September 6-15 - Darkhan to UB and around UB

Mike here, writing this post using our brand new laptop which we bought here in UB (UB=Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia with a population of about 1.3M which is roughly half of Mongolia's population and an even higher percentage of its wealth).

We are very excited about this purchase as we have been seriously roughing it since our computer broke down a month ago in Russia. We can't say that we enjoyed the experience of living without a computer at all. There are many things that we had to endure to bike across Mongolia, but having our computer taken away was absolutely the worst. Biking 10 hours a day in sand and heat is one thing; being forced to do that without new podcasts, audio books and music is quite another! But enough complaining, so getting back to to our ride....

After leaving Darkhan we had two days of riding on pavement to get into Darkhan. It was a relaxing (albeit long) 2 day ride into UB and a great way to finish off biking before our 10 day rest before China.

Below is a picture of a truck moving a ger that we spotted while having lunch one day. You see these on the road very often and generally half the family is sitting on top of the load (the whole family cannot fit in the cab I guess) with a big smile on their faces. Although I have never asked whether the nomadic families enjoy moving their home every few months, the do seem to be very happy and I can imagine that it would be exciting to move your home so often.

...our camp spot in between Darkhan and UB. Although there is a lot more traffic, finding a nice enough camp spot is still no problem.

On the left below is yet another pic yet another meal of tsuivan. Now that we are in UB I have no intention of eating any more for quite some time!

On the right is a group of kids that surrounded us as we entered a small village. Even as we got close to the capital we still caused a stir as we entered each village.

Jen cycling along the rolling hills into UB.

Happy to be in UB finally! Although we were excited to be into the big city, with big cities comes smog. After 2 months in amazingly clean and fresh air, returning to the smog of a big city (which you can see in the background) was no fun.

After arriving in UB on Wednesday, we set ourselves to the task of repairing bikes, and arranging the Chinese portion of the trip (visa, train, etc). After a few days of sorting through paperwork we were able to get a 90 day Chinese visa by the following Monday (for those of you that are interested, we have posted more details in a post which you can read by clicking HERE), but were not able to get a train ticket to Beijing until the Saturday after that, so for the rest of this week we are just relaxing in UB.

Me smiling with our hard earned 3 month visa...China here we come!

To replace our broken luggage racks, we had new ones mailed to us in Ulaanbaatar so we can continue our trip with no delay (thanks to "Old Man Mountain" who immediately sent them to us free of charge when we phoned them to say that our rack had broken )

While in UB we have spent some time looking at local museums. The below photos is from the "Mongolia Natural History Museum". The museum itself was pretty awful, but we entertained ourselves by reading the English signs explaining the exhibits. I am not sure who did the translating but our guess is it was someone who lied on their CV and put "fluent in English" to get the job, and then were in a bit of a bind when the time actually came to deliver! (see picture below for a sample)

For some unknown reason all of the sewer holes are exposed in UB. The covers are always sitting beside the hole, but for some reason they are rarely actually used to cover the hole itself. During the day we have usually been OK, but in evening while walking home from the pub or restaurant there have been a number of very close calls due to the combination of darkness and beer!

In UB we have enjoyed mingling with other travellers. On the left below is a group who are also doing a year in Asia: Francois & Nathalie and Edmond & Elisa (see Francois' blog at http://autourduglobe.e-monsite.com/). Edmond is a aerodynamics design engineer for the F1 Ferrari team so when we all went to a pub to watch the F1 on Sunday night he added interesting commentary to the race (ie: the Ferrari F1 team has their own private wind tunnel and they run a new test every 20 minutes, 24 hours a day!).

The photo on the right is of us with Shin Bai, a Korean cyclist (of the 9 cyclist we have met so far, he is the only one who is not French) whom we enjoyed a great supper at a Korean restaurant the night after a fantastic dinner with our French friends at a French restaurant! Shin Bai has cycled many parts of our planned route through China and hooked us up with amazing GPS maps for all of China. Now that we have turn by turn directions from our GPS for all of China now, maybe we should change our website name?

Below are two photos of cyclists (all from France of course) we have met in UB. On the left is Robert as Jen helps him with his Chinese visa application. The photo on the right is from a lunch we had with a group of travellers, three of whom are cyclists as well. The 6 of us (three from the lunch table, Robert, Jen and I) are all taking the same train to Datong (about 300km west of Beijing) on Saturday, and we are going to cycle together for the week or so ride into Beijing. It should be interesting cycling with such a large group for a while.

