September 13, 2014
Adventure cycling: It's been like this for 20,000 kilometres!
True to what I'd been told the 'road' was easy enough to follow even without the electric pylons. But then they reappeared side-right just as I reached another peak and looked down at the next village of Butsagan. The people in the village weren't very friendly, (the kids were all in school,) but I finally found a man who wanted to help me find the right road out of the village just enough to raise an arm at an electric pylon and say "Antenna." I took this to mean just follow the electric pylons. Ah yes, I already knew that trick.
So I followed the electric pylons up a hill on the other side of the village, which led me up to a big antenna. But here the pylons ended, and I was once again cycling blindly out into the lonely landscape. But there was only one set of tracks going west and so I followed them in good faith.
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It was difficult to have such faith in such terrible roads and progress became painfully slow. Contrary to what Ewan's Mongol Rally team told me about their being 'no sand' there was lots of the stuff, although I couldn't really accuse them of misinformation given that they'd been on a completely different road. As it was my bike kept disappearing into patches of loose sand and coming to a grinding halt, or turning me sideways, so that I had to stop and push it for a minute before continuing, whereupon a minute later it would happen again.
When there wasn't sand there was washboard. Actually it was often better on the washboard because even though it was slow I didn't keep having to stop. I just bumped along at five kilometres an hour and hoped that my bike and my bones were going to survive the shaking.
I needed to keep my daily distances reasonably high though, because I only had 30 days to get across Mongolia and actually I'd read that the border would be closed on the weekend and my 29th and 30th days were a Saturday and Sunday, so I needed to do it in 28 days. The only way to do enough distance on days like this was to cycle all day and I rode from eight in the morning until eight at night, posting an underwhelming 59 kilometres for the 12 hours of effort. To put that in perspective, at that rate of progress had I been competing in the London Marathon I would have finished last, just behind the fat man who tried to run it in a deep-sea diving costume.
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And the next morning the road got even worse. It was as if someone had come in and dumped a load more sand over everything, so I even sank into the washboard bits now. Then I saw yet another Mongol Rally car coming and it stopped next to me. "I'm glad when I see you guys," I said to the two young men sitting in it, "I know I'm still going the right way!" It was an Australian team and the two men looked similar, both with big beards grown during weeks on the road, but actually they couldn't have been more different, at least in their opinions. "Well," said the driver, "It's funny you say that, we're a bit lost. Is there another road?" By now I was confident that I knew what the deal was so I told them that there was another road to the south that went across the desert which was probably better and flatter, but that this one was nice and had better scenery and went through the villages.
This caused quite a division between the two. The driver, who was cheerful and friendly, wanted to keep going on the scenic adventure route but the guy in the passenger seat, who I'll refer to as Old Grumpy Guts, wanted to go back and find the turn for the southern route. "It doesn't make that much difference really" I said as they argued about it. And I couldn't see that it would; either way they would make it to Bayankhongor by the end of the day. "It doesn't make that much difference to you" Old Grumpy Guts said to me, perhaps failing to notice I was toiling away on a bicycle for several days through sand, "But it does to us." I felt terribly sorry for the nice guy. "It's been like this for 20,000 kilometres" he said.
It made me realise how lucky I was in a way as we said goodbye and I saw them immediately stop to argue about it some more. First of all that I wasn't trapped in a hot car. Second of all that I was traveling alone. Ah yes, I longed for some company a lot of the time, but being alone meant so much more freedom. I didn't have to consult anyone about which route to take, didn't have to compromise. If Daniel had come with me I never would have been able to go all the places I'd been. He'd never have been up for sprinting across Siberia for example. Thats not to say it wouldn't have been good with Daniel, it might have been better, it certainly would have been different, but I was happy with what it was without him. In any case Daniel had found his own happiness, now in love and engaged, to a girl from his home province in Canada. He never would have met her if he'd been off gallivanting around the world, would he, which made me think. Imagine if I get all the way around, and then find out 'the one' was living in Newport Pagnell all along.
Almost as soon as I left the arguing Aussies the road actually improved quite a bit and I started to make faster progress. Then I came out of the hills and saw a few dust trails from cars and trucks in the desert to my left and realised I'd found the southern road again. Then the tracks all converged together onto a perfectly paved tarmac road that would run the remaining 100 kilometres of the way to Altay. After about a minute of my tyres running along the smooth surface I thought to myself 'Well, this is boring!" And it was! That difficult road had really been an adventure, the best bit of Mongolia so far.
13/09/14 - 59km
14/09/14 - 79km
*This is not my joke, it's Keith Hallagans, but mine's better because it's with camels.
Today's ride: 138 km (86 miles)
Total: 28,397 km (17,635 miles)
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