Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia to work at the base camp of our long-term research project. These are his adventures…
Guy and Nadia left camp two days ago and since then I have been here alone.
Nadia is always fun to have around and Guy is a really nice chap and we have had some great days. Also, I guess that when I write “alone” I really mean ALONE. There aren’t many people at all here and probably no one that I can speak to within a few hundred km… Oh well, in a way it’s good to have some days by myself. I have time to organize and clean up the camp. And myself.
I was a little worried when I heard that Guy was here. The climate in the Gobi differs a bit from the African but he has managed the cold very well. I think that he found it a bit exotic, especially the morning we woke up and it was seven degrees below zero inside the ger. It is a little exotic to have a 1 cm thick ice layer in the tea kettle in the morning, even for me…
It’s been cold a couple of days but mainly it’s the wind that is worst. If you take the wind chill in account I reckon that the actual temperature would be somewhere 40-50 degrees below.
As I hiked up the little hill to listen to the traps last night (at ten in the evening) I suddenly felt as if being watched. I looked up and about 40 m away my headlight reflected into a pair of big eyes. The animal immediately crouched down, I pulled out my maglite and pointed it towards the animal ,at which it fled. Hard to say for sure but it did look like a leopard to me.