2008oktober 11 2008
september 5 2008September started, the summer was quite good for growing rapeseed, we will start harvest in about a week. On the other hand there was a lot of time consuming difficulties with visa and making pictures of the field.
june 21 2008Besides the jin-jang we planted two square fields with rapeseed to complete the “sojumb”, Mongolian for the combination of jin-jang with a banner on each side. In fact “sojumb” is the combination of symbols like in the Mongolian flag, so we planted a simplified one. 2008 will be the first year the harvest of the rapeseed will be pressed with a local press in Darkhan. This is what makes growing vegetable oil plants usefull; press the harvest locally into oil and animalfood. In Mongolia the spring-storms are still blowing so it still isn’t possible to make pictures from the air. So we work a bit on the car and think about life. Yesterday it started to rain, today is the longest day of the year.
june 6 2008As soon as we can we head back to the field. Seeding will start tomorrow, three days earlier then expected. We still have to adjust the seeding-machine and set out the shape of the jin-jang. The field appears to be just over one hundred meter wide but that isn’t a big suprice anymore; we are glad to make our mark anyway and it’s like women say, it’s not in the size, is it ? It won’t be a google earth project, but the setting is good to make nice pictures and that’s the most important. It’s a miracle Erdene wants to create this field anyway; farming normally is very straight business and mixing crops is not done. Due to the small size the marking of the field isn’t so diffecult as we thought. We don’t need the gps to make a circle but we use a rope and walk out the field with some iron part from the car. It feels good to do the things like this, and accept we are just pieces of sand in the desert. First day we plant the rapeseed part, and get quite some rain in the afternoon, second day we plant the wheat, and get rain again! This is so extra-ordinary in Mongolia that it feels like a blessing; maybe it isn’t big, but it’s like it should be...
may 25 2008So my friend has a friend and he grows lots of wheat. He is interrested to create a jin-jang with crops. I visit his company, he wants to help us. We are introduced to his friend again who grows lots of rapeseed yes. We end up near his farm about ten kilometers west of the city of Darkhan and indeed we start to unpack the seeding-machine and fit the parts toghether. It’s not clear what will happen exactly; we talked about 100 hectare, more and less. Seeding will start the first of june. One’s day my friend’s friend talkes about 100 meter; he can’t be serious, can he ? Anyway, we first have to go to Ulaan Baatar to extend our visa... Halfway this trip of 200 kilometer it isn’t spring any more; there is no green on the hills, it is grey like in winter. To underline the situation we get a special treatment from nature; we fall asleep when it’s still nicely warm; we wake up in heavy storm and snow. It’s still Mongolia here.
may 14 2008In Mongolia we first visit “Eeji Mod”, Mother Tree, to bring some offers. To thank for another safe journey and to ask for good continuing of our little project. A little bit further on in Shaamar we find the big Hanomag brother in good shape. And little Bayar, my desert dog, that was lost for ten days when I left in 2007. My Mongolian friends told me she was probably eaten by wolves. I surely thought I’d never see her again, even paid my respects to her at Eeji Mod, where she was found a month later... During our travelling the province of Selenge launced a big project to grow lots of wheat, the udmost base for daily food. The idea is to be able to supply Mongolia’s own demand, most of it is imported nowadays. Farmers involved are asked to double the area’s where they are growing. They are promised to get a good price in harvest time that will compensate for the investments they make now. Part of the project is disencouraging the growing of rapeseed by taxing it three times more. So farmers will use all the land for wheat and not “waste” any on rapeseed, which harvest is almost completely used for export to China. That’s all completely like we think about it, except that our harvest would be used in Mongolia to produce vegetable oil, which at the moment is imported too, from as far as Argentina, literally on the other side of the globe. The farmers involved don’t want to burn their hands by growing rapeseed anyway, they might get kicked out of projects for years to come. So now it looks like Oldcargo has a problem, instead of being supported. My farmer is more interrested in my car, instead of the seeding-machine that’s still in it. After our travelling like one big extented sprint it’s kind of hard to get used to the Mongolian speed again. Margash, manjana, tomorrow... We want to seed, now !
