In Ulaan Baatar

It's Monday afternoon, a scant 48 hours after arriving in Ulaan Baatar for our long-awaited XTreme Dork bike trip, and already I feel as though I know this city. It's a far more Westernized, open, cosmopolitan city than I had anticipated, well-stocked with food and equipment and much more connected to the outside world than Burma. It feels a bit like Calgary to me, a city sprawling over the foothills in a wide-open grassland. It's not as prosperous, of course, but I have been surprised at the number of shiny new cars on the roads, and the fairly European feel of the streets.

The dead hand of Stalinist city planning has been here, and our guesthouse, the LG, is located in one of those soulless apartment blocks that disfigure cities from Budapest to Bishkek. Lots of redevelopment is going on, though, and businesses and restaurants are springing up like wildflowers in May. We had a beer yesterday afternoon, sitting in the warm sunshine at the Grand Khaan Irish Pub (I'm not making that name up), watching the sophisticated young professionals of UB strolling by, cell phones glued to their ears.

I flew in from Beijing two days ago, assembled my bike and rode slowly into the city along a well-paved road in 23-degree sunshine, taking it easy on my untested legs and battling a savage wind which I suspect will be a factor in much of the cycling to come. I found my way to the LG, via a late lunch at another open-air beer place, the Khan Brau Haus.

Yesterday I awoke in my toasty warm guesthouse early and raced out on my bike to the airport to meet up with Audie and Serge, the other two Dorks on this trip. (Sadly Saakje, the other stalwart Dork, had to make the horrible choice between accepting a job she really wanted and going on a Great Adventure with her siblings, and chose with her head, not her heart. She will be sorely missed!) Unfortunately, I hadn't anticipated how cold it gets at night here, and it was only when my hands froze to my handlebars that I realized that it was only 1 degree, and that I'd left my mittens at the guesthouse. Audie and Serge arrived on Aeroflop and caught a cab into town and we spent the afternoon scoping out Ulaan Baatar, from the Stalinist pomp of Sukhbaatar Square (very reminiscent of Tian an Men Square) to the Tibetan Buddhist peace and beauty of Gandan Monastery.

Today has been spent in sleeping in and plotting our next moves. We have until July 30th according to our plane tickets, but our visas are only for 30 days, so we have to jump through a few bureaucratic hoops to get our visas extended. Having started the hoop-jumping, we then set off to find plane tickets to the far west of the country, the Altai Mountains. Our first stop, at the government MIAT Airlines office, was discouraging: the tiny Antonov-26 plane was too small to accommodate our bicycles. Our second stop, at private Aero-Mongolia, was happier, as their Fokker turboprop is big enough to take our bikes. We're booked to fly west in one week's time, since it may take that long to get the visas processed.

In the interim, we're probably going to test out our gear, our middle-aged bodies and our bikes on a short loop out to the Terelj National Park. I'm looking forward to the great outdoors, and it will be good to warm up our legs for the upcoming 2000 km of riding that we're planning.

The basic plan is to fly to Khovd, in far western Mongolia, and then spend the next 6 weeks riding back, first heading northwest through the valleys of the Altai (the last of the great mountain ranges of Inner Asia that I haven't yet visited), perhaps stopping for some trekking and/or horse riding. Then we'll head east, following the Russian border, as far as Khovsgol lake, where more trekking and riding await. From there, we'd like to head south towards the Great White Lake of Archangai aimag (province) and then due east into the old Mongol Empire ruins of Karakorum, past the Khulstayn National Park where Przewalski's Horse has been reintroduced into the wild, and back into Ulaan Baatar in time for our flights out of here at the end of July.

We're still unsure about road conditions along the way (a sign of the lack of preparatory research I've done for the trip), so our plan may change according to time or logistical constraints, or if we hear that we're missing a particularly beautiful area.

So stay tuned for (probably) irregular updates and photo uploads from the road!

Here's a map of Mongolia; our route is roughly Hovd-Olgiy-Ulaangom-Khovsgol Nuur-due south-east to UB

Here's another, better map. From Khovsgol Nuur, we'll head towards Moron, Tsetserleg and Hadasan before hitting UB.

I hope you enjoy a little armchair travelling with the Dorks over the next two months!!

Graydon