I reached Altay in the morning. Anywhere else it would just be a small town, but with 15,000 people it was one of the biggest places I passed through in Mongolia. I wanted to find somewhere to use wifi. In the previous towns I had gone to the nicest hotel and asked to use the wifi for an hour and had always been welcome to do so, and so that was what I planned to do here. The first hotel I saw, the imaginatively titled 'Altay Hotel' next to the 'Altay Restaurant' looked quite big but a bit run-down so I went on to look for a nicer one. I reached the central square but couldn't find one, so I tried looking down another street. I asked around a bit, found quite a few hotels, all run-down, none with wifi. Then I tried some restaurants, but there was no wifi anywhere. I kept looking and was then directed towards a big building in the central square, but when I went inside I found it was an Internet cafe.

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All of this was very frustrating. An Internet cafe was no good - I wanted wifi because I needed to charge my laptop and upload the blog posts I had written that were saved. The woman behind the counter looked puzzled so I asked a man who had just walked in wearing a suit if he spoke English, thinking that I could ask him about wifi. He asked me if I could speak German and I said, in German, "A little," which is the only thing I can say in German, and therefore a completely accurate statement. He responded by talking to me in very fast and serious tones in German. Now I looked puzzled. He pulled an identification card out from his pocket and flashed it at me and asked to see my passport.

I really didn't need this. It was hot, I was bothered, now I had some official hassling me. The European couple I'd met had told me that they'd been forced to pay a bribe at a checkpoint because of corrupt officials and now maybe it was turn. I gave him my passport and he walked off with it, made a phone call. If he made up some story I definitely wasn't going to give him any money. Then another man in a suit came to check the passport. Fortunately he was okay and gave it back to me and everything was okay. Except I still hadn't found any wifi.

Finally after going all over town I ended up back at the Altay Hotel where I had started and went inside. Well blow me down if it wasn't quite nice inside and if they didn't have wifi. They even sat me in a empty conference room because it was the only place with an electric socket that I could sit. Finally I could get online! It really is nice when you are in such a difficult country and finally things go right. Then all the power in the building went off and everything stopped working.

I gave up on the wifi and went and bought supplies for four days, because now I had 250 kilometres of bad roads before the next village. I also spent a long and tedious hour searching the market for a bungee cord because one of my two had snapped and it was going to be really difficult to get everything on the bike without it. Of course there was no bungee cord anywhere, even in the little shops that really should have had one, and I ended up buying some thin rope and tying things on with that.

I had been in Altay for half the day, and achieved almost nothing, but at least now I could leave. That I did, taking a track out of town that appeared to be going the right way. A woman stopped me and told me that the road was closed. This seemed to be the words of a madwoman, how could the road be closed? It wasn't a road, was it? It was just a series of tracks, and even if something somehow blocked all of the tracks you could just cycle around it on the desert. I'd never heard anything so ridiculous, and I kept cycling.

It was actually a bit like a real road for a while, this track, and I passed a sign saying I was on the road to Khovd, which meant I was going the right way. Then I came to a road block. I say road block, it was a car parked halfway across the road with a man with one of those light saber things. A couple of trucks had just been stopped by him. I cycled past them but the man stopped me. I noticed he had a bomber jacket on with the words 'Mongolian police' in a motif on the sleeve, but otherwise he was just some guy. The car wasn't even marked, just an old beat-up motor. He told me in sign language that the road was closed. I tried to ask him why, but that appeared to be a ridiculous question to him and he waved me away angrily.

How could the only road to Khovd be closed? I went over to the truckers that had parked up and tried to find out why it was closed. They didn't know. When would it open? They didn't know. What was up with this ridiculous country?

I could have easily cycled around the road block by going across the desert on the other side of the valley but instead I went back to town and made the unusual step of going to the police station. I hoped rather optimistically that someone there might speak English. No chance. I expected them not to know anything about the joker who'd parked his car blocking the road, but they confirmed that the road was closed. Of course the simple question of 'Why?' was beyond anyone's sign language skills, but I did manage to understand that it would be reopened at six the following morning.

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It was already mid-afternoon so I thought I might as well just stay in Altay if I could find somewhere. I still needed a wash after all. I went back to the Altay Hotel, but the power was still out and the rooms were expensive anyway. I decided to conduct another thorough search of the town checking out all the crappy hotels that I'd seen before. I found a couple of new ones but none of them had wifi and I really would prefer to have wifi if I was paying to stay somewhere. Interestingly enough the receptionists in the hotels found the idea of wifi in a hotel to be a crazy notion. Also, I think I'm creating the wrong image with the word 'hotel'. I mean, these were crumbling buildings with a few spare rooms and the word 'Hotel' on the outside. It was often very hard to find anyone inside.

It had certainly been 'one of those days' and I really needed something to give me a lift. I thought it might be the Mongolian man coming over to me and looking like he wanted to help, especially when he addressed me in pretty good English. Then he stumbled closer and I realised he was clearly intoxicated. Very intoxicated. Well I told him what I was looking for anyway, and he seemed keen to help. First he wanted to throw me and my bike in the back of his friend's car and drive me there, but of course I couldn't do that, and who knew how intoxicated his friend might be, so I said no. Then he said he would walk with me, and put his arm around me and slurred; "You... and me... will go to a hotel." It sounded rather too much like a proposal. "Together?" I asked.

"Together. How much? How much... are you?"

I think he was trying to ask how much I wanted to spend. But either way he was making me feel uncomfortable and then he started talking about how he was poor and I realised he was going to ask for money or vodka or something in exchange for helping me. Seeing as how he was clearly going to be no help anyway I just cycled off at this point.

I was about to just go and cycle back out of the town the way I had come in, camp there again, and give the whole day up as a bad job, but then I decided to try one more hotel. There was a sign for a hotel pointing down a side street but I'd never been able to work out exactly where the hotel was. This time I asked a man and he pointed at one of the crappy buildings on the street and I went over to it. I was welcomed in by a man and woman who showed me quite a few rooms, who couldn't even understand what I meant by wifi. Still I tried walking around with my laptop to see if there was signal and in one of the rooms there was a hotspot signal coming from somewhere that I could pick up. It was also the cheapest room. "I'll take this one!!!"

It wasn't exactly luxury, and there was no shower. But I had four beds, three more than I needed in fact, and electricity and wifi, a trickle of water from the sink, and, best of all, a door that I could shut and forget about all the sillyness that is Mongolia.