Retrospective on the Trip

October 12, Palau

It’s been two and a half months since the end of our Mongolian bike trip, and my fall holiday (spent diving here in Palau) has provided a welcome opportunity to sit down and summarize our adventure with the advantage of hindsight.

Overall, the bike trip was one that seems better and better with the aid of hindsight. Looking at the pictures over and over (I have them set on screensaver), I’m struck with how picturesque a trip it was. We had such great weather (with the notable exception of the horrible day of rain leaving Moron), and the endless blue skies and infinite horizons provided visual pleasure every day. The combination of grasslands, traditionally dressed people, horses, snow-capped mountains and ethereal lakes made for that exquisite other-worldly feel that we had previously experienced in Tibet, the Tien Shan and the Pamirs.

The biking itself was much, much better than we had anticipated. There were some really terrible sections: the first few days out of Khovd, the first day out of Ulaangom, the day between Tes and Bayantes, the road leaving Moron and, worst of all, the dreadful dustbowl of construction coming into Ulaan Baatar. However, many of the days saw us on quite reasonable dirt tracks, and we had numerous days of over 90 km, and a few over 100 km. In comparison to the distances we covered on dirt roads in Tibet in 1998 and 2001, and in Tajikistan in 2004, we did more kilometres more quickly and with less pain. Partly this was due to the far lower volume of traffic in Mongolia, and partly it was due to the Mongolian habit of making their own path whenever it got too rough on the previous path. Valleys are often half-covered with a kilometre-wide network of vehicle tracks, and as cyclists, it was easy for us to pick the least washboarded section and ride on it.

The availability of food, a big worry in previous XTreme Dork expeditions, was never a big issue at all for us. In fact, Audie and Serge brought more camping food from Europe than we needed. Every small town that we passed through was well-stocked with the basics, and there were plenty of guanzes as well to feed us. Because Mongolia is connected by rail to Russia and Europe, there’s a surprisingly large amount of cheese, cookies, noodles and even couscous in the shops. We never went hungry.

As for camping, you can’t imagine a better country for camping. Wide open spaces and a tradition of nomadism mean the entire country is a huge campsite. The only two constraints are water (there’s not much surface supply in some places) and privacy; sometimes you want to be alone at night, but it’s hard to be out of eyeshot of nearby gers. Most of the time, though, people go about their own business after a half-hour social visit, leaving you free to cook and eat at leisure.

We were quite happy with our choice of route. Although the last part of the trip, from Khatgal to UB, was relatively heavily touristed and had more traffic than I would have liked, it was still pretty for much of its length. The scenic highlight, though, was definitely the Altai; the horse trek in the Altai Tavan Bogd park was spectacular, and most of the cycling days were as well, although the horse riding is definitely the way to get up close and personal with the mountains.

The central stretch was a very pleasant surprise. Between Ulaangom and Khatgal, we had anticipated 680 km of barren semi-desert, while in fact most of it was very beautiful grassland with magnificent semi-Siberian vistas to the north towards the Russian border. That was also the least travelled part of the trip; some days we saw less than 10 motorized vehicles all day, which makes for a perfect day of cycling. If anyone wants to cycle Mongolia, I would highly recommend making it out to the west for both wide-open spaces, and scenery.

The one important caveat for anyone contemplating a Mongolian trip is that navigation is very, very difficult. There are no signs on most roads, so you need a good map (good topographical maps are available in UB) and, even more vital, a GPS. Without the GPS, we would have been far more lost far more often than we in fact were. GPS: don’t leave home without one!

Anyway, I would rate Mongolia pretty highly on the list of great adventure bike destinations, up there with Tibet and Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. I’m glad we went, and I’d gladly go back again, although I would probably go back just to ride horses and climb mountains. It’s a huge outdoor playground, one of the last great open spaces of the world. So get on a plane and check it out for yourself!

I’ve added a table of our daily distances and statistics and locations (for the cycling geeks among my readers), and I’ve also compiled a Google Earth file of our trip (basically just our campsites) so that you can visualize where we went. I'll try to post them in a separate post.

That’s all for this blog, folks. I hope you enjoy the photos and the stories, and that it inspires some of you to go somewhere you’ve always wanted to go. Check out more photos at my Flickr account. I have enjoyed sharing this trip with you, and I look forward to writing my next blog on my next big trip; perhaps Turkey, Cyprus and Greece next summer?