to Ulaanbaatar: the end of our Central Asia stage

October 13, 2016

"Usually this is just a number" Pierre says, we are at the distance marker 64 to Ulaanbaatar. Now, this number is more significant. From Ulaanbaatar, Pierre will travel by bus to Irkutsk and catch the Trans-Siberian train to Berlin. Our plan is to fly to Hanoi for the South East Asia chapter of this trip. This ends stage 5.

The “Steven King Motel” kept us warm and safe during the night. We get going a little earlier than what has been our habit lately. It doesn’t seem quite as cold and the comforts of UB are calling.

The countdown begins. Just about every 10 km by the distance markers we stop. Rather we should say, Pierre stops to let us catch up. We are happy we did the extra kilometers yesterday; the wind is not so friendly today, we have crosswinds that make us struggle whenever the road turns a bit to the south. The road is up and down reaching a high point and almost undetectable short descent before climbing one more time to a checkpoint at distance marker 25 km.

Around the corner of the hill, we get our first glimpse of Ulaanbaatar with a brown haze hanging above the valley. It’s still a long way to our first destination, Peace Square for a picture in front of the huge Genghis Kahn statue. The traffic gradually builds; we have to weave our way between car lanes and bus lanes. Surprisingly, we find most drivers courteous to us, there is very little honking.

Then...we are there! For such a long time Ulaanbaatar has been this distant goal on a map. Now, 5300 kilometers from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, through the Pamir Mountains to Osh, Kyrgyzstan, into Kazakhstan, across Xinxiang China and central Mongolia, we are here.

The square was a couple kilometers past the road to our guesthouse. So after the final pictures ending this stage of our trip, we ride back to find the Danista guesthouse. It is in a good location, a couple of blocks off the busy Peace Avenue and just behind a shopping center with restaurants (yes, we admit it, burger king!) and a grocery store. After a shower and a shave we join Pierre to celebrate our arrival with pizza and beer.

Us riding the last stage to Ulaanbaatar. Thank you Pierre for riding with us and taking the picture.

Us at the Ulaanbaatar boundry. We were hoping for a better city sign, but this is all we found.

First sight of the city. There is a brown haze over the city, possibly connected to all the coal they are burning.....

We bypass the hotel and first head to the central square to get our photo taken with Genghis Khan in front of the parliament building.

Today's ride: 83 km (52 miles)
Total: 23,918 km (14,853 miles)

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