Steve's Cycling Blog

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Thankfully not much on me, but others in the group got quite a bit wetter at times.

Today was another of those days which could have gone either way with the wind – in the end we got ‘not as bad as it could have been’.

Rather than breakfast in our hotel this morning we took a walk round the corner to a local family-run location for the usual boiled eggs and steamed buns, and this morning there were also a sort of fried pastry filled with red bean paste which was particularly tasty!

On the road at 0620 and I set out on my own – this certainly wasn’t my intention but with the ebb and flow of people from the tiny ‘cafe’ we were having breakfast in I missed the people I would have ridden out with.

In the end that didn’t matter, because the staff at the 6.7km toll gate were having nothing of 25 cyclists going onto ‘their’ road, so while Jimmy and Andreas scouted a way round this particular challenge (a minor diversion on a side road, which took us through a different toll gate who didn’t seem to care) we sheltered in a service station out of the wind and rain while we waited.

As we set off this time I hooked up with (big) Rob and Ivan and we planned to stick together through the day taking 2km stints at the front of our group, with the other two riding in the lee of the lead rider.

Thankfully the wind today was more of a beam reach (coming in more-or-less side on) – I say thankfully because at times I’m picking it was gusting up to 20 knots! And riding into that would have been very slow, very painful work.

We pushed through the 55km from the service station to the first of the coke stops with our rolling-changing lead-man paving the way. When I was ‘number three’, it was fantastic – Rob and Ivan are tall solid guys, so with the two of them between me and the wind it certainly made things substantially easier.

A quick stop for Ivan to grab a ‘Coke’ (which turned out to be a Pepsi) and we were back on the road looking for the lunch truck. We found them off to the side of the road not much further on – the two crew had done an awesome job of getting things set up given the blowing sand and dust, but were looking less then thrilled with life when we arrived.

Lunch was as quick as we could be – make a sandwich with as little sand in it as possible – shovel it in, repeat, fill water bottles and get back on the bikes as smartly as possible so as not to get too cold.

From there the sand-blasting really began! I tried to take some photos of the sand blowing across the road but you really don’t get an appreciation of how much sand there was – and obviously you can’t tell from a picture how much it hurts…! It was also beginning to form small dunes at the side of the road as well, which in some places were getting quite high.

There were a few points where the twists and turns of the road played to our advantage – at one stage the wind was sufficiently behind us that we were doing nearly 40 km/h, a turn of the road later and we were struggling to maintain 20 km/h!

We stopped for the obligatory photos at the ‘crazy dinosaur gate’ – I’d read about this area previously and was keen to take a look around but it was starting to rain as well as blowing like mad, so we didn’t linger long.

From there the 10km run into town seemed to go by very quickly and we managed to get into the hotel just as the rain really started to come down!

It was really great riding with Rob and Ivan today – had I been on my own I’d probably still be out there, and they’re both fun guys to spend time with (Rob had his headphones in playing him a mix of classic 80s, many tracks of which he decided to share with us by singing along – that was one advantage of the wind ;-))

I went out for a wander about town, which turned out to be pretty short as my raincoat is in my ‘other’ bag (which I don’t get till 1700 today) and it was raining again.

One thing I did manage to do was change $50 USD into Mongolian Tugriks so I’m prepared for our arrival in Mongolia tomorrow – I currently have 78,400 MNT in my pocket – not the best exchange rate (somewhat black-market currency trading in the local Mongolian market) but with it being Sunday tomorrow it’s better prepared than not and we have a rest day in two days on which we should be able to get a better rate at a bank.

Nearly time for tonight’s riders’ meeting so I’m going to publish this now and see how the internet is behaving after dinner and might update details of our border crossing tomorrow which sounds like it might be somewhat protracted.

Welcome to Mongolia

This evening before our rider’s meeting we were officially welcomed to Mongolia in a ceremony here at the hotel which involved some rather interesting singing, a shot of vodka, and a scarf for each of us – it was all rather touching. Hopefully here’s a video of a small section of it:

Being welcomed is one thing, actually getting there is looking a little more complex:

The border crossing is something of a circus because the Chinese won’t allow us to ride or walk across the border – it all has to be by motorised transport, so our bikes are going to be loaded into one bus, us in the the other and then driven across – expect it to take ‘some hours’… then we have 100km to ride to our first night camping which right now looks like it’s going to be a cold, wet and windy night…

On the plus side as you can see the border doesn’t open till 0900, so we get something of a sleep in, with breakfast not till 0730 (rather than the 0600 as it’s been the last few days).

Stage six riding data