Road to the Gobi

Mongolia Honeymoon is the next travelogue series on HarrisonFM. Here I’ll be writing and sharing our photos as we trek across Mongolia on our bicycles over two months of summer, aiming for weeklong chapters.

“Road to the Gobi” begins in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, with two bike boxes flown in from Japan and grand ideas of riding around the country for our honeymoon. Claire’s off for school, I’ve got the time to go big, so let’s try something audacious. The answer involved plotting this trip out to see a particularly wild part of the world with our bikes together.

Our first days in UB were just relaxing and orienting ourselves to an unfamiliar culture. Seeing street signs in Cyrillic for the first time definitely threw me. They seem familiar, yet are so distant. As a state firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence, that script was favored at the time for transliterating the Mongol language. English is sparse here but growing as Mongolia absorbs the greater world’s pop culture exports.

We quickly got an idea of the chaotic, clogged streets and the bus system, which I tired of after a day. Biking through the jammed traffic and busy streets can definitely fulfill a thrill seeker like me. It’s an activity only for summer, though, for Ulaanbaatar is the world’s coldest capital, with an average temperature of freezing year-round and a microclimate that traps cold, polluted air between the mountains and rapidly flowing winds above. No wonder so many people were out and about even late, enjoying the mild climate.

We had 5 days in the city with meandering goals daily. Thanks to the Buddhist influence, vegan options are surprisingly plentiful in Ulaanbaatar, though painfully sparse in the standard cuisine. Every vegan restaurant having a religious overtone gets exhausting, though slightly comical, since they all want to run “Supreme Master TV” on repeat. I really appreciated many of them having grocery stores attached, including dried goods that served us well as we got traveling.

Outdoor gear stores were a focus of Claire’s mainly, who needed a few pieces of attire to round out her kit after we rushed out the door to get this trip started. I had my mini Swiss Army knife confiscated at the airport since I carried it on instead of checking, and sadly couldn’t find a replacement — a major loss for a trip like this that I’m still smarting from.

Lastly, we sought out a cultural spot each day, hitting UB’s two major museums and its mountainous Zaisan viewpoint south of the city. It’s cool to see the portraits of Chinggis Khan and the history of nomadism and ancient warfare that define a proud people today. I was also bookmarking ancient historical spots in my Maps app to maybe drop in on by bicycle on the coming journey.

Finally, it was time to get going. The journey would start with us taking the highway south to Dalanzadgad, firmly within the Gobi Desert. Through a challenging route of little shelter, “featureless” steppe, and long distances between resupplies, it would at least be on tarmac the whole way. Cycling into desolate locations can be quite a spectacle in their utter absence of features, and the scale of it here is absolutely mind-blowing. Not a single wild tree exists once the steppe begins — we rode through a landscape denuded of any vegetation above knee height.

Setting out had us in for a shock of shocks, with the mild summer weather giving way to a lasting cold front that brought freezing temperatures and snow flurries. A half-day ride to reach the town of Zuunmod gave us an easy start, or so we thought — it was quite harrowing and had us on the door of hypothermia. Fortunately, we were able to get some good food and a greasy Soviet-style motel to warm up in.

After Zuunmod, and a last opportunity to kit up with some thicker gloves and leggings for Claire, we were off through the cold south for 500km of steppe to the desert. The wind was endless and biting, though often in our favor as a tailwind that we’ll likely pay for later returning north. We passed through Töv and Dundgovi aimags (Mongolian states or prefectures) into Ömnögovi, where the small city of Dalanzadgad was our goal. Traffic was a moderate nuisance but the potholed, single-lane road deters manic speeding. In later chapters, traffic will be even less of a concern as we expect to be on choppy double track and dirt roads. I’ll likely even ditch my helmet. The road to the Gobi was only the tutorial — stay tuned for chapter II!