may 1 2008After Irkutsk we have to cross a small mountain range, now we have to climb in first gear very often. We see many trucks with overheated brakes, but everyone gets down alive. On our side there are nice vieuws over Lake Baikal. We buy freshly smoked fish. We will drive over twohundred kilometer beside the lake, and this is only the short side... All that has been said about the lake is thruth; it’s big, it’s huge, it’s breathtaking and one thing more; it’s fully frozen. It works like a huge refrigerator for the hole area. Well before Irkutsk it got a lot colder and only after Ulan Ude it starts to get warmer again. In Ulan Ude we turn right in direction of Mongolia. It isn’t all that simple; there is a sign “centre 8 km”, we follow the sign and leave the highway, driving quite some time into town yes, but only until the road makes another right turn, gets big again and evolves into the same highway we were on, but now in the opposite direction !?! We ask the way, turn around, find our way into town where none of the information from Lonely Planet is usefull; no 24 hour internet, not even at 7 pm, so we go for some food, no food found anyhere. There are no parked cars on the streets so we think it isn’t a good idea to camp in this town. We get even more lost but finally find our way out of town, get some food in a truckers restaurant and try to find some place to park the car and get some sleep. The last weeks weren’t that simple, especially in the dark; almost all sideways end in a mountain of snow, or an undrivable mud-track. Today we drove into a village and after the village we found some track, we took it but it becomes more and more muddy, I just managed to get the car on some concrete from a small bridge without getting terribly stuck. With the light of the new day we find a way back to the road. In the afternoon we reach the border with Mongolia and que in. In front of the border it’s a mayhem of Mongolian cars. They give the Russian border guards a really hard time by changing the que-order constantly. These cars are all taxi’s; this border isn’t allowed for pedestrians, so the Mongolians are making some trade bringing pedestrians over by car. After five hours we are at the gate, with a Mongolian pick-up beside us. One hour nothing happenes, then the border guard closes the gate with a big padlock. Try again tomorrow. Almost all Mogolians at the border here bear big scarves from wodka-fights so we give up our shared pole-position to get some good sleep somewhere else. And on the 30th of april, well in the afternoon, we finally make it into the border, one day before our visa will expire. The Russians don’t like our strange car with so much gear; we have to open some boxes but they give up soon enough, so we do the paperwork and are allowed to the Mongolian side, where there is even more paperwork to do, but the guards are so much more friendly. The feeling of pure freedom starts almost straight after crossing the border.
april 26 2008After the flat part of Russia we have reached Novosibirsk, from here on it slowly gets more mountainous. We still make 300 kilometers or more a day, but it surely is becoming more difficult to drive. We have only sixty horsepower to bring four tons over the mountains to Irkutsk, the next big city, 2000 kilometer further on. For us it’s more then five days of driving, let’s say driving, making pictures, sleeping, eating and drinking too much coffee. And it’s getting a lot colder, one morning our stove wasn’t working, so we thought the gas in the gas-bottle was empty, later that day we found out it is still working, it just was frozen, inside our compartment, just under my bed... It’s about time to admid something; for most of the time we are driving with diesel instead of sunfloweroil. Some lousy excuses; we don’t have time enough to search for it on markets, our Russian visa is pretty short to reach Mongolia in time anyway and spring is coming, so we need to seed. Even worse; the sunflower oil has doubled in price because of the bad harvest last year; Right now sunfloweroil is almost three times the price of diesel. We just have enaugh funds for one third of the expected costs for our small project, not a good moment to waste money. So we waste our enviroment, like everyone else on the roads we drive. Doing something bad, to create something good, jin-jang.
april 20 2008After the Ural, the Russian country is flat for a enormous distance, for days and days we would drive bad roads and there was nothing to see but fields and bjorks. For us the flatness isn't bad news; mauntains are the biggest problem for the small engine of our old Hanomag. In the spring, when the snow is gone, the Russians burn their fields to make the ground furtile again. It is rough for nature, but good too. It must be bad for CO-2 in the air though...
april 16 2008We left Moskwa to travel east as quikly as we could. Stupid as we were we picked a fridaynight to get out of town; toghether with thousands of Moskowits we queed all night in a big mayhem with lots of caraccidents and chaotic driving. Our Hanomag even started to complain, but this was easily fixed with a small repair. The days to come we would face strong headwinds with low temperatures and frost in the nights, quite different to the spring temperatures of Moskwa. Many spots with old snow along the road. The Ural was even colder; most of the waters we saw are still frozen.
april 11 2008So we didn’t make it to leave the 21st of march, after all this wasn’t so bad; traffic in eastern Europe was one big mess in the Easterweekend because of a lot of snow. So now it is april 9th and we arrived in Moskwa with no major problems. The 34 year old Hanomag-Henschel is doing well, but she doesn't have such a big engine; uphill we go quite slow, more or less like the old Sovjet-trucks. Ahead of us there are about 7000 kilometers of reasonable, bad and worse roads to cross in three weeks.... To be continued
Jin-Jang (50/50)We will drive another old van to Mongolia, loaded with a seeding-machine and an oil-press for the project , again driven by vegetable oil. Once arrived we will try to create a round field with crops, possibly hundreds of hectares and plant both rapeseed and wheat in the shape of a huge jin jang. We will work together with Chuluun, a Mongolian farmer. The jin jang field symbolizes a peace-sign to the earth, as an offer for what it’s inhabitants do to her. |
2008