The rest of the week here in UB should be quiet for us. We are just killing some time in UB reading, eating ice cream, and preparing for our Chinese leg. For tonight though our download of the movie "I Love You Man" just finished after 2 days (the internet where we are staying is still not so fast!), so we are off to the movies on our new laptop with a huge 10" screen!. Cheers.

--Mike

(PS: I started posting some of the photos a little smaller, but you can get a larger size for any photo by clicking on it)

Sept 3 - 6: Erdenet to Darkhan, "Of Mice, Monks and Misdirection..."

Mike and I decided to, on our way east towards Ulaanbataar, take a short detour off the pavement to a famous monastery, the 2nd largest in Mongolia (I think?) and likely the most important tourist attraction we've heard of so far, 35km north of the highway, about halfway between Erdenet and Darkhan, the last big city before Ulaanbataar.

We planned to take two days to the monastery from Erdenet, camping somewhere along the way, and two days from the monastery to Darkhan. The trip there went very quickly, benefitting from both the new pavement and our more seasoned biking legs, and once we were off the pavement only 35km away from the monastery with rain clouds gathering overhead and still lots of daylight hours to get there, we decided to push through and sleep someplace warmer and drier than our tent for the night. This ended up being the longest biking day we've done yet, and after about 110 km we rolled into a ger camp, right before it started to pour.

The scenery for much of the trip there on the pavement was pretty boring, but after a bit on the dirth paths it got quite lovely again. This was the last valley we passed through, just teeming with animals on all sides.



We stayed that night at a ger camp that had remarkable facilities - 20 gers, flush toilets, hot showers, etc. - all of which was turned off because we were the only ones there. This turned out to be a common theme of the trip. We've been told at other touristy locations (like Khovsgol, the big lake about two weeks ago) that it's been a slow summer for tourists, but this is SO slow compared to the significant capacity that there is here for tourists (there were two other camps by the monastery, both similar to or even better than ours, and both also empty) that it also must be that the tourist season is winding down. Our host mentioned that he moves back to the city in October for the winter, though the traffic we saw hardly seemed to even justify staying open in September. That said, we definitely didn't mind, and both realized that this will be a totally different experience than what we will see in a month or so touring through the hotspots in China...

We spent the next morning checking out the monastery via self-guided tour ("self-guided" to be interpreted as literally as possible). To start with, we weren't quite sure where even to enter (or if we were allowed to), but just went around trying the various doors and going in the ones that were unlocked.



Jen opening the first unlocked door we found...


It was a lovely place, if slightly abandoned. Throughout the whole day, we saw one group of fellow tourists and four "monks" - one that was about 15 years old that unlocked the door so we could see inside, and three others that were about 10 - 12 years old (we're not sure if that young is technically called "monks" yet.) Apparently there are still about 30 monks that live there and there were 2,000 back in the heyday of the monastery. You could see how so many people could be acommodated there - it was definitely VERY big for 30 people, but there were also alot of run-down buildings that hadn't been restored which would have made it even larger.











For more pictures of the monastery, check out our full album: Monastery Pics

From there we wandered around a bit, looking for somewhere to get some food and eventually found a huge ger camp + sauna + hotel? that opened up their very fancy but very empty restaurant for us, and woke up the cook who was sleeping upstairs to make us and the staff some Tsuivan for lunch...

Mike waiting for his lunch, all alone...


That night, our second night in the ger camp, turned out to be quite an adventure. Earlier that morning, I opened up one of our bags and pulled out a notebook to see a HUGE mouse fly out and scramble away. Luckily, there was nothing valuable (food, etc.) in it for him to eat, though he did do a number on a plastic bag and a pair of my favourite underwear :(

Anyway, after ensuring that there was nothing vulnerable to further attack, we came back the next evening giving ourselves (me mostly) pep talks about the fact that of COURSE there's bound to be mice - we're living in a tent with no real walls (there is about 5 cm of space all along the bottom of the walls where the tent doesn't entirely cover.) I psyched myself up for an evening with earplugs, our beds and baggage safely away from anywhere a mouse could climb up on, but as night fell and the mice started to visit our nice warm ger, I will admit that my resolve faltered a little.

