Our last evening in Ullanbattar, Ariunna invited us over to her house for dinner.

She and her mother had made an incredible feast, and invited some other Americans over to share it with us.

The meal was huge and delicious, with two fresh salads, fried sausage, meat pies, Manty, homemade Solyanka (my favorite), roast chicken drumsticks, and even a big cake to celebrate Scott’s birthday.

Ariunna then took us out to a traditional Mongolian song and dance show, where booming announcements in English heralded 2 and a half hours of performances varying from giant group dance numbers to solo throat singing renditions of everything from traditional tunes to western favorites.

My favorite was the throat singers, for sure. They appeared in many different acts, often accompanied by lutes and bowed instruments called horse head fiddles.

After the concert, we headed up to the top of the mountains to the south of the city, where there is a large Soviet monument to cooperation between the Mongolians and the Soviets.

It was a very popular place for young people to hang out and as we were leaving, we even spotted the contortionist from the show that we’d watched earlier. She’d come up here with some friends to watch the sunset as well and was contorting here body so her friends could take pictures of her in front of the sunset.

It was a great last night, and we thanked her again and again before leaving to head back to the Hotel to pack.

The next morning, we feasted on the last bits of internet before we packed up our things, strapped them down on to the Speed TRs, and hit the road.

We made it to the train station with plenty of time to spare, and climbed on. It was platzcart again, so thank goodness, there was plenty of room for the bikes. I also got one last chance to speak Russian before plunging back into China. A barrel chested Mongolian fluoride mining engineer came over to speak with me. He spoke very little English, but was fluent in Russian, and we went on for hours chatting about the history of Mongolia, reasons why the great horde came to power and fell (my knowledge in these areas was all thanks to the wikireader), and the peculiarities of the fluoride market. He sold almost all of his fluoride to Russia, and the majority of his Russian sales went to firms in Buryatya. I had no idea Russia had such an appetite for fluoride!

He laughed when I expressed this: “They have bad teeth!” he said, flashing me his own set, which was itself none too shiny and manageable.

We did our best to go to sleep early on that train ride, for we pulled into the border town of Zamin Uud at the crack of dawn.

Zamin Uud was only 7 kilometers from the Chinese border, and we figured we would be able to easily wheel across. So it was with great confidence that we unfolded our cycles, strapped our bags down, and fended off all the cab drivers who attempted to convince us that it couldn’t be done.

But when we arrived, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, at the road that lead to the border, it was a madhouse of honking jeeps and screaming people, and a huge police roadblock. We headed up to talk with the guards, who confirmed for us that it was illegal to wheel across into China. So we would be needing a jeep…

We headed then over to find some chaps who might be willing to drive us. Tons of jeeps were already lined up and waiting for passengers, so it was certainly a buyer’s market.

We selected a couple of guys in an old soviet jeep who seemed especially friendly, and were not driving too hard of the bargain. They also spoke some bits of Chinese, which helped lubricate the wheels of communications.

It looked like they were using a system not dissimilar from that used by the uzbek border officials, in which at the shout of one man, the entire line would be allowed to flow into china for a moment, the when the road seemed full enough, cut off, like pulling a draft of beer.

And it looked like the next pint was going to be pulled any minute now, for the jeeps were all stating their engines, and beginging to whoop and holler as we wheeled our bikes over.

Our two drivers, one in a bright pink shirt, one in deep purple, rushed to load our things into the van and then we were off!

It was a wild ride.

All the jeeps burst forth, drag racing down the road, taking up all lanes and the shoulders, passing each other when they could. Our drivers turned up the music, downshifted into second, and just put their foot into the old soviet jeep. The ride was both terrifying and exhilarating, and the termination of the ride at the Chinese border was both relief and letdown.

We walked into the Chinese customs hall, and things we very clean. Cleaner than anything we’d seen in weeks. The system was also newly automated, so that no one needed to fill out customs cards. Instead, we just put our passports down onto a large scanning machine, and it did optical character recondition on the documents and printed our entry card for us. Was it possible that China had developed perceptibly even in the few months since we’d left her?

The border official seemed pleased with all the stamps in my passport and bubbled at me in English about how he had family in Indonesia… knowing Indonesian-Chinese they were probably running the place.

We exited the customs hall and proceeded over to wait for our jeep to make it through the vehicle inspection. While we waited, I took out the ukulele and played Queens of the Stone Age’s tune, “no one knows.” The other travelers who were also waiting for their jeeps to make it across gathered round and listened while the customs agents took their sweet time inspecting the Speed TRs.

Finally our things arrived, we paid our pink and purple shirted friends, and we were off into the city of Erlian. Erlian was quite a place. We were excited to be back in china for many reasons but not least among them was the availability of noodles. Food in Mongolia had been interesting, but also not our favorite of the entire trip. In fact we’d both been losing weight ever since we left the culinary womb of Uzbekistan, and it seemed high time to start 吃ing hard again.

