PARTENZA!!!
An hour late leaving home... traffic at a standstill on the highway leading to Malpensa, in short, nothing would be spared us on that day of departure. With a few violations of the highway code we arrive at my cousin's to leave her the car and run like lightning to the airport. We're here and by a miracle our 45 kilos only weigh 43.8 on their scale! Of course Angelo, my husband, had gone to check-in alone while I guarded our carry-on bags—illegal for weight and size—away from prying eyes. But it seems they didn't arouse too much suspicion; true, a bit covered by windbreakers and carried as if they were stuffed with nothing but feathers, it was easy (?) to deceive the staff. First check of the carry-on and alas, something inside caught the inspectors' attention.
What could it be, I thought, surely one of the car radios meant for the Mejet drivers, but they weren't interested in those at all, nor in the 2 bottles of Champagne meant to celebrate our return to the homeland of Genghis Khan, nor the Swiss chocolate, nor even the 2 books of fairy tales fabulously illustrated by a great lover of Mongolia, Cristiano Lissoni. So we unload everything, I no longer know what I put in that damn bag, and what made them think of an umbrella or windshield wiper were the 2 fishing stools that were going to end their lives in the Mongolian steppes!!!! They help me repack the bag and surprise—everything fits on the first try! We head toward gate B25. It's almost boarding time.
Queue, and I notice the steward shaking his head: it's not the right gate!!!! How's that, if from gate B25 a plane leaves for Moscow at the same time as ours? Could this be the latest trendy joke? Where could the mistake be? He tells us to run as fast as possible to B5, we had confused the seat number 25 with gate 5, with all these 5s!!! So, heart in throat, anxiety in our legs, off we go, we run, we fly I'd say with each of us carrying our 15 kilos of bag and the windbreakers under our arm stuffed with sunglasses for my humanitarian work down there, because those served as luggage too, and certainly the escalators don't exist for going up in these cases, that would be too easy, right???? In my head one sentence keeps hammering: we'll never make it, by now the plane is lost and no one called us! But Genghis Khan was watching over us without our knowing, B5 is right there and boarding hasn
't even started!!! The young ladies were late because they too had been trapped with another plane!!! We throw on the ground rather than set down these damned bags, panting almost spitting out our lungs. We're the first to present our documents and board, and with a huge sigh of relief we sit down, sweaty as furious Mongolian horses, to catch our breath and recover from our emotions, waiting for the next ones... and then, about half an hour later, the plane rises into the sky of the Lombard plain, imagining that some of you were scanning the clouds to catch a glimpse of it, we knew that by now Mongolia was within a stone's throw of us!
...and packed like sardines, knees in our nostrils, slowly slowly the great white bird took its run in the Russian twilight, without imagining that a few hours later we would have the most beautiful surprise of our lives: the snowy Mongolian steppes. Simply magnificent, like that feeling of coming home that overwhelmed us! Expanses as far as the eye can see, white and chilly under the snow, at times giving the impression of a black-and-white postcard. For our return Genghis Khan had orchestrated the most beautiful show he could offer us: an immaculate Mongolia.
... two days later here we are on the roads, but 200 km after departure, without warning, the jeep abandons us on foot! Having stopped to admire the gathering of cranes departing for the Gobi desert, their flight was fatal for us! Genghis Khan, having just found us again, would have abandoned us? we couldn't believe it... it was only after 48 hours of totally dismantling the engine, of laborious phone calls toward the capital from where the rescue team set out with the spare parts only to break down in turn, that we could finally set off toward our next adventures, accompanied by old Mongolian folk songs and the from now on protective shadow of Genghis Khan...
Mongolia is always worth it... To be continued in the next episode with: Mongolia: the flight of the eagle
Graziella (angy8@bluewin.ch)
For a journey in complete freedom through the steppes of Genghis Khan; mejet69@yahoo.com in English or
practical information: my pages:
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