Photo of the Week: Khongoryn Els, Mongolia – July 2013
Khongoryn Els, the Singing Sand Dunes, are some of the largest dunes in Mongolia. No trip to the Gobi is complete without a visit to them, and a picture from the top of course! The dunes really do make a sound like a low chanting or hum, an eery sound in the middle of nowhere at night!
Sirocco Overland 2013 Trip In Motion Picture
We have been working on this little project for sometime now. Compiling all our time-lapsed footage from the GoPro, video from Lisa’s camera and also the DSLR. We have put together the best bits that represent the 10 month trip we undertook last year. There was a big learning curve with the GoPro, a lot of the time-lapse stuff we tried didn’t really work, some were better than others and often when times got tough we simply didn’t film (like the time we tipped the truck into a snowdrift at night in Finland and had to winch ourselves out of 5 feet of snow).
It is a short little ensemble and we hope you enjoy it.
Don’t forget to watch it in HD and full screen. Let us know what you think below.
Photo of the Week: Khovd, Western Mongolia – July 2013
Khovd Lightning
A few days after arriving in Mongolia we had driven down to the city of Khovd to try and catch the festival of Naadam. This storm started not long after we set up camp and finished cooking, and was pretty typical of western Mongolian evenings. Although the rain was heavy and the winds strong, these storms always disappeared not long after and it was as if nothing had happened! We camped by the side of a river with hundreds of others in anticipation of the next day’s activities.
Photo of the Week: Gobi region, Mongolia – July 2013
Topping up. Wells were located on our old Soviet maps with details on recharge rate (L/Hr). However only about 1 in 5 were still operational
A great moment in the desert a long way from civilisation. A clean water well with water actually in it. We became fairly reliant on water wells during our 2 week traverse of the Gobi Desert region in the south of Mongolia. Even though it wasn’t that hot we were still using water for drinking, cooked, washing etc. Most of the time we got by with the 50L water tank but when we needed a shower we filled the 20L jerry can also. These wells literally made the trip.
Griff’s Photo Shop – 2014 Relaunch
It has been 10 months since the initial launch of the photo shop on our website. At the time there were only a select few photos on display and as we were on the road we didn’t have much control over what we could offer. The best we could do was to email a high resolution copy for you to sort out yourselves. For the tech savvy this wasn’t a problem, maybe only a minor inconvenience. Now that we are in Australia and I have finally sorted out 95% of the photos we have taken over 2013 (from over 7000 images) we can finally get some control back…
Mongolia – Part II: The Gobi Desert and the route north to Ulaan Baatar
How we escaped flash floods and spent the following two weeks bashing through the Gobi Desert following old soviet maps in the vague direction of Khongoryn Els.
We left Altai with the Frenchies, fully stocked with fuel, water and food. It was raining hard in Altai. The streets were flooded as we left in a south easterly direction heading for some smaller settlements where we could get fuel before heading off road into the South Gobi Aimag later on. En-route we were heading for ‘The Secret Canyon’ which we had been shown the co-ordinates to by another French group. We called it a day about 50km from what we believed to be the canyon entrance a couple of kms from a small gathering of mud brick homes. This didn’t deter local trucks full of men offering vodka or men on motorbikes with their families sat behind (babies included!) popping by to see who we were. None of us could speak Mongolian, and they didn’t speak Russian, so we were limited to hand gestures, toasts and shots of vodka to communicate greetings!
Wild Camping in Mongolia… Usually the only way!
Mongolia – Part I: The Wild West
How we scraped through the border to make the national Naadam festival, stumbled upon Kazakh eagle hunters, found hidden petroglyphs and met the ‘Frenchies’
Kyrgyzstan had been eclipsed by Tajikistan, in terms of hospitality and friendliness. But now we were entering Mongolia, a land famous the world over for it’s unmatched hospitality and warmth. I couldn’t keep the smile from my face as we crossed through the border, the excitement hard to contain.
Lisa
Griff
Sirocco Overland | Сирокко Оверленд 