Sarah Konoski

And will your noses fall off?

I guess they're more exposed.

It was interesting to pinpoint a body part, but it's true, you know, and we had to wear often special masks to protect our long pointy noses.

It was much harder than we'd imagined to find them.

locatable on our GPS on a little device we had with them, but they were so far away and there was this huge pass between us and them that we just couldn't make.

And so we were stuck at a base camp that we'd set up.

And each day we attempted this pass again in our two 80 series land cruisers and a 1920s Russian missile carrier, which just dragged a huge tractor tire behind it to make a little semblance of road.

because we were so far from civilization.

You know, the tiny town we'd come from was a good day's drive, and we just kept getting bogged, and we kept sliding back this mountain, which was very high.

You know, the air was thin up there, and it was probably, yeah, minus 40 that week.

So...

We ended up, yeah, almost giving up, I guess.

Each day we would come back to base camp with a great deal of despair.

You really want to get to the herders and each day you have there is so precious.

So it felt as though we would never reach them and it felt like a lost in La Mancha or a, you know, Fitzcarraldo or something.

Look, there was a yak that kind of gave us solace at night.

It felt like I was home with a pet and that I think kept us a little grounded.

But logistically we managed to get the cars up and over the hill just by hand.

So the whole team came together and just hand over hand, inch by inch until we managed those really steep parts.

It was the only thing left to try and it worked thankfully.