So once we were in Erlian, we stopped into a noodle shop, and ordered two big bowls of lamb noodles, embracing the return of not only those chewy thick Chinese soup noodles, but also the availability all kinds of condiments at the table.  I poured hot oil, soy sauce, and vinegar into my soup with abandon, as though making up for lost time.

We exited the restaurant, and asked the owner for directions to the train station as we hoisted our packs back onto our shoulders. At the train station, however, we discoverer that we would need to wait until the next day to get a seat on a train to the Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot, so we headed over to the bus station.

Have I mentioned recently how much respect I have for Chinese busses? No matter where you are in China, no matter how sold out the trains and planes might be, there is a Chinese bus that will get you were you need to be. My opinion of bussing as an industry has only grown as AsiaWheeling has progressed, and for me China is right near the top, just under Thailand, perhaps.

Sure enough, there was a bus leaving for Hohhot within the hour. We bought tickets and began plugging our various peripherals into the wall socket in the station to charge them a little before we left.

As we were doing so, another startlingly drunk man approached us. He cracked open a bottle of Er Guo Tou, a heinous 70% alcohol sorghum liquor that is truly undrinkable, and began sipping it from the bottle. He came closer and tried to talk, but was mostly able to splatter us with saliva and stutter incoherently. He then attempted to make up for his inability to speak by waving his hands around in vehement gesticulation, splashing the terrible reeking liquid everywhere. We did our best to be simultaneously polite and brush him off, but succeeded in neither.

It was close enough to the time our bus was leaving, that we attempted to busy ourselves packing our things up while paying just enough attention to not enrage the guy. We finally apologized, excused ourselves, and climbed onto the bus.

The very drunk man had been holding tickets for our bus, we’d seen them. But it seems that either the powers that be had decided not to let him board, or that he had wandered off and gotten lost, for he was not on the bus as it pulled away from Erlian, through a giant archway of French kissing dinosaurs, which marks the entrance to the Erlian to Hohhot highway.

Much like they had in Mongolia the nation, here in Chinese Inner Mongolia the semi autonomous region, they were very proud of their fossil collections and build many statues of dinosaurs. As we drove along the steppe, we could see them out of our window, and they just refused to cease, and for kilometers the roadside was studded with life sized concrete dinosaur statues.

On the way, our bus collided mildly with a semi-truck, bending one of its antennae-like rear view mirrors. This caused a slight delay, as everyone on the bus felt they needed to climb off, inspect the damage and then weigh in in the argument as to whose fault it was: the bus or trucks. We attempt always to stay neutral in such conflicts.

It was just after dark when we finally reached the city of Hohhot and unfolded the bicycles. We were surprised to find the place lit up like Las Vegas, and absolutely busting with Chinese business hotels. We really had the pick of the litter, so we rode around for a while testing our various places, before settling on the hotel.

We woke up plenty early on Scott’s birthday. We had plans to do a really serious wheel, all the way out to the Tarelj national park, 40km outside of Ulaanbaatar. Depending on how we planned our route inside the park, this could be as much as 100 km of wheeling. We had mapped the whole thing out on Google maps, and it looked like an amazing loop.

We began by loading up our packs with foodstuffs that we had purchased the night before; we also included sweaters, a large map of the area around Ulaanbaatar, including most of the Terelj national park, and our cell phones, just in case. We then headed around the corner to a grocery shop and bought 5 liters of water each. We stashed all the stuff in our bags, strapped them down and headed out into the city.

We were lucky. Traffic was not bad as we pounded south and east, past the ger district where we’d wheeled that first day and on into the countryside.

The larger freeway type road that we were riding on petered out into a crumbling two lane highway a few kilometers outside of the city, and with it the traffic fell even further.

We hit our first security checkpoint not far after that, but they seemed totally uninterested in us as we cautiously wheeled through.

It has been blazingly sunny when we left Ulaanbaatar, and had been cloudless for our entire time there, but as we road on clouds began to roll in adding a certain appropriately lonely feeling to the landscape. This was wide open country, with barely any trees in sight, you could see the topography of the land, flowing out for miles in front of you.

We rode by a rather large looking missionary operation out here, which was puzzling since there appeared to be nearly no one around, but then again I guess these were still probably some of the most densely populated non-Ulaanbaatar areas in the whole country.

We stopped next to an old beaten up car, hoisted up onto a block on stone, so that we could take a leak.

If anyone can explain to us what the sign underneath it means (Khurd Ukhel?), or even better why the old car is significant to the message, please do so in the comments.

