A cool morning greeted us outside our tents, the long wildflowers still sodden from overnight rain. Pretty wet by the time we’d packed up and negotiated the bog below the hot springs.

Did manage to not get any wetter negotiating these slippery little bridges.

Having backtracked to the stupa we visited, down the left of the river we went trying to find a suitable crossing point.

We did get safely across, but even then the best route up to the next pass was not as apparent as earlier in the trip. Normal transmission resumed and the last part of the climb over this pass got steep enough to have us pushing and warming up a little – but the warmth quickly disappeared on the ride down to the next river.

I even stopped to put some thicker gloves and extra layers on, but that was somewhat negated by falling in a rocky creek as we started to parallel the river!

Over that river, the initial gradual climb and cloud breaking up did help to warm us as lunch approached. The group of Malaysian tourists in a large convoy of new LandCruisers found us quite the spectacle – to my bemusement.

This is completely normal, surely?

Pushing again from here as the surface got slippy and steep.

No pushing down there.

Having crossed that basin, the exit was strangely twisty and not just straight up.

More walking though.

Probably our last time through two thousand metres altitude on the trip, soon dropping to the Orkhon Valley.

A fun descent it was too, strange to see a permanent building out in these parts.

Starting to look for a campsite before the Orkhon, we didn’t really have quite enough supplies so headed for the bridge (no fording this river).

Milling around a small ger collection on a busy road over the bridge, we were kindly gifted some beers by a passing motorist – somehow they survived the bumpy lava strewn ride into town ten kilometres away. Town, Bat-Ulzii, seemed a bit quiet but we found food at a place that doubled as one of the many Kapoake (replace the p) places we’d seen. While we were too early for a spot of singing, somehow this turned out to be one of the, if not the, best meals we had on the road – I’m still unsure what exactly it was though.

While we ate, an intense dust storm blew up from the north. Lingering over our meals longer, it finally eased and a nice campsite south of town was found to end one of our longer days.