Throughout the entire trip, there have definitely been many moments that have tested the boundaries of my "comfort zone," but I feel like I've managed to work through them quite well. I now talk myself out of panic mode as soon as a dog comes chasing us, as I know that almost all of them will stop and bark a polite hello as they actually get close to us. At night when we are camping in some random field and I imagine the sounds of strangers creeping up to steal our bikes and attack us in the tent, I have realized, with the help of some earplugs and a slightly less active imagination, that it is either a horse or a sheep or a slightly stronger than normal wind, and that between both the scarceness and extreme friendliness of the local population, the odds of it being a malicious person are so low that I would be better to waste my energies worrying about a lightning strike burning down our tent or something....

All that progress and, lo and behold, fearless Jen then finds herself standing on top of her bed in fear of the mice, holding a block of wood that had no chance of ever killing a single one of them, trying to keep Mike awake with questions like "A mouse couldn't ever JUMP it's way onto my bed as it climbs up the wall, could it?" and other ridiculous nonsense.... I will admit, it was pretty yucky, as by the time we went to sleep there were three or four mice nibbling at crumbs on our floor, noisily scampering around showing no fear of us whatsoever, but it is amazing the effect that such tiny little relatively harmless animals can have. All that to say, after a restless night's sleep (me waking up every now and then to worry about the mice, Mike waking up to make sure I wasn't), we were both quite glad to get going the next morning in anticipation of a nice, four-walled, mouse-free hotel room.

We set off nice and early, expecting to make it all the way into Darkhan that evening. We'd realized how fast pavement could be, and were told that the road from here to the pavement (going southeast) was alot less hilly than the road to our southwest was that we had taken going in. We had only gotten about 3 kilometers from the ger camp when we got to a river that the road seemed to cross. Our friend at the ger camp hadn't said anything about a river crossing, so we motioned to the following friendly fellow and asked him whether or not we needed to cross the river to get to Darkhan. "Yes, yes..." he says as him and his family watch us cross the freezing water in 5C weather, laughing a little and helping us out of the other side of the river.



Friendly as we may look in this picture, we are not this guy's biggest fan. He made us come in for tea and cheese after the river crossing and we had barely left his ger when they started to motion that we had to go back to the right. We were confused - the river was back to the right?? So we went a little toward the right and then back over to the left when we were out of earshot of their ger - obviously the road was over there? Over the next couple kilometers our stomachs slowly sank as we realized that, after one hour and barely 5 kilometers of river crossing and bumpy riding, the road was in fact on the OTHER side of the river, that we should never have crossed it in the first place. Maybe our friends had misunderstood, and thought we wanted to cross a freezing cold river with nearly a hundred kilograms of bikes and luggage for tea and cheese? Maybe they thought we wanted to bike over the bumpy valley instead of using the perfectly good dirt tracks? Who knows... either way, it did not put us in a fantastic mood, especially considering that we had now spent an hour and a half travelling only to have very cold toes, no idea where the real road was and had travelled less than 5 kilometers from where we started...

Mike, on his eighth river crossing that morning (he insisted on crossing my bike for me due to the slippery rocks and steep push up out of the river)


Jen pushing through the bumpy valley on the other side of the river, in search of a rideable dirt path...


After a bit of pushing our bikes through the bumpy valley, we finally found a good dirt path and started rolling at slightly quicker clip. After a quick pass and a bit of a rocky descent, however, our next setback hit us. The rack we'd repaired in Erdenet snapped on the opposite side from the tension of the bend and weld on the other side, forcing us to duct tape it together and swap the back and front bags on my bike so that the broken rack (formerly on mike's back, with the heaviest bags we've got) now supported nothing but our sleeping gear, which we could have carried in backpacks if need be.



The next river crossing only about 5 km later (the first and only we SHOULD have had) did not totally delight us, but turned out to be quite quick and painless now that it was warm enough just to cross it in our sandals and keep them on to dry while we rode on.



The rest of the ride to the pavement that day is still something we have not fully managed to piece together even between ourselves. Was the worst part really the swampy mosquito land, or was it the tens of kilometers of sand that forced us to push our bikes after successive falls? Was it twenty or only fifteen kilometers longer than we expected going in? Were the steep rocky passes actually worse than back in Bayan-Olgii (the start of our trip), or was that just our imagination? It was absolutely beautiful scenery, but suffice it to say, we would have been MUCH quicker and more confortable had we just retraced our steps back along the known and relatively benign dirt path back to the highway along the way we came, and accepted a few more kilometers along the pavement.