It was great to be out of the city, in the fresh air, wheeling hard over these rolling hills. The world around us was beautiful and we could count on it getting much better before it got worse. A few kilometers of hard wheeling later we spotted our left, turning off the main highway and heading towards Tarelj.

We decided to stop there to snack a bit. It was going to be a long day, and maintaining blood sugar would be key.

We snacked on some delicious dried horse meat that we’d bought at the super market, and some little sesame rolls which we squeezed some Russian cream cheese onto .

It started to rain ever so slightly as we finished our snack, but it stopped as soon as we put our sweaters on and started wheeling again.

We continued to wheel on, through gorgeous wide open country, just drinking in the refreshing nature of the landscape.

When we saw this sign that let us choose between Tarelj (the trees) or Baganuur (the factory), we put away all thoughts of the Russian space program’s launch site in Kazakhstan by a similar name, and the associated debris fields which we would have liked so very much to have visted while in Kazakhstan, and kept to the left.

Not far after that, we hit our next checkpoint. We pulled up to the booth, and to my surprise the fellow sitting in there said “ztrazvuitye!” (a formal hello in Russian). I responded to him excitedly in Russian, but he seemed to take some sort of offence, and called out to us for 7,000 Tugrug each. I did not have exact change, and when I handed him a 20,000 tugrug bill, he laughed and took it, handing me a giant stack of receipt like vouchers, and waving me on. I stood there demanding my change, but he just kept waving. Now the giant soviet transport truck behind us was honking deafeningly, and we just wheeled on.

I took out the stack of vouchers and could see that each one of them showed that the proper tariff for a normal car was just 1,000 tugrug. He had just taken us for quite the ride. But in a desert this beautiful, one can’t waste their time dwelling on the only negative thing that’s happened since we got to Mongolia… well with the exception of some truly hard to eat dishes.

It was a desert, be sure of that, dry and mostly devoid of plants and animals, but it did not feel that way. It did not feel desolate, instead the Mongolian steppe felt somehow rich, mysterious and inviting, all good motivators to wheel on.

Soon we began to spot little encampments of gers along the way, which we had been trained to identify by their clean white exterior, and arrangement into grids to not be the homes of locals, but large ger-based hotels that are set up to serve tourists.

Soon we came to a much wetter place, where a long river snaked through the center of the valley. Now we reached our third checkpoint.

Here too the attendant called out to me in Russian, but similarly was vaguely offended when I replied in kind. I showed him the giant handful of receipt/vouchers that I’d gotten from the second checkpoint, and he laughed as if to say he’d seen that one before. We proceeded to pay him 4,000 tugrug each to get into the park, and he provided us with a much more legitimate looking ticket, which even explained in English that our money would be put towards the betterment of the park, and maintenance of it’s natural wonders. That was a heck of a lot better than the bottle of Chengis Vodka that the fellow at checkpoint two was no doubt thinking of investing in with the money we’d paid him.

We wheeled across the long wooden bridge which spanned the river and headed from there into the park. Now the traffic fell to almost none, with the presence of a car being just as likely as that of a horse and rider, and either one being interesting and unexpected.

We wheeled deeper and deeper into the park, watching the river’s valley revealed below us as we slowly climbed in elevation.

We passed a family selling camel rides, and thought briefly that one of the most common questions when someone sees the AsiaWheeling business card is “Well, have you ridden a camel?” We had the chance here to forever more answer yes to that question, but from our vantage point we could see the well trodden loop that each tourist takes on his ride, and just couldn’t bring ourselves to do such a senseless thing.

So on we rode, deeper into the park. The mountains started to grow nearer to us, now not in the distance at all, but by the roadside, then we road turn and began to actually climb into them. As we rode further and further into the mountains, things began to green up more too. Now we could see trees changing color on the mountainside, and there was enough grass for cattle to be grazing around us.

Mongolia has a geology that is uniquely positioned to do a great job of preserving fossils, and they were proud of it out here, with life sized statues of dinosaurs being not an uncommon site along the roadside.

Now things we really getting lush, with trees and shrubs lining the road. Something about coming out of the city and through the desert makes the green all the more intense, drawing you in. It might also have just been the polarization of the Dawn Patrols. But, as with all these things, the truth almost certainly lies in the middle.

We were well into the mountains now, and as we pulled onto a large and gravely uphill section, we spotted a rustling in the bushes nearby the road, and out popped a Mongolian man on horseback, drunker than anything we’d seen on the entire trip. He was like a zombie, sloshing around in his saddle, with a cigarette permanently glued to his lower lip, the filter deep in his mouth. He did not spot us until he was almost right next to us, and as his horse decided to make a turn to head uphill there was a moment when I thought he might fall right out of his saddle and onto the ground. But he had developed some very deep seated reflexes and twitched back upright. Scott called out to him, asking whether we were in Tarelj or not, and whether the road we were on would indeed loop back to Ulaanbaatar.

