Finishing with a Bang

On the last day of our 11 day trip our van...the Russian Winston as I called him , had a little accident. We were on the concrete- which is rare in Mongolia, and the tire decided to separate from the axle. This was a little bit of a problem since were traveling about 50 miles an hour. At the time I was day dreaming about the fresh kimchi and galbi bar-b-que I would be enjoying the next day back in Korea, so it scared everyone in the van to say the least. We had had no problems with Winston over the trip either.

Pretty much how it went down was like this: We're cruising down the road and the wheel comes off. There's a big bang and we immediately know something's wrong. The driver does a great job to keep the van under control as we slowly turned to the left and towards the left hand side of the road. Luckily no vehicles were coming the other way. But in Mongolia, there are rarely cars coming the other way. It was really like slow motion as we crossed the road and then went off it, down a little embankment and onto the grass and dirt. when we went off the tarmac, that's when we started to roll. Luckily we had slowed down enough that we only rolled once. There were 8 of is inside and we all got tossed around pretty good. But luckily we were all able to climb out the drivers door, then jump down from the van. There was a little gas leaking, so we grabbed all our belongings and got them away from the van too.

Since everyone was OK, atleast no broken bones or cuts. We were able to get back to Ulan Bator that evening. They have great cell phone coverage in Mongolia believe it or not, so we were able to call our guest house in UB. They organized a van from the nearest town to come pick us up. He was there in a couple hours to take us to our destination. Of course he drove like a maniac, but I figured what were the chances of crashing twice in one day. Plus I wanted to get back to UB so I could change my flight to get back home a little quicker.. Not that I didn't enjoy my time in Mongolia. But I didn't want to spend another 48 hours in the dirty, trafficky capitol city. And yes, I was lucky enough to get one of the last available seats on the Saturday afternoon flight...thanks Mongolian Airlines!

Back at the crash site our driver Auggie, worked his little tale off getting his van back on 4 wheels and doing everything possible to fix his little machine. I really hope he got it up and running and safely fixed. He seemed like a cool guy. Though he did take one of my 9 lives.