A woman who drove her off-road vehicle to a remote Mongolian beauty spot ended up with a flat tyre when she ran over an abandoned high heel shoe.

The bizarre accident happened when the woman, not named, and a friend decided to take their off-road vehicle into the Hulunbuir Steppes of inner Mongolia to admire the spectacular rolling grasslands dubbed the ‘garden wonderland of China’.

But after enjoying the view, she climbed into the vehicle to drive back home and said that she then suddenly heard a bang.

When she got out, she found that a high heel shoe had pierced her tyre and that the air was leaking out.

She said: “I realised something had happened when I heard the bang, and when I got, out to my amazement there was a high heel shoe literally nailed to the car tyre.

“It was really unexpected to find a shoe here in the middle of nowhere, never mind one that was impaled like this in my tyre.”

The woman said that in the end, she had been forced to call a tow truck to the remote spot so that she could get back home.

Online commentators speculated that the shoe must have been lost by somebody who turned up with inappropriate footwear, and lost the shoe while trying to make their way across the grassland terrain.

As it would have clearly been impossible on the soft ground, they speculated that she had discarded the shoes, and then carried on barefoot.