His answers appeared to be in the affirmative, but it was hard to tell for he was truly now more beast than man.  He made a motion and some gurgling noises which might have been best interpreted as a challenge to race him up the hill, and then galloped off.

Extreme Stuff.

At the top of the hill we paused for a moment, reasonably confident from our investigations of the map that this was the highest point on the wheel, and therefore marked the 2/3 point of the wheel.

After we crossed over that crest and began wheeling down, things became even greener. We were riding bow through meadows backed by forests. All day the weather had been oscillating between bright sunshine and dark rainclouds, but here it felt as though we’d passed through the darkness and come out into the light.

Then, suddenly, we came upon a huge luxury hotel. This was unexpected. We were suddenly wheeling through manicured lawns, by tennis courts, and eventually into the entrance of a huge 5 star hotel. What was this place doing literally in the middle of a deserted national park? It felt like we’d entered a dream world… Could this place actually be real?  Were we delirious?

Well, dream or not, it seemed as good a place as any to ask for directions, so we headed in.

The front desk staff spoke perfect English, and was more than happy to pour over the map with us. They confirmed the worst of our fears, however, which was that while there was a way to head all the way through Taralj, looping around back towards the city of Ulaanbaatar, it was not on exactly what you’d call a road, and they assured us that from here on the way was unwheelable.

What this meant was that the 2/3 point that we’d though we’d hit a while ago was not even a half way point, and that, unless we decided to sleep in a Ger or at the 5 star hotel, the entire wheel was going to be much more like 140km. This was nothing to face on an empty stomach so we sat down on the steps of the hotel to have another snack.

While shoveling thumbfulls of funky tasting peanut butter into our mouths, and tearing into another package of Jerky we decided that we should just try to wheel the whole way home. A brief calculation suggested that if we raged, we would probably be just be able to make it home before dark. In our favor was the fact that it was more downhill on the way back than on the way here, as well, but not by much…

So we wheeled on, really tearing into it now, with a new resolve and a new stomach full of processed foods to keep fueling us into the ride. And so we started climbing, up and out of that valley and down the gravelly hill where he’d seen the very drunk horseman.

We rolled on, through the next valley, over the crest of another set of hills, and then into a long slowly downhill sloping straight away.

As we rode, we were joined by another rider, this one on a horse, with the help of the downhill, we were going just barely faster than him, and gave the man our best as we rode by.

As we rode back across the long wooden bridge, a work crew was now active down in the river, piling up rock for a new concrete bridge that was under construction.

The sky continued to threaten rain off and on as we pedaled out way back up and over yet another set of hills, and finally back onto the straight away towards Ulaanbaatar.

It rained briefly on us again as we pedaled by that old dead car. The rain stopped quickly, leaving us riding along on a slick wet road.

The road was beautiful, but dangerous. It reflected the world around us like a long thin strip of mirror, laid out in the sandy desert soil, but also hid untold obstacles. Twice, I rode through what looked like just more glistening rode, but turned out to be a deep, water filled pothole that almost flung me over my handlebars.

The sun came back out once more as we drew closer to Ulaanbaatar, exposing the countryside in some of the most dramatic hues imaginable, and conjuring rainbows all around us.

Sunset was just laying in for real as we completed the last leg into Ulaanbaatar, triumphant in completing what would almost certainly be the longest ride of the entire trip.

After spending a day acclimating to the Ulaan Baatar streets as modern nomads, it was our time to investigate the inner-workings of a new economy.  Mongolia, which had a GDP per capita of $1,573 in 2009, was now boasting a booming minerals extract sector.  This drove corporate profits and foreign direct investment up, making the Mongolian economy a veritable proto-kazakhstan, and explained the presence of Irish pubs, Lexus SUVs, and commercial bank branches which dotted the capital city.

Today was to be a lucky and fortuitous day, as we had the opportunity to wear the most presentable clothing we owned, which at this point was for both of us a pair of well worn jeans and shirts which were to hopefully ment to be worn wrinkled.  We polished our shoes in the divice provided at the door of the glorious and fortuitous Wen Zhou Hotel that morning and strolled into the blazing Mongolian sun before Ariunna arrived in her charriot.

Today we were to have the opportunity to speak to Jargalsaihan Dambadarjaa, chairman of Xacleasing and a seasoned financial professional known regionally for his adept employment of Social Media.  As a prolific blogger concerned with the well being of his countrymen, Mr. Dambadarjaa engages sociopolitical issues through both his publishings and the daily work he does at the head of Xacleasing, a member company of Tenger Financial Group.  With Ariunna, Dr. D’s daughter, at our side, we considered some final questions for the seasoned financial professional in this no doubt arduous and volatile financial climate.

