Technical super disaster

Day: 125-129

Sunrise:
08:57/09:03

Sunset:
17:22/17:19

Total kilometers:
1211

Soil condition:
Ice, snow

Temperature – Day (maximum):
minus 13°C

Temperature – day (minimum):
minus 18°C

Temperature – Night:
minus 30°C

Latitude:
51°21’785”

Longitude:
099°21’046”

Maximum height:
1475 m above sea level

I wake up as if I hadn’t slept all night. In an incessant loop, I have fruitless arguments with the mayor of Tuwa. In my dream, I keep trying to explain to her what a weak sense it is not to be able to awaken the desire to live in yurts among a people who already live in them for the most part. They are already doing it. “Apart from that, your government has given your people yurts. So you can’t forbid them to put them up,” I explain. After talking my mouth off to the stubborn person, I wake up in a cold sweat. Dreams are usually foams, only when I open my eyes the dream remains a part of this morning. Or to put it another way, the foam of the dream is my reality.

Disgruntled, I get up from the wall and light a warming fire in our stove. In our yurt, it’s around minus 10 °C at 8:00 am. It quickly gets warmer. I put our kettle on the hob, sweep up the dirt that has been brought in, as I do every morning, and actually want to lie down again until it gets light. “What the hell,” I say and switch on the laptop as I’m way behind schedule with writing about our experiences.

It takes a suspiciously long time for the computer to boot up. “It must be the low temperatures,” I think and switch it off again as a precaution. Then I hold the piece in my hands and warm it up a little over the stove. When I start it up again, it no longer boots and an error message appears on the black screen. “This can’t be true!” I curse indignantly. “What is it?” asks Tanja, yawning and stretching out in her sleeping bag. “Well, our notebook has just given up the ghost once and for all.” “What? I don’t think so. I’m sure it’ll work again when it’s a bit warmer in here.” “No, the hard disk has seized up. That’s clear to me. It’s not going to recover this time,” I say, my pulse racing as I realize the extent of this technical tragedy with every minute that passes. “And what do we do now?” asks Tanja. “How should I know that?” “Maybe you can have it repaired here in Tsagaan Nuur?” Tanja ponders. “Here in this village? I don’t think that’s possible,” I reply grumpily.

On further reflection, I realize that I have lost yesterday’s entire writing day and the short notes from 13 other days because I stupidly haven’t backed them up on my external hard drive. It later transpires that the image processing of 1,700 photos plus signatures has also been lost. “Are our pictures safe?” asks Tanja, also getting nervous now. “Yes, all the pictures are backed up on two external disks,” I reply as Tsendmaa comes into the yurt to visit us, as he soon does every morning. “No problem. My friend is a computer specialist. I’m sure he can fix it,” she tries to comfort me. A little later, we are trudging through the village at minus 18 °C in search of her friend. It takes us an hour to find him at the bank. “Asuudal baihgui”, (“No problem”) he says and asks me for the booting DVD. “I didn’t bring any,” I reply, causing a crease to form on his forehead. When I also tell him that this good piece does not have an internal DVD drive, several wrinkles appear on his young forehead. The bank employee walks with us to the school building. There we sit down in an empty classroom and don’t know what we’re waiting for. Until suddenly an English teacher comes and asks about our problem. Unfortunately, the English is so bad that any communication is almost impossible. The only thing we think we understand is that the young man is trying to get a booting DVD to copy onto a stick. “So I can start the computer,” he says in Mongolian and disappears. An hour later, he comes back beaming from ear to ear, inserts the stick into the computer, but it doesn’t accept it. The glow disappears and a little later it is gone again. Two young schoolgirls enter the classroom. Tsendmaa, who has been with us for hours, explains to them what we are doing here. After a while, they lose their shyness towards us and try out their English. Tanja has now run back to our yurt, while I am now sitting in a Mongolian classroom, waiting for the computer man and trying to teach the girls a few words of English. Another hour passes and another attempt to get my laptop up and running fails.

Completely annoyed and depressed, I want to go home. But I hadn’t reckoned with the young man’s tenacity. He drops me off in a simple log cabin which is the local restaurant. The small room smells of greasy stew. I sit down on a wobbly low bench without a backrest and stay there. People come in and eat the only dish on offer. Stew. They drink milk tea and eye me out of the corner of their eyes. Half an hour later, the computer man picks me up again. We walk to a nice-looking log cabin. It was built by a Japanese aid organization and is supposed to be a kind of school of old customs and craftsmanship. Again I settle down to wait. This time on a modern chair, obviously sponsored by the Japanese. The teacher, who is about 55 years old, smiles kindly at me. The computer expert may use your computer. He runs a virus program. According to him, these nasty viruses are to blame. Of course I don’t have a virus because my laptop has never been connected to the Internet. Apart from that, there is no internet here. But how can I explain that? An hour later, the virus program ran unsuccessfully over the Stik. It’s already 5 p.m. when I say goodbye to the helpful, overzealous helper. Unfortunately with the same result as this morning. The computer does not work.

Tired, I then try to set up the spare computer in our yurt so that at least our live reporting can continue.

The next day we send the patient to Mörön in a four-wheel drive bus. Saraa knows the computer expert at the mayor’s office. It turns out that the hard disk has a mechanical defect. Probably due to the cold. “I can’t save your data. Nobody in Mongolia is able to do that,” says the expert on the phone. That is the reason why we send the good part to Germany for a lot of money. A week later, I hear the sobering answer. “Hard disk hopelessly destroyed. Data cannot be recovered,” says Ben, one of our partner’s employees. They install a new hard disk, install the programs I need on it and then hand it over to my parents, who have big problems sending the notebook back to Mongolia. Courier services refuse to send laptops with batteries because of the risk of explosion. Apart from that, the shipping costs are up to 350,- € and only to Ulan Bator. Now the laptop is on its way with the normal mail. Shipping time up to four weeks.

In the meantime, I’m working on our spare computer, which we thankfully have with us for the first time when traveling. It consumes a lot of power, is very slow and outdated, but it runs.

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