Navigation notes

In Mongolia some things are fixed; generally mountains and towns with fuel stations. Pretty much everything else; villages, roads and rivers, is movable. Roads drift and migrate just like the nomadic herdsmen, who use them for their trucks (moving house and buying supplies) but horses, camels or motorbikes for everything else.

With the best maps available (1:500,000) and a good GPS we can always plot accurately where we are, but often there's no road shown at that point on the map. Despite this, by placing our trust in following the most-used track we've done well and only had to backtrack twice.

North of Hovd we had to use conjecture and lateral thinking to find the right route. Both the Garmin basemap and the 1: 500,000 (published 2003) showed the major road going North, while the dominant tracks headed West. We decided that a new road must have been made - a logical place to put one as it cut a corner and saved ten or fifteen kilometres.

Russia, with Cyrillic roadsigns, should be a doddle from a navigation point of view, although we found last night that navigating in a city, in rush hour, to find a hotel is far from easy. Even with a city map (not really designed for driving by) it took us and hour and several stops. The hotel when we did find it, was friendly and good value, with even a garage for the car.