This was to be our last morning in Ulaanbaatar, we were going to take the car to be repaired then hit the long road home. After breakfast we took the car to the mechanic the woman at reception had suggested, unfortunately when we got there it was not open yet. It only opened at 10a.m. on weekends so we went back to the hotel to wait for an hour. Over the course of that hour something terrible happened, something much worse than the car being stolen, someone washed our car - all that dirt and dust we had carefully collected had been removed. The security guard at the hotel looked like he was part of the Yakuza or Triads. He was a young guy in a dark suit with large tattoos on his neck and the sides of his head shaved. When Chris came back from a trip to the shop he had his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, and was carefully scrubbing our car. I would have gone to stop him but I would prefer to not mysteriously disappear, so we left him to finish. When I next went downstairs to reception he was strutting out the bathroom straightening out his suits and correcting his cufflinks like he had just killed a man. I thinly masked my annoyance and thanked him with a swift roundhouse kick to the head. At precisely 10 o'clock we went back to the mechanic to fix the car.

 

To our surprise the mechanic's was a brand new high-spec workshop, it looked like it had hardly been used, and it was cleaner than any garage we had ever seen. When we walked to the reception desk - yes that's right, a reception desk at a mechanics, this was definitely a serious workshop - they looked at us blankly, we gestured for one man to follow us and then I pointed at the problem.  He damn near pissed himself with laughter when he looked beneath the car and saw the exhaust pipe with a big section cut off. He then indicated for us to drive the car inside so they could look at the underside. As soon as the car was airborne he had another accident all over himself about the exhaust, knocking the pipe and muffler and then watching them wobble independently. This was clearly a new experience for this professional garage, he called over his colleagues so they could have a laugh. Shortly after the entire staff had arrived to laugh at the state of our car we began investigating.

 

There were two problems we didn't even know we had: an oil leak and a petrol leak. The oil was leaking at the front axle, and the petrol was leaking through a grating on the tank. Then of course there was all the scrapes and dents which we expected to find. Sharkey had suggested the check engine light may be related to the lack of exhaust, he was partially correct - the exhaust sensor had been torn free. The mechanic also pushed on the front tyre for a while. The tyres are supposed to rotate around a vertical plane to allow the car to steer, they are not supposed to rotate around a horizontal plane. This new axis of rotation was because of a broken connection - it would also explain why the stearing wheel vibrates so much under heavy breaking, which it had been doing since Kazakhstan. After the original man had finished laughing and had returned from changing his underwear, he tried calling someone who could translate. The only problem with his plan was calling someone that didn't seem to speak any English, and talking over the phone to someone who doesn't speak English makes charades so much harder. He gave me the phone but the voice on the other end kept repeating "car make?", and they didn't seem to understand any of the suitable responses I gave them. The conversation ended abruptly when they found a customer who spoke fluent English in the shop. He managed to flawlessly translate that they wouldn't be able to replace the exhaust but they could fix it tomorrow, they also wouldn't ever be able to fix the wheel or leaks. I suspect the main reason they can't fix it because they aren't the bodge job masters that dodgy mechanics are, so we decided to find one of those after lunch instead.

 

Back at the hotel we met the remnants of the convoy in the Irish pub. We decided to stay for another night incase we were stuck with the proper mechanic’s fix tomorrow morning. The Lion Boys were off to do some shopping in the afternoon before their evening flight home, and The Mongoliers were off to the gym to bulk up for their return to the North of England. We drove the sparkling car to the dodgy parts of Ulaanbaatar we had driven past on the way into town, and begun our search for a mechanic. We tried a few and got no further, each place we visited took a look and invited their friends over to laugh their heads off - which only left us to clean up their blood and move on to the next workshop. They all react like they've never seen a Mongol Rally car before despite this being the finish line for the past 10 years, but then not many people are stupid enough to try to drive home. With each mechanic we came closer to one which could weld, which was apparently their main issue with our slight issue. They would each give us a rough direction to find the sole welder in Ulaanbaatar until we eventually found him. Sole in that he was the only welder, he did not appear to be a cobbler in anyway, he looked as though he had just walked off the set of a post-apocalyptic film. He showed no interest in my ruined shoes and waved the ruined car onto a rickety raised platform. The first attempt to climb was unsuccessful, so I overcorrected the issue and nearly flew off the other end of the ramp. When he looked beneath the car he reacted like we had just opened a vile of smallpox at his shop. Apparently welding right next to a leaking petrol tank is not a good idea and is a problem, which despite being hugely apparent, we had for some reason managed to not even slightly consider.

 

We drove back to the morning's original mechanic to confirm we would be there tomorrow, after all they had seen the leak in the petrol tank and still said they could fix the exhaust. When we arrived the man from the morning called his translator and gave the phone to Chris. After a few minutes of pulling confused looking faces he passed the phone to me. The woman at the other end of the phone must have been swating up all afternoon because she now spoke better English, that or she was a different woman. She kept asking if we had a pipe, we weren't aware we were ever told to get a pipe so strangely enough we didn't have one. She didn't accept no for an answer and wouldn't stop asking if we had one, even when I asked how they were planning to attach the pipe if we did have one. I gave up, handed the phone back to the man, said goodbye and headed back to the hotel. The oil and petrol leaks were slow enough to not cause a huge issue, the wheel had been wobbling since Kazakhstan, and the car sounded better without the exhaust.

 

We returned to the hotel to find out we had unfortunately missed The Lion Boys' fairwell since they had to rush to the airport and we were busy visiting as many mechanics as is humanly possible - I'm sure we will see them once we return to the UK, after all we are transporting some things for them. Because we were driving in the morning we decided a final trip to the cinema and a few quiet pints would be better than a heavy night drinking. This also meant we got a chance to visit the third and final cinema in Ulaanbaatar. Both the cinema and pints went off without a hitch, so we returned to the hotel to move into our new room. The new room was the same room only now had two less beds, which leaves so much extra space in our room to do activities.