An hour in the air brings us to Dalanzadgad, about 375 miles south and smack in the middle of the Gobi. This city of about 15,000 has a distinct Old West air about it: a dusty assemblage of squat buildings surrounded on all sides, as far as the eye can see, by unobstructed space. We pile into a fresh caravan of G4-spec Land Rovers and ride out of town on a plume of dust - four Defender 110s, two Discovery 3s, and two Freelander 2s: right-hand-drive, diesel-powered, and laden with enough gear for a leave-no-trace week in the wilderness.
Our first campsite comes into view under an ominous gray sky on a rise near the northernmost slope of the Gurvansaikhan mountain range. We're not far from the spot where, in the 1920s, American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews famously discovered the first recognized "nest" of dinosaur eggs, and in 1971, a team of Polish and Mongolian scientists uncovered the fossilized remains of a velociraptor and a protoceratops locked in the throes of mortal combat. On this day, mortal combat seems limited to a group of cinereous vultures - which can approach thirty pounds and take to the air on a ten-foot wingspan - squabbling over the messy carcass of a goat. Gray wolves are known hunters in these parts, packs of them picking off hapless animals like this one during the night. By day, these huge barefaced birds are happy to finish off the wolves' leftovers. Nothing is wasted in the desert.
We, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to ease into our expedition with a bit more luxury, enjoying a bowl of lamb stew with fresh Mongolian bread and crashing early beneath the peaked roof of a traditional ger. In the morning, rainstorms that drenched the camp overnight have moved on, and our team, joined by a pair of Mongolian guides, sets off toward an impossibly wide horizon, under what must be the biggest blue sky on the planet. When Land Rovers daydream - stuck in rush-hour traffic or looping the mall parking lot on Christmas Eve - they probably daydream of places like this.
Few companies have such an evocative history as Land Rover, which celebrated its sixtieth anniversary this year, and fewer still have such a tangible link to the past as Land Rover does in the Defender - and not in a froufrou, round-headlights retro way, either. The Defender is the real deal, a galumphing, unapologetically low-tech lug of a truck whose doors slam not with a whumph but a clang. And the Defender is not simply some adorable, bewhiskered geezer, telling tall tales of wars won and hills scaled. As we soon learned, there was nothing the Gobi could throw at us that the Defender couldn't climb, crawl, or claw its way out of. ...next page >>