Fjällbonäs-FarAwayistan: 070620   Today, for the first time in my life,I found a closed border crossing. For some reason the border between Russia and Mongolia is closed today and we have no choice but accepting the situation. We have an option on finding rooms in what I call Holiday Inn. Nash is not too impressed by the name. I may have found a new niche in my business. Lat year I had a small series of hats knitted. They could be turned inside out and on one side had “Farmer Lips”, on the other “Cityslickers”. This was for Lukas, when he converted from concrete to a life in the big, wild desert. I thought much about his life then, when he left the comfort zone in the concrete belt and threw himself into desert racing and sleeping in tents in primitive conditions. I now plan to open a retreat spa in Fjällbonäs and take care of pure cityslickers and give them a week of primitive Farmer Lips-life. I hope to have Nash as my first customer. He’d be the perfect first VIP guest. Can I get him to desert the stock market and Hyatt hotels for a week, I will be a certified spa guru. Today, we only managed about 300kms, a much needed day for changing tyres and some polishing of the equipment. I ordered a proper Russian (sauna) from a toothless old man at the border post. A proper Russian sauna is a 2.0 version of a Finnish one, an extreme introduction for Mash. Here you can see the five-star version we used. The only thing missing was a dip in the river, but it was too far, 400 meters to be exact. Here is the inner door to the Russian sauna. It has to be well isolated, because in the winter, temperatures are low up here. The sauna is on an altitude of 2112 metres. When Nash brings equipment like this to the sauna, I know that he is the perfect member of the Cityslicker segment. About this part of his bathing equipment is nothing bad to be said. We all gave him some proper advice on what is part of a proper sauna evening. I have to show how Rikard and I are dependant on coffee. Here, we stopped to stack up on food and felt the need for coffee and simply had to organise Nescafe. I look forward to enter Mongolia tomorrow morning. The knobbly tyres are fitted and the gas wire lubed. << Previous All chronicles Next >> High Performance Riding www.pgdakar.com Per-Gunnar Lundmark Fjällbonäs 15 933 91 Arvidsjaur Per-Gunnar Lundmark Eva.PG.Lundmark@swipnet.se Updated 2007-06-23