Diagonal above me are the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. I’m looking up at millions of glittering stars and see the Milky way across the sky. It’s Thursday night; Les and I make a toast with our Don Fernando semi dulce in a completely dark Gobi Desert.
This morning, after our first night in a yurt, we drove of into the desert. Our first stop is the Water Canyon where we hike for three hours. Pika’s, small animals comparable to a marmot, are running the whole hike in front of our feet. We continue our drive through vast landscapes. Five days we live at the backseat of a jeep and drive past Gobi’s wonders. The backseat is covered with cameras, an e-reader, shades, backup batteries; books, beanies, gloves and two, meanwhile empty, backpacks. It’s difficult to fit in our selves, but we feel perfectly at home. . I have Dotan on repeat; the music feels like the perfect soundtrack for this trip. In the distance I sometimes see a dust cloud from another jeep and once in a while we pass a camel or yak skull. The sun goes down and against the horizon walk dozens of camels. At our left we see the first sand dunes appear. After again a day with a perfect clear blue sky, the sun sets. In the distance loom three white yurts, we get a private yurt, they couldn’t make us any happier.
Singing Dunes
With the bright light of the morning sun in our faces, we have breakfast on small stools in front of our yurt. The only sound you hear is from groups of whizzing swallows. Next to our tents are already sand dunes, but we drive by jeep to the highest one of 300 meters. With the four of us, Leslie, I, Naza our guide and our driver we climb to the top. Totally wet from my sweat I arrive at the top and plump panting down in the sand. It’s airless, so the dunes don’t sing today. But the view is priceless. Thousands of sand dunes, with sharp edges, form a golden pattern in front of me. The backdrop is a high black rock formation. Behind me is the flat desert landscape over which we drove to here. Les and I walk balancing over the tops of the sand dunes in western direction. When I look back over my shoulder, our driver and guide are two small black dots on a golden sand mountain. Fully concentrated on taking in the surrealistic view our selves, we sit silently next to each other. In the distance in the flat desert landscape I see our yurt camp. The sun goes down and the shadows are slowly getting longer on one side of the dunes. We get up and glide, much faster then uphill, down through the soft sand.
Red Flaming Cliffs
The red colored cliffs seemed small from out of the window in the jeep. Now that I am standing on it, I realize how big this peace of red cliffs actually is. I take a deep breath while I am looking at Iris. She is sitting on the Red Flaming Cliff ( Bajanzag) in front of me. Because of the great distance between us, Iris is just a black spot on the Cliff. It’s almost sunset. Besides our guide and the driver, it’s just us. The complete silence, the magical view of the rocky desert and the sky turning purple and pink is breathtaking. For one minute, I am in another place, far away. A tear sneaks out of my eye and rolls down my cheek. This feeling of intense happiness, is the reason why I am here. To see the most beautiful places of the world. This is truly one of them and I see why people come here to meditate. This place has an energy I can’t describe. Maybe it’s the surrealistic scenery I am looking at, or the fact that this cliff I am sitting on, is a pre-historic wonder where the first dinosaur egg was found. Totally zen I walk back to the jeep.
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