Steve's Cycling Blog

Today has been our first off-road day which has been great fun – nice to break up the tarmac with some gravel and dirt!

Stage 13 rider notes

A welcome change to our routine this morning – bags not required until 0600, the same time as breakfast which means that 15 min of standing round in the cold with nothing to do is gone 🙂

Out from camp and we were on mostly dirt roads which make for great riding, where the roads are gravel they’re significantly less pleasant as they end up rutted and corrugated.

I watched the lunch truck head up the hill and followed in that direction, only to see them coming back towards me some 15 min later – it seems they were lost! It also turned out that I was less-lost at that point as somewhere I’d missed a flag and a turn, but managed to loop back onto the route which added 2.5km to my day!

Between camp and lunch were two reasonable sized hills, but on the dirt roads they were relatively easy going and the downhills were awesome fun 🙂

After lunch things got (lots) tougher, with one long steep gravel climb, and then two shorter, but steeper climbs to follow. By now we were mostly on rough gravel roads which didn’t make the downhill as much fun because it was just way too rough.

Coming down the valley from the last significant climb we passed a massive mine – it must be some 5km long by about 1km – apparently it’s a combination of copper and gold being extracted.

At the last town we passed by Grant and I got the instructions and the flaging a little confused, but eventually found the correct path, and for only the second time today the route decided to load correctly on my Garmin which was extremely handy as following the flags was difficult in the wandering multi-road ‘system’.

On his MTB Ivan was first into camp this afternoon, but I was only about 15 min behind him at 1445, and Grant, who I’d been playing leap-frog with all afternoon was a further 15 min behind me. Others have been trickling in over the course of the afternoon, but today has been a much longer and harder day for many.

After ‘only’ 7:30 on the road I’m feeling well shaken today and suspect that my forearms and shoulders are going to be a little tender tomorrow.

Now the rain has come, which could make tomorrow’s off-road riding kind of interesting, though it seems like it’s only going to be a few spits here there’s thunder rolling in the clouds around us.

Even the lunch trucks haven’t made it in to camp yet, so dinner’s being pushed back to 1830 to give them and other riders a chance to get in – one of the good things about Mongolia at this tie of year is that it doesn’t get dark till gone 2130 which gives those keen to ride plenty of tie to get in.

Mark and Miles have been doing an awesome job of feeding us – tonights dinner was a chicken and vegetable stir-fry with rice, which when you consider they’re cooking on burners on the ground, in a tent, in the middle of nowhere, to feed 35 people, is damn good going!

Last in to camp were Ruth and Rob who’d been on the road for 14.5 hours by the time they got in – that’s one very long day – my hat off to them I don’t think I could manage that!

Riding data