How Many Altais?
Words & Photos: Jane Shearer
“The border police will come and pick you up. Okay?”
I reread the Google Translate message as the off-duty policeman strides back to his Toyota Corolla bogged in mud beside the Sagsai Gol. I want to write back, “That is not okay.” However, even if the man hadn’t lost patience with the slow Google Translate exercise, there’s nothing more to get out of the exchange.
Chris and I were heading towards our seventh and final Altai of our bikepacking adventure. We’d collected three Altais (one city, one mountain range, one pass) in Kazakhstan, two in Xinjiang, China (one city, one mountain range), and one so far in Mongolia (mountain range). I badly wanted to collect the last Altai to complete our ‘set’. ‘Altais’ had become our bikepacking collection goal, like stamps, or Pokemons, but a bit different.
We started off wanting to go to the Altai Mountains in each of the three countries. Then we added in the challenge of going to a city or town in each country called ‘Altai’. We gave ourselves bonus points when we saw a sign ‘Altai Pass’ in Kazahstan. However, the off-duty Mongolian policeman was impinging on our Altai point-scoring goals because we’d come too close to the Chinese border, although neither he nor the internet could tell us how close was too close.
Borders are sensitive areas, although often it’s hard to understand why. The Chinese border, twenty-five kilometres away, ran along the crest of the Altai Mountains with 150km of dense forest on the other side with a single road perpendicular to the border. We knew that road because we’d cycled on it while in Xinjiang. What bad things might we do because we were near the Chinese border? We couldn’t think of any. Your ability to do bad things is limited when you are on a bicycle.
And why were we in the back blocks of western Mongolia trying to collect Altais? Because I’d read an article about some cyclists who cycled through the Altai Mountain Range in four countries (Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and Russia) in 2019. They were inspired by a mad trio who cycled the same route in the spring of 2014 with skis, alternating bikepacking with ski touring.
We wanted to visit the Mongolian Altai because we’d cycled in central Mongolia in 2025, including through the Khangai Mountains, but not made it west to the higher Altai Mountains. We could have reached the Altai by flying into Ulan Bataar, then on to the west, but it seemed more interesting to cycle to Mongolia through terrain we’d not previously crossed. There aren’t many roads in this part of the world and there are also not many accounts of westerners cycling them. Both appealed.
It’s not often we start a bikepacking trip genuinely unsure if the route is going to work out. While the bikepacking bloggers had got through, we knew there were two significant hurdles. Challenge 1: the Old Austrian Road in East Kazakhstan. There’s a bridge that regularly gets washed away and little clarity about whether the mountain river is crossable on foot. The only intel I could source (on Caravanistan) was the bridge had last been washed away in 2024 and no one thought it would be rebuilt soon.
Challenge 2 was the Xinjiang border where few westerners cross into a part of China that is heavily surveilled and controlled. Would we be able to cross? Would we have issues with our phones and computer? We’d heard horror stories of people sitting for hours in sweltering heat while their devices were searched and images were deleted and spyware installed.
Then Challenge 3 arose: a major foot and mouth outbreak closed roads and towns western Mongolia as we boarded the first of three flights taking us to Oskemen, Kazakhstan. If we made it through Kazakhstan and China, it still might not be possible to cycle the Mongolian Altai. “What should we do?” we asked each other on the plane from Zurich to Istanbul. Do we rethink entirely? Cycle west through Kazakhstan? Fly south to the Tibetan plateau that lies in China proper? Fly to Tajikistan and cycle the Bartang Valley that we’ve had our eye on for a decade?
However, once a trip is in train, it’s hard to shift your momentum. Our planning and our gear were all focused on our route to the Mongolian Altai. Our flight home off the continent left from Ulan Bataar, and this was the route we wanted to do. Never in decades has it been so easy to get visas for all three of the countries; currently New Zealanders can get a 30-day visa on entry for Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia, allowing flexibility rather than requiring fixed entry and exit dates plus a set of fake hotel bookings. Therefore, we decided to stick with our original plan, while keeping in touch with contacts in Khovd (in the north of the Mongolian Altai) to hear about the progression the foot and mouth outbreak.
I’d never heard of Oskemen (East Kamenogorsk) before researching this bikepacking trip. It turns out to be a city of 320,000 people, the largest in northeast Kazakhstan. We cycled into town from the airport after chatting to the last westerner we’d see until the border of China and Mongolia. Two days later, we headed east at dawn hoping to make good progress before the heat of the day. Our springtime warmup cycle from Santander (Spain) to Zurich (Switzerland) hadn’t acclimatised us to temperatures in the thirties Celsius.