XacLeasing, the firm which Dr. D chairs engages in what it discribes as a kind of Microfinance.  While generally considered a socially organized financial arrangement in which money is pooled to provide loans on the magnitude of 3 to 4 figures, microfinance in Xacleasing’s case deescribes loans generally considered small by international commercial banks.  In the case of Xasleasing, these loans to individuals, small ventures, and medium sized enterprises are collateralized by assets such as construction, transport, or mining equipment, and in the occasional case, real estate.

With Dr. Dambadarjaa, we discussed the nature of recent growth in the Mongolian economy driven by resources, the fledgling financial market, and the gigantic untapped potential on regional borrowers and lenders, most of whom were modest in size.

He encouraged us to continue our investigation of the economy through his firm, and to that end introduced us to the Philipp Marxen, a recent recruit from Germany who now headed up Tenger’s China investment office.

Philipp went into detail describing Tenger’s efforts in developing microsavings accounts with no minimum balance marketed toward first time bank customers in the country.  I could relate to the fellow as a lad with a taste for adventure and a penchant for frontier markets.  With experience leading investment project’s in Paraguay’s agricultural market and a licensed derivatives trader on the European Energy Exchange, Philipp  came to Mongolia seeking career development alongside the change to do something truly different.

After an informed explanation of the regulatory environment of Chinese consumer finance, Philipp invited us out for  lunch at a local Indian restaurant which apparently garnered some fame.  Sipping down Lassis, Philipp delved into his background further.  By the time we had finished, the Mongolian microfinance landscaped looked significantly more fascinating than it had when it was completely opaque that morning.

Strolling off the rice and curry, we walked to the splendorous main square in front of Mongolia’s parlament, the great Khan holding court atop a mighty steed.

Across the street, we saw a forlorn pink building in a fantastic location.  Upon further inspection, it revealed itself as the Mongolian Capital Market, commonly known as the Mongolian Stock Exchange.  Rapping on the door and speaking to the attendant, we were able to garner a guided tour through the establishment.  Each broker member of the exhage has a seat at the exchange to trade on behalf of its clients, and the exchange is open for one hour each day.  For most of Asia’s exchanges, the Mongolian Stock Exchanges trading hours represent a lunch break.

Fascinated by the exchange’s earnest and deserted interior, we perused the walls, looking at charts of bond issuance and stock offerings over the past couple of years.  We took a lucky moment to host a brief press conference in front of the marble backdrop of the press box.

Considering the challenges and thrills of operating in such an environment, our minds entertained ideas of new ventures in Mongolia.  Was this country to become the next Dubai or the next Kazakhstan as a result of its newfound resource wealth?  How much of the extracted value would recycle its way back into the economy of the nation?  Was the role of a small and illiquid equity market on its way to playing the role of its larger Indonesian counterpart?  We pondered thee thoughts over a small feast of mayonaise carrots.

And with that, we prepped our bodies for a next day of rigorous wheeling with a night of rest.

The next morning we checkout out of the Sunny Motel, thanking them, and storing our luggage in one if the rooms that was currently being renovated.

Always in search of internet, we headed to a certain café that had been recommended very highly by the lonely planet, a place by the name of Michelle’s French Bakery. We had every reason to expect it to be therefore mundane. We were pleasantly surprised, though. It was probably the highest concentration of foreigners that we’d experienced since Hong Kong, but the food was decent, the baked goods better than decent, and the coffee not bad either. The internet was fast enough to get things done, though the owner seemed to think that if he typed the wifi password in for you there was no way for you to retrieve it later (shame on you! just change your password from time to time…) and we felt just fine about biding our time there and waiting for a call from the Chinese business hotel.

Before we got a call from the Chinese business hotel, however, we got a call from a woman by the name of Ariunna.

She had been one of my father’s students at Grinnell College and had returned to Ulaanbaatar after graduating. We were in luck, she would be around during our time here and was more than happy to show us around. She sounded sweet as pie, and as I headed back to deliver the good news to Scott he was on the phone with the Chinese business hotel, which I might start from now on more properly referring to as the Wen Zhou Hotel. We were doubly happy  (to reference Chinese ligature 囍), for they also would be able to accommodate us.

Knowing now that in-room ethernet was in our future, we closed up the laptops, and were just about to blow this cafe we ran into some more Mongol Ralliers, they too just having completed a trip from London to Mongolia in a little micro machine. They directed us to their website, four stans and a pole, which told their story. This driving across post Soviet countries business looked like fun, and the more we chatted, the more Scott and I began having parallel dreams of driving across Siberia…

Back in reality, it was high time to wheel over to the Wen Zhou. The ride was quick, and we were checked in and feeling Chinese-business-good in no time.  Then we got a call from Ariunna. “I’m coming to your hotel, and we’re going out to lunch. I’ll see you in five minutes.”