Some pics from along the way...




By the time I reached the pavement (we had spread out a little to avoid feeding off each others' bad moods and spiralling into a collective depression), Mike was doing "pavement angels" with the kind of happiness in his eyes one usually only sees in a small child experiencing the first snowfall on Christmas morning after a long, cold, dry winter.



Needless to say, after the six hours it took us to travel the 50 kilometers to pavement, we didn't have enough daylight or energy to make it another 60 - 70 km into Darkhan that night, so we stopped in a town about 55 km from Darkhan called Hotol.

From the road, it looked like a miserable little place, between the cement factory puffing smoke and the fact that 100% of the town seemed to be made up of those huge, bland, rectangular soviet monster apartment buildings. That said, as we rode in, we wondered whether it might actually be the happiest place on earth, as teenage boys gave us high fives, what seemed like hundreds children played merrily on the sidewalks and everyone over high-school age toted happy little newborns in their arms... either that or a real-life version of "The Lord of the Flies," with nary an adult to be seen (in which case we decided to get the hell out of dodge early the next morning because we all remember how "Loæd of the Flieds" ends!)... By the next morning we realized it was in fact the former, as the adults that now dominated the streets at about 8 am proved just as happy and friendly as their kids did the night before, asking us loads of questions about the trips, driving by with thumbs up and friendly honks and wishing us all the best in every language they could muster on the rest of our journey. Even in the incredibly friendly Mongolia, this was an exceptionally congenial town.



The next day was a quick bike in from Hotol to Darkhan, where we are now maxin' and relaxin' (enjoying our first english MOVIES in about a month and a half..... our hotel has HBO!!!) and getting ready for the two-day bike into the capital city, Ulaanbataar, which we'll leave for tomorrow morning. This will mark the end of what we'll see of rural Mongolia, which is a bittersweet thought for us both. It's been such an amazing trip with experiences so far from what we are familiar with that we know we will miss it very very soon. That said, after just over a month in the country, we are very excited for China and the complete culture shock it will offer (and, I admit it, the slightly more comfortable biking and sleeping conditions.) It's still a ways off, with a week or more in Ulaanbataar to apply for our visa, fix our broken rack, etc. but as we get closer we are realizing how very much our trip is about to change. We've started thinking of it as a series of about five or so very different trips, since this year is unlikely to feel like one continuous stretch of anything other than being away from any sense of normality or routine.

With that, we're off for lunch! Stay tuned for more from Ulaanbataar!

August 31-September 2 - Repairs in Erdenet

We left Bulgan on the 31st and did a nice ride into the city of Erdenet. Erdenet is Mongolia's second largest city at about 80,000 people and we were told it is the richest city outside of the capital. The reason for this is the massive copper mine just outside the city which our Lonely Planet guide tells us consumes 50% of the countries electricity and generates 40% of the nations hard currency earnings.

Below is a photo of Jen riding into Erdenet The wealth was evident from the moment we got into the city. We ended up checking into the nicest room in the nicest hotel for about $30 CDN a night. It actually has a shower with hot water 24 hours a day!!! We have been seriously enjoying this novelty.



I found the suburban development below very cute. As in North America all the homes looked the same, except that these homes could not have been more than 500 square feet. They were tiny! Not exactly the McMansions most Canadian suburbs have. Adam (a friend from Montreal) let me know about the "Tiny Home Movement" last year while we were bored in class(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/garden/11tiny.html). I think the concept is really cool and these houses reminded me of it immediately.


Our plan was to spend one day in Erdenet resting and cleaning, but after washing the bikes I noticed that the Mongolian roads had not treated my rear cargo rack well and it was bent and cracked in a very bad way. This could have forced us onto a bus but our hotel owner was able to find a welder from the copper mine who could weld aluminum (which is quite difficult) and he bargained him down to ~$23 to do the repair the following day (delaying our departure for one day).

As well I contacted the manufacturer (Old Man Mountain from California) and they are shipping us a replacement rack, free of charge, which will meet us in Ulaanbataar. So although we were worried at first about how this might delay us, as long as the weld can hold for the next week into Ulaanbataar, it will only end up slowing us down by one day. As well it gave us a good excuse to sample the numerous great restaurants in town (in reality the best are probably about the same quality as your average highway truck stop at best, but right now they taste amazing!).

