Steve's Cycling Blog

Today has been our second rest day, and after the trials and tribulations of the last couple of days riding it’s been very welcome. If only Ivan and I (who I’m currently sharing a room with) had had the good sense to turn off our 0500 alarms it would have got off to a better start…!

The hotel provided us with an awesome breakfast this morning (I wish I’d taken a photo) – two fried eggs, sausages, bacon, bread and salad – absolutely awesome!

After a bit of washing-sorting I drifted down into town with the intention of getting a SIM card for my mobile WiFi – unfortunately I hadn’t taken my passport (which I knew from previous experience I would need) so I couldn’t get that sorted – luckily I ran into the hotel manager who was on his way back to the hotel so offered me a lift.

On the drive back I discovered how his English comes to be so good – he spent a year some time back working as a teaching assistant for a class of six year olds in an international school, the principal of which was a New Zealander.

Passport in hand I went back to town with three key objectives

• get a Mongolian data SIM – once I had my passport this proved to be relatively straight forward – let’s see how the coverage goes. Given it was only ₮30,000 (about £12) it won’t be too much of a loss if it doesn’t prove to be terribly useful
• next up was a haircut – Rob had seen what he thought looked like a barber in the bottom of PC Mall – the name was a little confusing until I discovered that the entire top floor of a rather large building was given over to a massive Internet Cafe, in which most people seemed to be playing online games. Anyway – Richard was also getting a trim, so I waited for a few minutes for my haircut. At ₮5,000 (about £2.20) it’s not the cheapest haircut I’ve ever had but it was certainly an improvement.
• change some of my USD into Tögrög (₮) – I’d change some on the black market in Erenhot, but was aware then I wasn’t getting a good rate so had changed only the minimum I could. Today’s rate was amazing with the bank giving me ₮1,995 per $ which given the interbank rate is ₮2,001 was great.

With the key jobs completed I continued to drift round town to see what there was to see. The answer proved to be not a great deal, but it was interesting none-the-less. Mongolian towns don’t seem to be as swept-clean as Chinese ones, and are somewhat more run-down looking, but on the plus side you don’t get the whiff of ‘drains’ here quite like you seem to in China.

I stopped in to a supermarket to pick up some more chocolate bars (they had Mars as well as Snickers in this store – bonus) and ran into a young Peace Corp chap from the US who is living in Sajnsand for two years while teaching English at the secondary school – he’s half way through and has been enjoying his time here. Apparently it’s compulsory for students to learn ‘some’ English, and many also continue to learn more than they are required to which explains why there is more English spoken here than in China.

Fuel is also pretty cheap here in Mongolia at ₮1,806 (about 62p) per litre, which makes the prevalence of Toyota Prius vehicles seem even odder than it did. Based on my estimate about ¾ of vehicles on the road are Toyotas, with a significant proportion of those being Prius – presumably they have a factory somewhere here. The other thing I’ve noticed about vehicles is that about half of them seem to be right-hand-drive, which for a country which drives on the right seems pretty weird.

From there is was back up the hill to the hotel where Ivan was playing with one of the toys he’s brought with him – a small drone – seems like great fun, hopefully I can get some of the video footage he shot of himself riding down the hill toward the town.

I’ve been slightly confused by the fact that all the signage in Mongolia seemed to be in Russian, where-as in the north of China there seemed to be a mix of Mongolian and Chinese. It turns out that what I’m seeing is in fact Mongolian, but written using Cyrillic script – essentially the Mongolian/Russian equivalent of Pinyin, which stems from the Soviet influence during the early days of the formation of the Mongolian Peoples Republic in the 1940s, and although the more traditional Mongolian script is seen it doesn’t lend itself to being written horizontally so is fairly rare.

Bruno and Pär are currently entertaining a group of local cyclists who have obviously heard we’re here and come for a visit:

Local Sajnsand cyclists who came up to our hotel to visit

Tomorrow we’re back on our bikes with the regular 0600 breakfast pre-departure.

As you can see we’ve 157km to cover tomorrow, and the wind is forecast to be unfavourable, so we’re hoping that an early start will get us well on the way before the wind gets up. Today it’s done the ‘right’ thing (unlike yesterday) and been calm at dawn and got increasingly stronger as the day has gone on, so if we have to have wind, let’s hope it does the same thig tomorrow.

Because we’re camping for the next two nights, and I have no idea about mobile coverage, it’s possible that this will be my last blog post until our next rest day in Ulaanbatar in three days time.

Pär – the one on the left in the above photo, takes awesome pictures – check out his photo-blog of our trip