We would learn soon that this was Ariunna’s style, the 11^th hour call. And we were ready to roll with it.

We changed our shirts and ran outside the hotel. Ariunna pulled up in a Silver Chevrolet, which was being driven by her cousin, whom she called her “brother.” We had run into this too in Buryatya. In these Mongol cultures, the distinction between cousins and siblings is essentially disregarded in casual conversation.

Ariunna’s brother-cousin drove us to a restaurant called The Modern Nomad, where we proceeded to pour over the gigantic menu filled mostly with traditional Mongolian fare, and looking to Ariunna to recommend. She was happy to step up to that challenge, and soon we were digging into some deep fried, meat stuffed pockets, a bowl of lamb broth with thick noodles, another soup made of coarsely chopped heart, and a few salads.

The food was good and hearty. The Mongols are into a gamey, meaty flavor, which is a recurring theme throughout their culinary cannon. It was a loud and interesting flavor and we were eager to study it further.

We exited the restaurant just in time to see a dish dash wearing Emeriti fellow roll by in a Hummvee with Abu Dhabi plates, bumping some really hot sounding Middle Eastern beats. Ariunna’s brother-cousin was still outside, and we were shocked. “Has he been waiting here the whole time? Why did he not eat with us?”

“He’s working for my dad, running errands, he’s just back to pick us up.”

Now it was making more sense. This cousin-brother was working for Ariunna’s dad as a driver. We decided it might be better to give him the day off, and stroll a but.  So from there we headed out on foot, checking out monuments like this man trapped in a metal box.

or this fantastic and gigantic statue of Chenghis Khan the parliament building.

We were very much enjoying this tour of modern Mongolian architecture. I just couldn’t help thinking about Klingons.  I am now absolutely certain that the entire idea for the Klingon race in Star Trek, especially the next generation was directly influenced by Mongolian culture, history, dress, and architecture.

We parted ways with Ariunna and headed out for it little late afternoon wheeling, heading for the hills, though this time instead of towards the Ger district in the east, we headed towards the super posh housing development hills in the south. Traffic was once again terrible, and we found ourselves in a snarling jam that stretched forward for kilometers, and so be began weaving among the cars, working our way towards the hills, which we could see in the distance. Even this proved harrowing, and impossible without choking down lungful after lungful of sooty exhaust. So eventually we just started riding on the median.

Eventually the traffic broke and we were out in the open. And the first thing I noticed was the air. The air here was much cleaner than in the city, no doubt part of why this was where they were building the newest and poshest housing developments in all of Mongolia.

The road got worse and worse as we continued on, but wheeling out here were there was no traffic felt great, and we wanted to keep going further.

One of the housing developments reminded me of a certain ”hard-scrabble town in Iowa” , where I’d spent many an hour.

Finally, the road petered out into a giant construction site, and we had to turn back. The traffic on the way home was just as bad as it had been coming out, which was puzzling. One would assume that Ulaanbaatar followed some kind of a daily morning peak in influx and evening peak in outflux based problem, but every direction here seemed to be equally doomed to immobility.

We rolled past the Well Mart Supercenter on our way back to find dinner at a very strange Korean restaurant called Red and Black. The walls were load, the use of Helvetica was rampant, and everything felt new and shiny. We ordered a large bowl of noodle soup, a plate for fried spicy glass noodles, a basket of deep fried everything, and a Kim Bab roll. It all looked beautiful, but was somehow lacking a certain something… salt perhaps…

That evening we wandered out into the night, taking a break from our furious work on correspondence for you, dear reader, and found the air to be thick with the added smoke of hundreds of outdoor food sellers, all roasting meat on charcoal grills.

The Sim City 2000 theme rang out loud and clear, bright and early. We were somewhere outside of Ulaanbaatar, on a train bound from Ulan Ude into Mongolian capital. The Dutch women that we’d been sharing the compartment with had already woken up and had enough time to brew their first cup of coffee. They drank a strange space age kind of Nescafe that foamed and bubbled, whipping itself right before your eyes as you mixed it with hot water.

We had just time enough to mix a couple cups of our own ho hum run of the mill instant coffee which we mixed with a little Siberian 7.5% high octane coffee mixing milk. We barely had enough time to pour two of those cups back before the train was hissing and squeaking it’s arrival at the station.

The Ulaanbaatar station was very impressive, blocky and imposing. It was a cool morning outside and still felt kind of like Siberia. As we were strapping things down, Buryat looking women who spoke perfect English were coming up to us and offering us guesthouses for 4 dollars a night per person. It wasn’t Siberia, but seemed at least that hotels would be cheap here. What a strange phenomenon, this pining for Siberia. We pulled on the leather jackets and hopped on the bikes.