Below is a picture of the broken rack. The left leg should be straight, which it clearly is not! The long month through Mongolia on sh*t roads has clearly taken its toll.



The owner of our hotel is in the center and the two miners that he found to do the repair on either side. It was really amazing actually. As soon as the owner saw our problem he was on his cell phone to everyone he knew until he found someone in the city who was able to weld aluminum and he then convinced them to bring their equipment to the hotel and do the repair for ~$23. I highly doubt your average "Holiday Inn Express" employee would even look up "welder" for you in his phone book, not to mention calling in personal favors for their random guests.



The welder on the left, and the other hotel owner (wife of the man above) who acted as our translator.



The finished weld job. It is not all that pretty and the rack is still as crooked as Bernie Madoff, but it should hold until Ulaanbataar.


So that's all from us for now. We are off to a wonderful evening of Korean food, a hot shower, a bottle of wine and some BBC World Service (it's been a while since we've had English TV). That may not sound like your favorite night, but for us it is a nice change of pace!

Hope all is well and talk to you soon!

--Mike

August 25-30 - Moron to Bulgan City

Mike here again! As we are soon going to be entering China, Jen is spending most of her non-biking time buried in Chinese books, so making this blog post falls to me. This suits me fine, as we are growing tired in Mongolia of not being able to communicate with anyone!

We left Moron 6 days ago and arrived in Bulgan City last night, which was the first big town (11,000 people) we had seen since leaving Moron. This meant a hotel and a shower (which was seriously needed) after five days cycling through the country side. We set a goal of doing this leg in five days, and after five long days (about 70-80km each day with 7-8 hours actually pedalling , and 12 hours or so between camp sites) we rolled into Bulgan happy to be able to wash up and eat something different (a.k.a. ice cream!).

For this post I am going to take a bit of a different approach and insert a bunch of photos with a caption before each photo explaining it. So here goes!


Wrestling is the big thing here. We still haven't seen any matches, but in many cities there are statues and stadiums.





The farther east we move, the larger the markers at the top of passes become. Out west they were simply a pile of rocks and now they are often monuments such as this one.






This was one of the only vehicles we saw this day and it moved so slow that we kept pace with it much of the morning. It is a huge semi trailer FULL of wool! Wool is one of the major exports from Mongolia.



The "roads" in this leg were much nicer than the last leg which allowed us to make up to 80km a day rather than the 40-50 we managed in the last section





Mongolian country side is weird. It is so open and wide that at first it feels empty and alone but after a while you realize that it is very busy. There are always a number of gers in sight no matter where you are, and without exception there are herds of sheep, cows, camels and horses everywhere.





The weather was generally not too bad, but there were rainy times each day which forced us to get creative for shelter for lunch.



One of our campsites. Privacy is impossible in Mongolia.





More horses. Livestock here wander where they want and there are never any fences. I am sure all the horses we see have owners, but we rarely see the within sight of the herds.





Typical scenery for the ride.... Mongolia is amazing, like one huge campground with hundreds of double-track mountain bike trails in every direction.



Over this leg of the trip we passed through 3 small villages of about this size that gave us a chance to refill on water and supplies (albeit limited supplies as the shops had little stock)


Every time we set camp, the local people would all wander to us curious as to who we were. This generally resulted in them trying out our bikes and us joining them for tea. (Or in this case, a very weak sweet-tasting vodka made out of goat's milk.)



A note from Jen on the outfit - though it looks very traditional, about half of the male population in the rural areas seems to wear something like this, young and old. We have noticed that lots of teenage guys add their own style to it with a tilted ballcap and wearing the sash alot lower on their waist.... the Mongolian equivalent to baggy jeans, I guess.

Another camp site. Because of the large number of gers inhabiting any area suitable for camping, we were almost always near a family of gers. This was a mixed blessing. Although it is fun to hang out with the Mongolian nomads, we also are used to much more privacy in North America!





A kitty was very interested in our bikes and spent much of the night playing with them.


Mongolia has put our bikes to the test and so far we have had only a few minor problems. This bracket snapped and needed to be replaced. Hopefully the pavement we will soon get to will be easier on them as we only had one spare bracket along!


