In the morning I went to the garage of the hotel in Khovd to get my bike. I looked a bit closer to the ground, and saw a lot of nails and other nasty iron things. You really have to keep your eyes open here to not get a puncture. We went to fill up the bike and get some supplies as it was a long way to the next big city which is Altai.

You leave the city by going up a hill. On top of the hill you have a nice view and there is what I call the buddha hill. It is a pile of rocks with blue ribbons. I don’t know what exactly it means but I will find out 🙂 I was stopped by a guy who wanted to have a chat. Friendly guy, but we had to move on. The offroad was great, and we could easily ride 90kph on the gravel in the start. After a while we noticed a lot of construction works were ongoing.

The country is definitely transforming. They are building asphalt roads, and I guess over a few year it will be here. The economy is growing fast here. The country is rich of minerals and the buyers are close. Good infrastructure explains itself. But how will it affect the people? This great country has been about gers and animals for ages. I wonder and was thinking about this when riding.

The offroad got a bit more technical after a while. There were many parallel tracks. Some had a lot of washboards. Other had soft sand. Others had curves and ups and downs. Well the main thing was to be concentrated, but I enjoyed the ride. We advanced well, and after 80 km or so we reached an unreal stretch of asphalt for about 50km. The change is coming faster than expected.

We pushed on and got hungry. But where is the shade here? It was already warm in the afternoon, above 30 degrees. We found some shade under the road construction. Not very nature, but we cooled down for a moment and rode on.

By the evening we got to a town called Darwi. We stopped to get some supplies. There was also a bus with locals who were going to Ulan Baator. I think half the bus got out to check my bike. They did not jump on it at this moment 🙂 I don’t mind as long as they are curious. From what I see Mongols love motorbikes.

We left the town and kept riding. It was good offroad but bumpy. I was thinking what a good job our suspension was doing. I noted my front tyres was loosing pressure again, so we stopped to inflate it. Luckily we did, because our jerrycan with spare fuel got loose, and was hanging on a wire in the back. Luckily it did not get in the rear wheel and we didn’t loose it.

We checked the GPS to see how much time sunlight we had left. Normally around one hour before sunset I stop to setup camp. We saw some wild horses and followed them. A bit further were some hills. Nice spot to hide the tent from the road. There was no water, but we had some with us.

We set up camp had a big dinner with bread, chicken pastry and noodles. There was great view on a snowy mountain peak. It was Saturday night, but we went to bed early. Tomorrow would be a big day.