WE CLIMBED ONTO the flat roof of the house to survey our options. The nearest peak soared straight up from the depression, its towering slipface oriented towards the southeast. On the other side of the basin, which was perhaps a kilometre across, two further mountains of sand rose up to scrape the sky.

We were deep in the heart of the Badain Jaran, a region of sand dunes covering nearly 50,000 square kilometres at the heart of the otherwise sandless Gobi Desert. But these weren’t just any old sand dunes – they were the largest on the planet, some reaching heights in excess of 400 metres.



Indeed, physical geographers like to refer to them as ‘megadunes’. I’d wanted to climb one since first entering the dunefield a week or so before. My companion, Bruno Baumann, an Austrian writer and adventurer, was more than up for the challenge, but couldn’t decide which of the three monsters before us was the tallest; they were all huge.

The Badain Jaran is one of the lesser known great ‘sand seas’. Adventurous tourists make sorties into the vast sandscapes of Egypt, Namibia and Oman, but this corner of Chinese Inner Mongolia is rarely visited by outsiders, thanks in part to the fact that the Chinese military likes to use it as a testing ground for missiles.

Bruno and I had walked for three days to reach this spot, an adobe compound that housed our host, Lao Gao, and his family. Lao Gao had arrived as a little boy with his parents in 1957 from the province of Gansu far off to the south. I never received a totally satisfactory explanation as to why the family had settled here in the middle of nowhere.

Their nearest neighbours, a few Buddhist monks at an isolated monastery, were a day’s walk away. Lao Gao’s presence in this world of sand was, like that of the monks, only possible because of the groundwater reserves that lie just below the surface of the Badain Jaran. In many places, this groundwater feeds shallow lakes that punctuate depressions between the towering dunes. It’s the lakes, more than 140 of them, that have given the desert its name. Badain is a Mongolian word that means ‘mysterious’ or ‘from the heaven’, and jaran means ‘lake’.

High evaporation rates tend to make the lakes brackish and shallow. The one in Lao Gao’s basin had disappeared entirely, leaving a thin salt crust. But sweet water from his well allowed him to thrive. Several times each day, he or his daughter would fill two metal buckets and carry them back to the mud-brick house on each end of a pole balanced across their shoulders. The fresh water also allowed Lao Gao to cultivate all manner of crops in the sandy soil.

He gave me a tour of his impressive set-up. On a sizable patch of land, he cultivated neat plots of cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, onions and aubergines. He even had an apple tree. Produce grown in the hot summers kept the family going through the hard winters, when temperatures plummet far below zero for months on end. Piles of vegetables were kept in a subterranean storehouse, the hole in the ground protected by an old padded quilt and some slabs of rock.

Lao Gao’s self-sufficiency in crops was complemented by camels and goats, which grazed the patches of vegetation scattered across the depression, as well as the occasional shrub and clump of wispy grass that clung to the dunes’ lower parts.
The only reason Lao Gao had for climbing the dunes was to look for his camels. He found the idea of ascending one to the very top quite baffling. He’d smiled and shaken his head when we told him our plan. “I don’t have to climb to the top to get a good view,” he said.

Straight up

We eventually plumped for the nearest dune. The two farthest might be easier to ascend, we thought, given that the slopes up to their crests were more gentle from our starting point, but the fact that climbing the nearest dune would mean going more or less straight up the slipface gave us an added impetus.

Lao Gao wished us well. He’d become accustomed to the curious whims of Europeans since his first encounter with Bruno some years before. For Bruno, our trip was a return to the scene of an earlier expedition, a solo trek across this sand desert that had nearly ended in disaster. Having run out of water deep inside the arid wilderness, he had struggled to the top of a dune crest to be met by an extraordinary sight. In front of him, nestled in a depression, was a house. Bruno had just made it to the dwelling. To put it simply, Lao Gao had saved his life.

On this occasion, Bruno had brought a pair of binoculars as a small gift for his saviour. Lao Gao was getting on in years and found it increasingly difficult to spot his camels at round-up time. The binoculars would help. It was just a token of his gratitude, Bruno said, but how else do you thank someone for saving your life?

We ambled across the salty terrain to stop at the foot of the slope and check our altitude with a GPS unit. We were 1,237 metres above sea level. Looking up at the imposing wall of sand before us, we began climbing.