Over the next four days we cycled through rolling hills, tobacco plantations, conifer forests, alongside the enormous Bukhtarmar reservoir which catches water from the Irtysh River flowing out of China. We collected our first Altai. We learned to recognise hole-in-the-wall Kazakh bakeries and Chris ate shashlik (kebabs) which he’d been looking forward to. At Katon Karagai, the tourist hub of east Kazakhstan, we had a day off before heading further into the mountains. Turns out an eastern Kazakhstan tourist hub has a café with good coffee but little else of note.
We cycled past the turn-off to the Old Austrian Road to see the very far northeast corner of Kazakhstan. Locals told us we must see Lake Rahkman, the prime tourist location in this part of Kazakhstan. Lake Rakhman is a bucket list destination for many Kazakhs. We met several who had driven to this area from the Caspian Sea, 2400km away! Lake Rahkman turned out to be… weird.
We cycled a thousand vertical metres up a very rough gravel road to arrive to an avenue of extremely dilapidated Soviet-era dachas and slightly less dilapidated post-Soviet dachas, all with rusty satellite dishes. Another kilometre on we arrived at a tall fence on either side of a two story building facing a full carpark. There were no signs. What were we supposed to do? Where should we go? We couldn’t see a lake. Trial and error took us to a small office populated by a large woman behind a formica desk. We filled out forms and paid five dollars equivalent in Kazakh tenge to be admitted into the park adjacent to Lake Rahkman. We left our bikes parked up outside the building (not once in the whole trip was there an issue with security of our bikes or possessions) then walked an uneven path of concrete flagstones between fake trees festooned in LED lights with rusty stains streaking their cables. Finally, a view down the lake which sits in a high valley and is surrounded by conifers, very reminiscent of central Europe or the Rockies.
One of the oh-so-many selfies requested on this ride.
A long queue of Kazakh tourists stood on a pier, waiting patiently for two electric unspeedy speedboats to convey them up the lake and then back down the lake. We aren’t queuing people so walked around the lake on a kilometre-long boardwalk, slapping at mosquitoes. A lunch of bread, cheese and cucumber and a brief swim in the cold water later, we’d done Lake Rahkman and retraced our route out of the valley, down the gravel road, past the workmen who’d asked for selfies as we struggled uphill. We took a last photo of 4506m Belukha (the most scenic part of the ride) and pedalled back towards the Old Austrian Road.
Belukha Mountain on the border of Kazakhstan and Russia.
The Old Austrian Road is the only route through the Altai Mountains in east Kazakhstan. It’s 60 kilometres of track built by Austrian prisoners during World War I and is an adventure tourism destination for four-wheel drivers when the bridges are extant. We snuck up the first part of the 1000m climb early in the morning in case vigilant park guards stopped us. We were determined to give the river a nudge if the bridge was out; New Zealander’s have lots of practice crossing mountain rivers.
As it turned out, all our worries (and all my hours of trying to zoom in on Google Maps to investigate the river) were unnecessary. A new bridge awaited us shortly after we met a four-wheel driving Kazakh family who loaded us up with ChocoPies (marshmallow and chocolate biscuits that can withstand fifty degrees Celsius in a glass cabinet), instant noodles, cucumbers, 1.5 litres of Coke, 1.5 litres of soda water and a box of teabags (the teabags lasted us into Mongolia). We cycled over the bridge and celebrated with a ChocoPie before finding a campsite further downstream.
Celebratory ChocoPie after crossing Challenge 1 critical bridge on the Old Austrian Road.
Jane cooling down in Lake Markakol.
Out the far end of the Old Austrian Road, we visited scenic Lake Markakol, home of the best Kazakh café of the trip. Then we cycled down from the mountains towards the town of Markakol, with one of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen while biking. Stark white sand dunes, hundreds of metres in height, rolled out of China into the Ortaterekty River valley. From Markakol, a couple more days (including a mosquito-ridden campsite on the bank of the Irtysh River) got us to the Chinese border to meet Challenge 2.
China-East Kazakhstan border with sand dune fields.
Challenge 2 turned out to be as unchallenging as Challenge 1. We worked our way through Kazakhstan’s four stages of passport stamping, writing on and exchanging small pieces of paper, scanning of luggage, navigating large new roads that didn’t lead to the border and gravel tracks that did, to arrive at the Chinese side of the border at one minute before their lunch hour. They welcomed us into their immigration building and we gradually accrued eight immigration staff who tried to make their new visa machine work. An officious Chinese official told us, “Don’t worry,” and “Sit down.” Chris wasn’t worried but was loathe to sit down until I pointed out upsetting Chinese officials was a bad idea. The visa process ended up taking an hour and included confiscation of all our food but not scrutiny of our devices. “Do you take photographs?” we were asked. “Yes,” we said and pulled out our phones. “Oh,” they said looking disinterested and turned back to the visa machine.
