Bigpeteb/sandbox/Grand Tour Mongolia

This is a Wikivoyage user page.

In the TV show The Grand Tour, the series 2 episode "Survival of the Fattest" featured presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May assembling a kit car and driving it several hundred miles across mostly uninhabited Mongolia.

Understand

“ The nearest civilisation is a town called Mörön. It's hundreds of miles away. In order to reach it you must build the contents of these boxes. You have enough food and water for seven days. ”

The unwitting explorers were given a map ("not to scale") that gave them a very rough outline of a route, with some very whimsical names. With some searching, fans have deduced quite a few of these locations.

• Start (Middle of nowhere)
• Sandy pit
• Deserty lookout
• Expanse of nothingness
• Watery part
• 1 Twin lakes
• Some trees
• Bumpy meadow
• 2 Creepy teepee
• 3 Very big crack
• Wibbly wobbly bridge
• Rather boggy and sad
• Floody place
• Log cabin
• Lots of trees
• Deep river of despair
• 4 Mörön

Prepare

This is an extremely difficult trip. Except for a few tracks, almost the entire route is literally offroad. You should absolutely have at least two vehicles, because as seen in the episode, if one vehicle gets stuck you will need another vehicle to tow it out or fetch help.

Ostensibly, in addition to their car, the presenters were given only a compass, a vague map, and some camping supplies and military field rations. Realistically, they were in a caravan with at least one camera car (and probably at least one other support car). Their route would have been reasonably well-studied and planned in advance; any hemming and hawing about which way to go is just for show. They certainly had GPS and reliable maps, as well as much more food than they were letting on.

Get in

Unless you're quite wealthy, you won't be able to arrive the way the presenters did (flown—presumably in a bush plane—from Ulaanbaatar to a desolate remote starting point, and having a kit car air-dropped to you from a helicopter). You'll have to settle for buying or renting a suitable vehicle, perhaps in Uliastai, and driving to a suitable "starting" point.