Scott had lost his lock again. This one had been a really great one too, purchased in Turkey right before we left, but regardless we were in the market for a replacement, so we scanned the streets for bike shops as we rode. This did not look like a city that purchased many bikes, however… at least not bikes for the people.

It was touristy. The most touristy place we’d been in months, I’d say, since perhaps Istanbul. The city was full of Irish pubs, night clubs, tour agencies, and all the other less savory businesses that cater to vagrant backpacker riff raff. Many of the signs included English as well.  How did we all of a sudden arrive from Siberia into Phuket?

The Mongolians use the Cyrillic alphabet (more or less) so I was stuck in a loop of trying to access the Russian sector of my memory banks as we rode by signs and advertisements, but continually coming up empty handed, the words being all in Mongolian. In fact, there was a shockingly small amount of Russian or Chinese on the signs here. For a country wedged between two great powers, both of which spoke not much English, it seemed interesting to me that Mongolia was choosing English as its second language of choice.

It was early, and the streets of Ulaanbaatar were empty, giving us the very incorrect indication that this was a reasonably relaxed city to wheel in. Feeling none to pressed for time, we began to meander through heart of the city, looking for hotels, guest houses, places to eat breakfast, and the like.

We rode by some Australian people, who I feel I can now safely say were Mongol Ralliers, having recently achieved their goal of driving from Europe to Ulaanbaatar. They looked like they’d been out all night, and yelled out to us as we drove by “So you think you can cycle in this city, eh? Have you seen the traffic?”

“What traffic?” we called back gesturing to the empty road around us.

We’d find out soon enough, though, exactly what they were talking about. Just give the maniacs time to wake up…

Speaking of maniacs and breakfast time, it was still having not found a hotel that we pulled into a little local eatery to eat a little breakfast and drink a little more coffee. All they had in the way of coffee, however, was this “American Flavour CoffeeKing” The stuff was really bad, like an old a melted coffee-flavored lozenge blended with Elmer’s glue.

The mug that came with it on the other hand…

We could not read the menu at all, though my mind kept trying to interpret it as Russian, so we just ordered at random. The food was interesting, like a cross between Chinese food and Russian food, without quite the stylistic refinement of either.

We got a very mayonnaisey carrot salad, a large pickled cabbage salad; and a hamburger patty with a fried egg on top, doused in what might have been termed Pace brand mild enchilada sauce, accompanied by two squat gers of rice each sporting a little areola of ketchup.

The women who ran they place were very friendly, though, and while they spoke no English, Russian, or Chinese, they were very kind to us in allowing us to plug our laptops in and to investigate the maps in the Lonely Planet.

So it was with a slightly better idea of where we were that we headed back out on the cycles. This by no means meant that we were out of the woods yet, however, for finding the hotel that we’d selected turned out to be another Irkutsk style venture into the confusing depths of a huge soviet housing block.

Inside the block, we were able to find first an old man who spoke Russian and was able to help get us to the right sub-sector of the gargantuan apartment block complex, then a young boy who was more than happy to lead us right to the door of the French youth hostel that we’d been interested in. They were unfortunately, however, booked solid for that night.

So we followed a Mongolian girl who spoke French but no English across that particular section of the soviet housing block over to the Sunny Motel, which turned out to be quite affordable and very cheap. The husband and wife who ran the place were also stellar folks, learning English, Chinese and Russian, and running a spick and span little operation.

We dropped off our things there, and climbed back on the cycles to head out to the train station. We needed to get from Ulaanbaatar over to Inner Mongolian China sometime in the next week and a half, but we had no idea exactly how often, and where or when the trains ran.

Now free of our packs, wheeling felt good, so nimble and speedy were we. We made short work of the trip to the giant yellow MTZ station.

Inside we found a bewildering number of options, including international trains to Beijing and cities in Inner Mongolia on a bi-weekly basis, and domestic trains much more often which take a traveler to just a few kilometers shy of the Chinese border.

Still not knowing exactly what our plans here in Mongolia would be, but happy to find that we had many options, we headed back out to unlock the cycles, stopping as we did so first at a SIM card kiosk and then at a very cheap Korean powdered coffee machine, which had been retrofitted to take Mongolian Tugrug.  The problem with the retrofitting operation was that the machine was unable to give change, and so cheap was the coffee that our smallest bill was enough for 6 cups. So we made friends and just bought them coffee with the excess change.

Then it was time to do a little wheeling. The traffic was getting very thick as we pulled back onto the roads, and we began to learn that the drivers here are none too perceptive. Ulaanbaatar is filled with giant and expensive SUVs, in part because they are useful during the long and savage Mongolian winters, and in part because of the recent boom in foreign direct investment and development centered on the exploitation of Mongolian mineral resources.

