This Mongolia trip was a return to the country for Carhartt, but a first time visit for everyone else right? What were your first impressions and biggest culture shocks as first timers?

Jerome: I think from my side, me and Percy went together and we had no idea of what we were getting ourselves in to. You landed and just felt so far away from everything, it just didn’t compute. When you fly somewhere normally you just land and, you know, go and find a coffee, do very simple things. When you land in Mongolia, you realise how far away from everything you actually are.

Percy: And I think to a certain extent, since the airport we’d been winding each other up about how fucking gnarly it was going to be. So we created this whole mass hysteria before we even landed, I honestly think we sent ourselves a bit nuts.

J: From the outset, even before we got on the plane, we were like, “We’ve never flown Air China before”- we were on Trip Advisor checking the reviews and they were all super thumbs down, minus one star…so we freaked ourselves out. And to be honest when we got there, it was a bit out there.

P: It was really strange because in Ulaanbataar the airport is pretty brutal but not as brutal as flying to India or something. But then the gap between the airport and the city, that showed a touch of how the real Mongolia was – the Mongolia we’d experience later on in the trip. Then we got to the city and it was really Westernised, kind of normal for us, but with an undercurrent of the Wild West. Like it was almost normality, but it just felt a little bit out of control.

J: My opinion is that it was really trying to be Westernised, trying so much…

P: It was like a veneer of Westernisation over that embedded Mongolian culture, years of living in the fields and herding horses….like someone had slapped this cheap veneer over the top.

I guess it has been massively urbanized in the last ten years, hasn’t it?

J: That’s the thing; obviously it was new to me, Percy and a lot of the other crew, but a couple of guys had been on the previous trip and I think for them it was a massive shock in terms of what had changed in the last ten years. I think it’s all to do with mineral deposits and people coming in – I mean the infrastructure, the buildings getting built are fucking insane, there was so much being made.

Did you find that because there’s been a lot of movement towards Ulaanbaatar it was hard to hit certain spots, sort of like how bits of London are unskateable in rush hour?

J: Well I’ve been to China on skate trips and it’s not like that yet. There’s still more horses than there are people. I think that skateboarding is still a very bizarre thing for people to see…

P: It seemed a lot more real in China. When you go to China and skate the spots you get these huge, gigantic crowds of people, taking photos and clapping if you do shit. In Mongolia, it was almost like they didn’t give a fuck that you were a skateboarder, it wasn’t a novelty or anything.

J: They just didn’t get it. In China they still have that Westernised thing where they can, you know, share information, put things on Facebook or whatever. But out there there’s no frame of reference.

Spots outside of Ulaanbaatar, and whether there was much to skate when you got beyond the city…

J: Outside of Ulaanbaatar it was really rare to see anything skateable – I don’t remember seeing anything really.

P: I don’t think we skated anything – apart from that one monument in the train station – we didn’t skate one thing of that era. It didn’t exist I don’t think.

Is there much of a skate scene in Mongolia? The original trip was to find a skatepark which turned out to have been demolished three weeks earlier, are there now many skateparks dotted around?

P: In Ulaanbaatar we did see kids with boards – when word got out that we were around, kids with boards would materialise. I mean it wasn’t like in London where you’d walk down the street and see 20 kids with boards. But then as soon as you leave Ulaanbaatar, there is no skate scene.

J: Literally you left Ulaanbaatar and left any trace of Westernisation…

P: And I think there’s still quite a lot of peer pressure from the families not to be involved…that kind of light hearted Westernisation where it’s not involved producing something, it’s a pastime.

J: You know, it doesn’t have an end goal, doesn’t have a future job in it. But then the life out there for a lot of people, it is still nomadic, it is still dependent on livestock. Skating is still new to that generation, new to that whole world.

What did it taste like?

P: Melted goats cheese, with a shot of vodka, warm.

J: It’s so gnarly man…

P: You didn’t even try it!

J: There were times, when you were in the middle of nowhere – I walked for two hours, just to get a Snickers. You’d step out of your yurt, look to the horizon, and just walk in that direction. You’d earn your Snickers.

Finally, what advice would you give to people planning on visiting Mongolia with skateboards?

J: With skateboards? (Laughs from both)

P: Dig out some books!

J: There are spots, but you have to be willing to really, really work for it and to skate really hard spots. Take spare griptape and boards because you won’t get any out there, take soft wheels, take a broom!

P: You know what, it’s good. It is really good, and I’m glad to have gone.

J: It’s a definitely a memory, an experience.

P: That’s skateboarding, you’re with the right people and you’ll have the best time. It’s all a bit rugged, but you can have a good laugh there.

J: It’s not like the UK, there’s no real planning laws there. The builders don’t have a clue so you’ll get say, five stairs, a handrail – and it’ll end in a bank. Stuff like that you wouldn’t see elsewhere, so there are spots if you put the effort in.

P: I’m made up really, it’s an experience you’d never get anywhere else. If it wasn’t for skateboarding there’s no way in my life I’d end up somewhere like Mongolia or wherever.

That seems like a good point to close with, cheers guys.