Sunsets here have been amazing, but not nearly as amazing as the stars at night. The milky way is as bright as I have ever seen it. I would take some photos to try to show this except for (1) I have no idea how to take photos of stars and I threw out my photography book in Russia as it was too heavy, and (2) at night I am always far too sleepy to even consider pulling out the camera.





This is the only real river we passed by. Because of the lack of water the shower in Bulgan was far overdue!!





Everyday the temperature was 10C-15C. This was generally a great temperature to bike in, except for the rain that would come out once or twice a day. It got uncomfortable when the rain came and the temperature fell, Jen was amazing throughout everything. She has this odd ability to not let anything stop her from enjoying herself. I have spent a lot of time in pain/discomfort with people who could ignore it or push though, but Jen actually still manages to enjoy herself. It would be cold, rainy and windy and she would be biking along listening to her music seemingly oblivious to what would make most people miserable.



Again in every little settlement the kids would come out and curiously look us over.





There was one time where there was a big group of about 30 horses on the road and just as we entered the herd they started galloping away from us, and along with us. I was tempted to pull out the camera then but decided to just enjoy the moment as we cycled along inside a pack of galloping horses. Instead this photo which I took later on will have to suffice!





Again setting up camp, and people came out curious and helped us put together our tent. They also hung around and watched us cook supper amazed at our little stove.





He seemed to enjoy my bike and once he got the hang of it took it out for pretty long ride.





I may look really high in this photo, but am not. This was taken after the fourth day, and was starting to come down with a cold making the idea of a hotel the following day even more attractive.





This is the same family as the guy riding the bike above. After the tent set up, they pulled us into their ger and kept of convincing us to drink bowl after bowl of "airag". This is fermented mare's milk and is very popular drink in Mongolia which has about 1-2% alcohol. After many glasses of the stuff we still have not developed a taste for it and makes my stomach turn with every cup but it is very hard to turn down and feels impolite.





Now it is a time for a rant about the food in Mongolia. Coming here we were repeatedly warned about the food and it was all true. In every restaurant you have at most three options and they all have the same "gamy beef/mutton"flavor which essentially reduces them to all the same option. It has gotten to the point where even our clothes smell like the food, meaning even in our sleep we can't escape the monotony. Cooking for yourself is no easier as the stores have less stock than your typical 7-11. While cycling we have generally been on a non stop diet of dry biscuits (no idea why they feel the need to color them bright pink as in the picture below) with jam, chocolate bars, and gummy candies (when we can find them) and in the evenings we stop at a guanz for a dose of "Tsuivan" which is a tasty Mongolian noodle dish, but after a number of weeks of it, is starting to lose its appeal.



When there is no pavement rain means mud and mud means slow going!



After over 20 days in Mongolia we run into our first stretch of pavement. After getting onto the gloriously smooth surface Jen promptly gets of her bike and proceeds to hug the road with what appeared to be more love than any hug she has given me. This turned out to be premature though as after 2-3km the pavement ended and we were back on dirt!



Jen riding on the short lived blacktop!





Bulgan City. This city has noticeably more wood home and fewer gers in the city. Possibly a trend as we continue to move closer to the capital?





I guess if you travel long enough eventually weird things start to occur, but this one still blew us both away. We checked into our tiny 6 bedroom hotel, in the small city of Bulgan, Mongolia with a population of 11,000. This tiny city is about as far away from Saskatchewan as you can get on the earth without starting to come back to it. After picking our room the hotel owner hands us our key with a Saskatchewan key chain! We tried to explain to her this amazing coincidence , but our Mongolian proved insufficient for the task so we have no idea where it came from.





Jen doing the laundry outside our hotel this morning. We hear there are laundromats in Ulaanbaatar which we are excited to use!



And that's all for now as I am going back to our hotel to watch some TV. For the first time on our trip we have an english channel that isn't "Fashion TV" and I am excited to watch the news and make sure the rest of the world hasn't gone to hell in the past two months! If you are especially bored and didn't get enough photos above (which does seem unlikely, I did put quite a few) you can see other photos from this leg of our ride by clicking here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Jennifer.Zwarych/20090830MoronToBulgan?feat=directlink



Tomorrow we continue west towards the capital city. We are very excited because from here on it is almost entirely pavement. As well we will only be 1-2 days between large-ish cities which will make for a luxurious week or so ride into Ulaanbataar. Hope everyone is doing well and drop us an email to let us know how you are doing!