Regardless of petty excuses, this was a highly technical wheeling city. A rider in Ulaanbaatar must be vigilant against maniac drivers, assuming always that the people around you will be breaking the rules, never signaling their intent, and generally ignoring not just lanes, but the border between road and sidewalk as well.

Ulaanbaatar is also full of gers too, the traditional Mongolian nomadic dwelling. Gers are a pretty ingenious structure, resilient against the weather, and adjustable to increase ventilation, store heat, and the like. It might come as no surprise, then, that amidst the blocky soviet structures and new shiny metal and glass buildings of Ulaanbaatar, there are also plenty of gers just set up on open bits of pavement. As far as we could tell, there were no rules about parking, and I would assume this extends to parking of houses as well.

Suddenly, as it always seems to go, we realized we were starving. And so we dropped into a very high concept 1960s plastic shape themed restaurant, which turned out to serve traditional Mongolian food.

We ordered blind again, being unable to interpret the menu, but more or less struck gold with a large plate of red cabbage salad, and a sizzling meat and egg scramble. We also got a dumpling soup which came with a certain kind of white milky looking pork broth, which I’d only up until that point found at Korean restaurants.

We headed north then, past Freedom Night Club (American Soft Power get’s er done), and by a very intriguing Chinese business hotel. We decided to pull an uber lichht and send Scott in to shuo a little and see what he could see. He came out looking very excited. “The place is great. It’s definitely a Chinese business hotel, it’s about 20 bucks a night, it has in-room Ethernet, and there’s a dank looking restaurant downstairs.”

“Excellent.” I replied.

“They’re booked solid right now, but I’ve made some friends in there, and they’ll call us tomorrow.”

Feeling great about that option, we hit the road again, wheeling northwards and taking a right turn, veering slightly down hill now and out into the countryside. We spotted a large grocery store, and locked the bikes outside to go in and buy water and generally gawk at the products.

Here we saw the return of the Kickapoo joy juice that had been such a smash hit with David Miller in Borneo. Meat was moving quickly here, and the shoppers were invited to pick and choose from unpackaged piles of it that just sat in the bottom of the cooling unit.

Anything thing which we could not help but notice inside this and all the other Mongolian grocery stores that were to follow was that absolutely everything here that could be was branded with the name of Chengis Khan. There was Chengis Khan Vodka, energy drinks, crackers, sodas, beer snacks, chewing gum, cigarettes and lord knows what else.

From the grocery store, we headed on further into the countryside, and taking a left to wheel towards the Ger district, the part of town where there are many more gers than permanent structures, and where a family might move for anywhere from 2 months to 5 years to spend some time participating in the largest and only truly developed Urban Economy in Mongolia.

The air in Ulaanbaatar is some of the worst in the world, especially in winter. This happens for two reasons: one is that the local wind paterns and the proximity of certain elevation changes encourage air to local air to hang around the city. The other is that during the winter the poor in the ger district burn lots of coal and dung to heat their homes, while the impoverished burn garbage (we’re talking plastic bags to batteries). All that smoke gets trapped in the same cycle of bad air caused by reason number one, and makes for a truly heinous lungful.

Homes in the ger district are separated out by wooden fences and cordoned off into treeless yards. We rode along by the central giant trench, which seemed to act as a collecting spot for all the refuse of the community, and took it up into the hills, the heart of the ger district.

The people we encountered were generally smiling and seemed happy to see us visiting their neighborhood, which I am sure is not on the normal tourist’s itinerary for Ulaanbaatar. We were riding over the loose gravel roads, cresting the top of the hill when all of a sudden three new riders joined out pack.

They were boys, locals of the ger distric, and out wheeling presumably after school. They stuck with us for the rest our wheel through ger district, constantly challenging us to ride harder, or take turns faster. I was beginning to understand that the wild driving of the people in this city might stem from a more basic biological need for speed…

Back on the main road, we pushed it hard back into town. We were fighting a terrible headwind, and so the going was tough, with cars whipping by us, and the subsequent clouds of dry dirt they threw up ending up cought in the teeth. I would hold my breath as I went threw a cloud of dust, pedaling hard and thinking the heavens for the Maui Jims.

That evening, as we attempted to write, lying in our beds at the hotel, a savage domestic depute broke out. Two people, man and woman, in the room next to us were really having an intense argument. The walls were very thin, so we were the sorry recipients of the entire ordeal. Soon the argument escalated to screaming. Then we began to hear stomping and slamming of doors, then bashing noises and more screaming. Soon, what was almost certainly now a physical fight burst out into the hallway, and we heard a human body smash against the wall.

All the while, Scott and I were in the room, listening to Tom Waits’ album “Alice” wondering what we should do.

Throughout the next few hours, the battle nextdoor would simmer down then heat up again, with more banging, screaming, slamming and similarly violent noises. The Sunny Hotel was nice and all, but we needed to get a new place first thing the next morning.