The slipface is the steepest slope on a sand dune, and it’s aligned with the dominant wind direction. All over the world, these slopes are remarkably constant in their angle – almost always between 33° and 35° to the horizontal. This is the angle of rest of individual sand grains, which cover a narrow band of particle sizes. Any larger, and they are classed as gravel; if the grains are smaller, they are known as clay or dust. But the slipface that Bruno and I were intent on climbing appeared to defy the laws of physics. It seemed much steeper.

We soon realised that going straight up the slope was impractical. A foot set into the sand simply resulted in a gentle cascade that brought you right back to where you started. Even with the aid of his walking sticks, Bruno found it impossible, so we altered our plan to follow a ridge that snaked its way up just to one side of the enormous slipface.

Mounting the snake ridge entailed only marginally less effort than tackling the slipface head-on, but it was at least possible. We ascended slowly, Bruno leading the way with his sticks. I found the going slightly less tiring if I placed my feet in Bruno’s footprints, but it was still strenuous work.

We stopped after a while to catch our breath and look out over the basin. A wisp of smoke escaped from the chimney of Lao Gao’s house. Bruno checked our altitude on the GPS: 1,352 metres above sea level. We’d passed the 100-metre mark, but a glance towards the summit told me we weren’t even close to half-way up the megadune.

The snake ridge was getting steeper, and I had to stop more frequently to get my breathing under control. The sand seemed to be getting softer, too, and the strain on my knees was almost unbearable.

Clockwork toy

The sun was pale and watery in a sky concealed beneath a veil of dust. This fine material is constantly being excavated by the fierce winds of the Gobi and blown southeastwards across China. Thousands of centuries of this wind action has laid down a thick layer of the stuff, hundreds of metres deep, in a region known as the Loess Plateau. It makes rich and fertile soil; the plateau has been dubbed the Rice Bowl of China.

Immense plumes of desert dust from the Gobi have been tracked by satellites far beyond China, driven out across Japan and Korea and over the Pacific Ocean. Some of this material even reaches North America. On we went. I felt like a clockwork toy, plodding my way up the gargantuan pile of sand. We were both losing strength but, within reach of the summit crest, Bruno stopped once more, leant on his sticks and checked the GPS.

We’d covered 300 vertical metres, he said, nearly 1,000 feet. It seemed like a very significant achievement to me. “I can see the final ridge,” Bruno puffed, shading his eyes from the hazy sun, “but I have to warn you, it’s a long way, and I think this is the hardest part.”

The sand here was the softest so far. Each step, even when I placed my feet in Bruno’s footprints, resulted in a mini-avalanche. I tried a sort of shuffling technique, but it made no difference. Each time I moved, I generated a cascade of grains and I found that I had to keep moving or I would actually lose height.

After another five minutes of hard work, I fell flat on my face and started crawling. On all fours, I made more progress, but I’d been reduced to the status of a four-legged animal and I still had to stop every ten metres to rest.

Panting hard, I began to wonder if I had the stamina to make it, but Bruno was now standing on the crest and I wasn’t about to let him do it alone. I delved deep and crawled another few metres. It was as if I were doggy-paddling to the top of this bloody sand dune.

As my head emerged over the sharp crest, a blast of wind filled my eyes and mouth with sand. Bruno was still standing, catching his breath. “Almost there,” he called. I looked up to where he stood, gazing at the slightly higher peak. The crest we were on curled away to our right, rising another few metres to the summit. Bruno started walking and I regained my feet to join him.

We tottered along the narrow crest, battling against the furious wind as it sent torrents of sand streaming into the blue ether. After the last few metres, we sank onto our haunches at the summit. Bruno checked the GPS. It took a few minutes to locate the satellites. Laid out all around us was the world of sand, a mountain range of megadunes that stretched far into the distance.

Finally, the GPS gave us our reading: “1,582 metres,” Bruno said. In our exhausted state, it took a while to do the mental calculation. “Three hundred and forty five metres high,” I said at last, “about 1,200 feet.” We’d just climbed a dune that was taller than the Eiffel Tower.

We made our way back down along the sharp crest to stand and stare at the slipface that dropped below us. I looked at Bruno. “I think this is probably the quickest way down,” I suggested. He grinned. “Yes, I think so too.” I took one last look at the peak we’d just conquered and stepped into the void. Gravity grabbed me immediately, yanking me down. My legs became a blur, sprinting at an impossible speed just to stop myself from nose-diving.

I was running faster than I’d ever run before. Somewhere to my right, I saw Bruno flying slightly sideways across the slipface, but I was going straight down. My heart was bursting, but I couldn’t stop. It had taken us nearly four hours to climb the megadune. We reached the bottom in about four minutes.