Time, technological capability and inclination to post here during our first two weeks in Mongolia has been lacking. But here we are after a rest day in Tsetserleg with a little post coming up.

Ulaan Bataar as the biggest city by far in this sparsely populated land was interesting to spend a couple of days in making final gear purchases, assembling bikes and organising transport to the northwest for the three of us, our bikes and gear. It enabled us to have a look around. A former Soviet satellite, any ongoing influence of that era was not obvious to my eye.

Certainly weren’t any cars from that time (guess they’ve all decayed), Toyota is obviously king here – easily three-quarters of the passenger vehicles. I thought NZ was bad for used Japanese imports, here there are Priuses, or derivatives, everywhere you look (used imports, the right hand drive steering wheel is on the wrong side – not that that matters on dirt tracks). If it’s not a Prius, it’s a LandCruiser – the big, fancy SUV ones, not the workhorses. Pleasingly oversized pick-up culture has not made it here. As we learnt, Priuses will go anywhere!

There are a few Russian UAZ vans that are well suited to the rough conditions. It was one of these that we crammed three bikes in the back of, along with ourselves further forward, for two days of driving to Murun. From there we rode north to Lake Khuvsgul, which stretches north over a hundred kilometres close to the Russian border, for a little shakedown ride. This involved far more heavy rain than I expected and a lot of highway riding at a busy national festival time of the year. A hundred heavily loaded kilometres in storms and then a headwind were exhausting and a stark wake-up for me and Ian. The scenery helped distract us! But we got away from the crowds to have a lovely night camping by the lake. First herds of yaks ridden beside were a highlight.

Back in Murun we somehow got all the extra gear and food that we’d left at our accommodation on our bikes and headed south on a route of dirt roads that Rachel and Ian had devised to get us to the bikepacking.com Khangai Mountains Traverse route. Mostly smooth dirt roads with plenty of time along and across valleys with occasional climbs and downhills between the next one, there were still Priuses everywhere! But it was all part of the fun, as were beautiful riverside campgrounds, friendly Mongolians, stunning scenery, green green valleys, masses of animals, interesting food and mostly good weather punctuated with almost-daily afternoon thunderstorms.

Those few days of riding were so good, it would be hard to beat – so it proved with the bikepacking.com route, where it was still beautiful and we met plenty of interesting, curious and generous people – but the scenery and riding were just a little bit more harsh. A horrible section of corrugated roads, which we’d been warned about by the only other bikepacker we’d seen to that point, stretched for scores of kilometres either side of Zag. But that was overcome and people, food, vast greenness and views, animals, seeing such a different place are more than enough compensation for the harder points.

This is the first new, and very foreign to me, country I’ve been to for quite a few years – combined with the most bikepacking I’ve done for a long time. So it’s not all easy, but I’m slowly getting my legs back around the challenges. Such a foreign language and alphabet (Cyrillic) is something none of us have really got our heads around, trying and failing to communicate with so many friendly people is quite frustrating. But we get by and have some entertaining and charming encounters.

The conditions haven’t been overly harsh, yet some gear I’ve had for years inconveniently failed near the start of nine days in remote areas. One of which was my air mattress, despite repeated attempts to repair it I eventually left it in the trash. The hardness of sleeping on the ground is not too bad (Mongolian beds are very hard anyway), but by the wee hours the ground is cold – particularly at 2500 m. So I haven’t been sleeping much at all, but am well rested in my spacious new tent (a two-person tent for one person was a good upgrade for such a long trip with a lot of gear). I found and bought a folding foam mattress today, so I should be ok – if I can fit it on my bike somewhere!

Rest day is almost over, heading for the Orkhon Valley tomorrow so I should make the most of this bed and sleep. I haven’t managed to process photos as I normally would, most are still on my camera, but here is a photo dump from my phone as some sort of consolation if you managed to read this far.