Swerve. I'm jolted awake by another washout in the road, which we pound through in a cloud of white dust that flies up through the headlight beams and over the windshield. We've been driving south from the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaator for almost 20 hours, and my knees can't take much more abuse against the dashboard. There is no road to follow here, and the Land Cruiser carves out its own path through the Gobi desert in an undulating course that dodges ravines, rocks, plants and dried river beds.

I've taken a break from sitting behind the wheel, and one of our local drivers is in the driver's seat, concentrating on the satellite receiver that is crudely duct-taped to the steering wheel. Without the horizon line, he needs the GPS to guide us to Dalanzadgad. One of our camera operators and our audio technician both shift around in the back, bundled in down jackets to stave off the cold, which snakes in through the frigid windows from the darkness outside.

The rest of the car, almost every square inch, is occupied by gear and supplies. Batteries, cables, duffels and hard cases sit democratically with bags of beef, salami, peanuts and bottles of water. I can hear the external tanks of benzene sloshing around on the roof rack above me, next to a spare set of tires. We were supposed to arrive hours ago, but in miscalculating the average speed of the two diesel-powered Land Cruisers behind us, the convoy is slower than expected, and we've lost the sun. The GPS glows out another course correction as we turn our wheels into the smooth grooves of a rutted track, the remnants of some improvised road leading who knows where. I drift back to sleep.