8th Aug - Bike with CRAZY Russians

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A fun day biking. Only covered 35km on map distance but biked 85km!

A Lovely sunny morning. I am still suprised to see camels just happily crazing around the place...

Up early and on the road. I could not see any signs of civilisation around me and I had a really lovely morning sitting in the sun eating my cereal and having a cup of coffee. I did not realise that the short lift I had got last night had actually dropped me off further than I thought and on the wrong road. I was on the road going to the town of Tsagaan rather than on the main road which by passes the town. As I did not see any turn offs on the road I just carried on going for a couple of hours and was surprised when I could see the town off in the distance. Once I could see it I realised that I was on the wrong road and I needed to go there anyway to get back on track so off I went. I thought it would be good to stock up on water and also to buy some lunch at a restaurant.


I was very glad that I took the detour as outside the restaurant were 2 touring bikes and out came a very friendly Russian man to welcome into the restaurant a fellow cycle tourer. They spoke a little English and asked me to join them for lunch. I recognised them from the photos that German cyclist Pete had shown me a couple of days along. I mentioned Pete to them and we compared photos of Pete with each other.... a small world the world of cycle tourers in Mongolia. :-) Pete had met them about 1 week ago and helped them out with spares for their broken bikes.


I found there bike loading very funny. Beer and vodka had pride of place. They had no front panniers and so they were short of space to fit everything and where not balanced in terms of loading. Their front wheels came off the ground regularly as they were going up steep hills. I remembered what it was like before I got my front pannier rack in NZ. I think that is is easier with the weight distributed.


We pottered round town for a while trying and failing to find a bike shop that was open (closed on Sundays or something) and then asked directions for the right track out of town.


I headed on up the hill and waited at the top. Boris did not take long to catch me up but Serge went really slowly. I found out when he got to the top of the hill that he was only able to use 1 gear as the gears had broken in an accident a couple of weeks ago. Therefore he was biking across Mongolia on a FIXED WHEEL! Insane...

As we continued out of town I stopped and waited for them several times and explained that I thought that we were on the wrong track as we were going West-Southwest when we should have headed South for about 10km out of the town before heading West. It took about 1 hour to convince them - by which time we were at the top of a pass. Boris walked off to the top of a hill and used his binoculars and could see the route we should have been on off to the South. We laughed and headed down hill cross country... It was a very fun ride down with the Russians in fine spirits and it being a lovely sunny hot day.

When we came down off the mountain we over shot the first main road we came to. I thought Boris knew which road we needed as he had looked with binoculars from the hill top before we descended and so I just followed him. We took the second main road and headed West.


It was unfortunate that Boris heading down a hill too fast and straight into a hole in the road. He went flying through the air. It turned out that only one set of brakes were working on his bike and so he did not slow down fast enough. He was cut and bruised but more importantly his back wheel was very badly buckled. When we had a look at it, about half of his spokes were totally loose and so provided no support when he hit the hole. Oops. I had been really worried that my bike (Xena) would fall to pieces in Mongolia and that was old and worn but in comparison to the Russian's bikes Xena was in great shape. They had no tread on their wheels, only 1 working gear, buckled wheels but with beer, vodka and their fishing equipment they where as happy as anything :-)



We had all at some point fallen off our bikes in the last 3 days so had some good scares to show off!

We tried to improve the wheel so that the bike was ridable for about half and hour but I ended up having to leave them to fix the wheel as by this point I had only covered 35km. I knew that I would not make the border before my visa expired if I did not do 75km per day.

I really enjoyed biking with the Crazy Russians. They were fun guys and obviously touring at a very different pace to me. They were taking 3 months to travel through parts of Russia, into Mongolia and then back home again. They were averaging about 40km per day and stopping early to catch fish, put up camp and drink beer and vodka.


When I saw a big lake in the distance I realised that we had over shot the road we should have been on and I was now much further South than I should have been. I cut across the mountains on some local tracks hoping that my sense of direction was correct and that I would come out on to the correct main track. I stopped off to check when I came across a Ger camp. They were very friendly and gave me some food and invited me to stay. The guys had been drinking loads of booze so I decided not to take them up on the offer and push up and over the mountains towards the other main track and camp on my own. Before this though I stayed with the people in the Ger camp for about 1 hour and had a rest and enjoyed their company.


Spontaneous Mongolian wrestling to impress the foreigner...


The lads love showing off their horse riding skills :-)


Everyone from the camp of 4 Gers (plus horses and guns).


This little lad was trying to move this very very stubborn horse that did not want to go anywhere...


They showed me their homemade wooden guns and the catch from the day. I was duly very impressed.


I had only cover about 35km in terms of map distance today but actually biked 85km. It was rather frustrating in terms of getting to the border before the 17th but it was a fun day. I thoroughly enjoyed the company of the Crazy Russians and also the Mongolian family at their Ger camp. I was pretty tired by the time I put my tent up. It was dark and I just went straight to sleep.