The day dawned clear, bright and calm – if a little chilly. After rider’s meeting and another great breakfast from the hotel we set off. As you can see below it was a pretty straight forward day ahead, with the…
A day in Sajnsand
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…
Wind and rain and cold (stage eight)
So the rain started about midnight! This was far from a welcome development given that the wind was still blowing strongly across the desert. Knowing we had 146km to ride that day made it even less welcome! The theory went…
Welcome to Mongolia (stage seven)
In the end the border crossing proved to be relatively straight forward and something of a non-event. As planned all our bikes were loaded onto one bus, us and our bags onto the other, and off we went. To leave…
Raining in the desert (stage six)
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…
The most interesting thing in town and stage five
The most interesting thing in town…? Us…! Xianghaungyi is a pretty small city, and the clearly don’t see a lot of westerners – certainly not arriving 30 at a time and wandering round their streets in a mix of cycling…
Stage four
Today was one of the days that I’ve been worrying about because it was down to be 164km, and there are four further days all of +/- 120km before we get another rest day. As it’s turned out, it wasn’t…
Stage three
Today was always going to be a short day so we had the luxury of a ‘late’ start – with rider meeting and breakfast at 0700. It also meant that there was plenty of time for sightseeing along the way.…
I need to learn to nap
Not a lot happened yesterday…! I tried to sleep in, but that didn’t work out so well – particularly since breakfast ended at the hotel at 0900. So then it was time for a look round town. Wandered down to…
Stage two
I realised that calling them ‘day one’ and ‘day two’ was going to get confusing because tomorrow is a day, but not a stage as it’s a rest day – so, today was stage 2 and day 2…! Here are…