Most of Mongolia has no railway, so the only way to Ulaanbaatar, or anywhere, was by bus. I was told the journey would take two or three days, depending on how many times the bus broke down. Astonishingly, we didn’t break down once, and it took just under 48 hours.

The bus looked tough. At the back seats were covered in junk, while some of the seats in the front were now just metal frames. Most of the luggage was sellotaped cardboard boxes, and everything had to go under your seat, on your lap, or in the aisle, meaning getting on and off the bus became an obstacle course. The windows were clean enough to look out through, and were lined with filthy, threadbare pink tassled curtains.

We drove through mountains, past huge frozen rivers, enormous eagles sitting on the side of the road. The bus would randomly stop in the road (what road? more like a sandy track) for toilet breaks, and everyone would rush off, the women trying halfheartedly to find a mound of earth for some privacy.

We stopped off at a cafe in the middle of nowhere (everywhere looks like the middle of nowhere though). I’d eaten so much Kazakh food I had no wish for any more, but I was summoned inside. Through a door padded thickly with a worn embroidery was a room with low beds, stools and tables around which everyone ate together. I was given more buuz.

The landscape became flatter and dryer as we looped south to the Gobi desert (not of the sand dune variety). To my enormous excitement, and the whole bus’s I think, we saw lots of camels – proper two humped camels with lots and lots of dark velvety hair, and they looked surprisingly elegant. But the Gobi was so full of puddles and mud that looking through the windows became more and more difficult. So sadly this is only photo I got of the camels.

We stopped off at a Ger camp for lunch, and everyone disappeared into an unmarked Ger without me seeing which one they had entered. When I plucked up the courage to walk in to one, they were all sitting on low stools again, drinking milky tea.

The nights were bleak and extremely cold. I could feel the wheels struggling against the sand, and the stones that flew up made it sound like it was raining. But the daylight hours were quite entertaining. A game of cards was played in the aisle on a pile of boxes, with much triumphant flourishing of hands and collecting of money. We arrived in Ulaanbaatar very dirty and smelly, but in pretty good shape.

I’d found a WOOFing place just outside the city in one of the ger suburbs. But since nothing really grows in Mongolia, there wasn’t much I could do. The host is a young woman who started off trading second hand cars and false jewellery, then got into property development and now rents out an apartment to tourists, and was off to Hong Kong to learn how to invest better. Her tourists were away for the night so she let me sleep and wash in the luxury apartment, on the condition that I’d never been there… I indulged myself with a bath and a supper of horse rib.

Ulaanbaatar is concrete and dirty, and seems unusual for not having a single pretty street. There are however a few old temples which survived communism. At the Ghandan Khiid monastery, there was a very jolly scene as students seemed to be celebrating their graduation. But I longed to return to the steppe.