Benzine

When you pull up to a gas station and there are goats milling around the broken walls; and two of the old, dial pumps don't have nozzles; and the one that does, doesn't look like it has been touched in years - this is not a very encouraging sign. There was a gasoline shortage in the Gobi. We were glad we had taken along 40 extra liters of gas in jerry cans. But, now we had used that up.

"Over there," John yelled and he pointed to another gas station. This one had a pump with a hand crank. "Get a load of that," John said. As long as we could get a load of gas I would be happy. The distances in the Gobi are long. Already we'd past a family that had run out. They had waited over three hours in the heat until we had rescued them with ten liters of our precious liquid.

At one city (although a dusty collection of gers and tin shelters sitting in the middle of nowhere can hardly be called a city) we had to get gas directly from the gas truck. At another we had to buy gas black market from a couple of Japanese construction workers who were selling off their supply from jerry cans. They were charging double the going rate, but what could we do. To funnel gasoline between their can and ours Butar sucked on the end of a hose. When the gas hit his mouth, he winced and gagged. Cigarettes, high fat, and now a mouthful of gasoline. This guy wasn't aiming for a long life.

While Butar shortened his life expectancy, I went off in search of some food. The Japanese man had pointed to a food shop, a small tin building which was no bigger than the trunk of your car. "Do you have bread?" I asked the lady who unlocked the door. "How about crackers? Canned peas?" I looked around. "Do you have any food at all here?" The lady didn't understand anything I said. "I guess toilet paper would be out of the question?"

"Sorry John," I reported when I got back to the van. If we had needed a headlight bulb, a can of lubricant, or even a china tea pot, we would have been all set; but no bread. The Japanese man pointed in another direction. "There is another shop," he said. "They have some food."

"Did you hear that Janet," John said all excited. "They have crackers and shortbread."

The heat must have affected John's hearing. "No," I corrected. "He said they have chocolate and canned beef."

The Japanese man cut in, "But they're closed."

So, for lunch John and I settled for a salad made from out dwindling salad stock - three small tomatoes, one radish, a jar of pickled celery (alas our last green pepper had been digested by a large green worm - what a shame), and a thin slathering of peanut butter on our remaining two slices of hard, stale bread. "I'm full, you?"

But at least our gas tanks were full and with more Gobi exploration to go, that was most important.