Day 11: Marathon through the mountains
Laurance Yap
Special to the Star
Through the wonders of modern technology - a BlackBerry world phone and GSM towers - I'm filing this report from a campsite on a riverbank in the Altai mountains, about 100 km north of the Mongolian border.
Remarkably, the cell-phone service here is excellent. It's also an amazing natural landscape: mountains behind us, a river in front and, thanks to the bug spray, me relatively comfortable.
The drive today was another marathon, over 800 km from Novosibirsk to where we are in Kosh Agash. But thanks to the changing landscape - which quickly went from flat to hilly, and the excellent winding roads - it was far less of a slog.
Tomorrow, we cross the border into Mongolia and the real competition begins; over 2,500 km of special stages still have to be run, enough, Kees and I hope, to make up our 11-minute deficit to leader Armin Schwarz.