Steve's Cycling Blog

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And the best of it was that for the first 37km it was actual tarmac road which was super nice. A number of the local cyclists who had come to the hotel last night also came out to join us this morning for the run through to the city gate.

Shortly after turning off the tarmac the long climb for the day began. From the tarmac road it looked like the first stretch up into the valley was about 1km, but that ended up being somewhat deceptive as it was over 3km to the top of that first stretch. The initial climbing was mostly around 5%, but the further into the valley we got the steeper it got, with 7%, 9%, then this sign:

Where the steepest section was a 12.4% climb. In all we climbed constantly for 15km for an altitude gain of 850m over that distance.

Lunch was at the top of the climb in an awesome location overlooking the next valley we’re going to cross.

The first descent and the ride across the valley floor were reasonably good, some corrugation and some pretty rough bits, but on the whole not too bad. The next climb just kept getting steeper, to the point where Ivan got off and walked his bike up. Grant and I were determined that we were going to ride up, and with a couple of stops when we lost traction we eventually made it – would have been quicker to walk, but that’s not the point!

For a while the track deteriorated again, though not to the state it had been prior to the rest day. The oddest thing is that this morning’s climb was on a decent well-made road which obviously receives regular maintenance, but as soon as we came over the brow of the hill we were back to multiple tracks of varying degrees of crap.

The last descent was clearly going to be quite long and it bean heading into a canyon which got progressively rougher and steeper until we came out the end of the canyon to be presented with an amazing view across the valley and down to the lake.

The next 5km of descent was fantastic – hard-packed earth with flowing curves and downhill to the river at the bottom.

We’ve stopped slightly earlier than anticipated today at an awesome spot overlooking the lake. There’s a local holiday camp of sorts here, which has some cabins and a couple of gers so some people have treated themselves to a bed – personally I’m happier in my tent on my own pitched away from everyone else so that I can get a decent night’s sleep without listening to other people snore, fart and shuffle about!

We can also now clearly see Russia across the lake beyond the snowcapped mountains. Being up much higher is also having a positive effect on the temperature – although it’s super sunny it’s quite a bit cooler than it was down on the plains, so hopefully getting to sleep will go well 🙂

Because we’ve stopped early tomorrow gets a little longer, but it seems we’re going to be stopping at our originally planned campsite, so maybe we will be doing some riding on border-crossing day.

That said, it sounds like one of the river crossing between here and tomorrow night’s campsite is impassable, so Andreas is currently our scouting a new route – so who quite knows, we’ll find out at 0530 tomorrow.

Riding data