During the meal, I asked Tybo what he enjoyed doing in his free time. He said had a ranch outside of town where he raised horses. "How many?" I asked. "Oh, twenty-five or thirty," he replied. In a place where owning a horse made you a man of means, I began to understand why the locals were treating him with such respect. I discovered that many were racehorses; he raised them to run in the legendary Naadam race. Held each year in July, the course covers 20 to 25 kilometers across the rugged Mongolian Steppes and has been held more or less continuously since the days of Genghis Khan, who was also from these parts. The riders are all children, the youngest are two, the oldest no more than twelve. In Mongolia, to win the Naadam is an honor equivalent to winning the Super Bowl, the World Series and the Stanley Cup combined. Tybo's horses had won it twice.
By mid-afternoon it was hot back at Tybo's cement pad and we were all working hard to get the car finished. It was clear we wouldn't be leaving before tomorrow and if we subjected the old Chrysler to the same pounding on the barely passable Mongolian roads on our way to the Siberian border, we would have to repair it again by the time we got there. The solution was to truck the car to the border. Tybo knew a guy. We climbed into his Mitsubishi again and went to a neighborhood where large trucks were parked haphazardly on the streets. Tybo found his man and, after long negotiations, told us it would be $400. This was less than half the amount other rally teams had had to pay, so we agreed immediately.
That night, we invited Tybo to dinner with us at our hotel. After a few beers, I asked him about his family. He told me he was living alone right now because his wife and daughter were in London, so his daughter could get a better education. "Some day she will come back and help run Mongolia," he told me with all seriousness, and I believed him.
Early the next morning, Tybo took us to his apartment for breakfast. It was a modest place. We ate yogurt and had toasted bread. Rich and I wanted to pay Tybo for his work and for all his help. He refused. He told us he enjoyed helping and wanted us to remember Mongolia. How do you thank a man like that? Finally, I rolled a $50 bill discreetly into a stack of Mongolian currency and held it out to him. "This is not for you," I said, "but to help with your daughter's education." He sat for a moment, then nodded slowly and smiled as he took the money.
Driving old cars to remote parts of the world has taught me lessons in how to be self-reliant and humble, and to never give up-no matter how bad things seem. Meeting Tybo reinforced another lesson: people are almost always more than they seem from when you first meet them.