights here in a Ger Tent in Terelj National Park, but on the way we stopped off at some local's tent to see how it's done properly. The couple who lived there were very welcoming and, in between milking the Yaks and rounding up the sheep, offered us some of the local delicacies. Of particular interest to foodies out there would be the fermented (horse) mare's milk (airag). It was very sour and conjured up images of pouring vodka into milk that's been left in the sun for a few weeks. There were various other cheese and cream products but I decided not to ask where they came from and politely tried a bit of each.

The Ger camp we stayed at was quite basic (cold showers again, despite there being a little box with red glowing lights on it promising the opportunity of warm water; it was alas not to be). The Ger's themselves are round, about 6 meters in diameter and have a wood stove in the middle. The furniture is just about ok – the beds are a bit hard with the mattress only being about 3cm thick – and we couldn't keep the damn stove alight for love nor money, so it was really cold in the mornings. All of this slumming was worth it though for the jaw-dropping scenery. No photos could do it justice. The area around the park is similar to the rest of the country only there are hundreds of granite rock formations worn out of the landscape like at Brimham Rocks in Yorkshire. But best of all, there's nobody else here. You can see for literally hundreds of miles and see absolutely no-one. Clearly there are some people out there, but – to further the Yorkshire Dales analogy – you don't risk twisting your ankle on poor man-made footpaths cutting through the natural scenery (there aren't any footpaths) whilst trying to avoid the hordes of middle-aged day trippers in their brand new fluorescent pink waterproofs who are equally trying to control their screaming kids who would rather be sat in front of their PS3 than enjoying the natural world. It's utterly silent apart from the wind through the (few) trees and buzz of giant grass-hopper wings. Good eh? J

Rich.