Cycling to Jeminay, the first town in China, mirrored the rest of our time in Xinjiang. It was hot, well into the thirties, with a bright unrelenting sun glaring out of the sky. The landscape was stark and rocky except for irrigated patches near the town. The road was huge; four large lanes separated by a crash barrier winding into the distance, closed off from the desert by continuous 1.8m high fences of criss-crossing barbed wire.
Five kilometres beyond the border, we stopped at a police check point and showed our visas. “Do not worry,” the police told us using Dubau, their realtime voice translation app. “This is just a routine police check.” Visa check complete, they asked for selfies with us then shook their heads when I asked if we could take a selfie with them. We went through the same routine again just out of Jeminay when a police car swerved towards us in the middle of an intersection. We learned to groan when we saw a police vehicle because it inevitably meant stopping for a visa check and a round of selfies.
Jeminay appeared as a green oasis in the middle of the barren landscape. Wide streets were lined with trees, red lanterns and swathes of LED lighting that glowed all the colours of the rainbow at night. Our hotel, a truly uninspired rectangular block with failing cladding, was surrounded by leafy green poplars and had a dining room with breakfast buffet that could have fed several rugby teams simultaneously but only had to cater for us and a handful of other guests.
We stayed two nights in Jeminay because I’d cricked my neck at the mosquito campsite and then exacerbated the related muscle tension by cycling 135km in the heat together with navigating the border crossing. The upside was a highlight of our trip – dinner with a Kazakh-Chinese family. We became social media stars after visiting a Jeminay high street café several times. Lan, who works in the local television station as an engineer, came to the café after hearing about the English-speaking tourists because she rarely gets to practise her excellent English with native speakers. She put on a huge spread for us, including pilaf and roast mutton. As her husband shaved slices of fat off the sheep’s rump (a delicacy), he explained, “The greatest meat eaters on the planet are Kazakhs, followed by wolves.”
Lan & family in her Jeminay house.
Jane and a horsewoman in Altai – collecting our next Altai city in Xinjiang.
The other big win of our two weeks in Xinjiang was our ride through the Altai Mountains on the G331 highway. We’d been told Xinjiang was missable riding and we should consider catching a bus to the Mongolian border. However, Lan told us about a new highway from Altai city to the tourist destination of Kanas Lake, not yet on any western maps. We felt we’d done our lake tourism at Rahkman but I discovered the G331 highway, which opened in July 2025, continued west to east across the whole of northern China. We could cycle through the granite Altai ranges to near the border with Mongolia. We spent three nights swimming in the rivers and camping in the conifer forests. Police sniffed us out at our last campsite; likely we were reported by one of the roaming fishermen who wandered up and down the riverbank. The police pulled on their bulletproof vests as they climbed down the embankment from the highway. However, they only checked our visas, asked for a selfie, then told us to be very careful about lighting fires. “No fires,” we said and shook our heads with emphasis as we waved them goodbye.
Stark granite and conifer forests in the Chinese Altai.
Chris howling with the wolves in Qinghe. Why do we never get to see wolves when we have been told to watch out for them in so many countries?
We spent our last night in Xinjiang at Tashkurgan, the border town nearest to Mongolia. We did the rounds of the Tashkurgan shops to acquire food for the next four days because our Khovd contact told us the three towns closest to the border (‘close’ meaning up to two hundred and fifty kilometres from the border) were closed because of foot and mouth disease. We searched Tashkurgan unsuccessfully for tofu but successfully for beef jerky and dried mushrooms. The key to shopping in Central Asia is to visit every store in sight because you never know what they will have – it’s a treasure hunt.
We also stocked up on Mongolian currency. Finding Mongolian Tugrik in China had proved impossible up to this point with many forms required then no Tugrik available. However, the guy in the duty-free port store which sold waving cats, knives, torches, fake fur hats and stoles, chocolate and (best of all) peanut butter, had a large stack of Tugrik he was happy to exchange for Yuan at a very fair exchange rate.
The Chinese-Mongolian border was relatively straightforward but reasonably time consuming as the Chinese officials took 20-30 minutes per person and we chose the slow queue. 2.5 hours later we popped out the far side after Mongolian immigration stamped our passports and welcomed us to the country with not a word about foot and mouth disease.
We didn’t want to ask about restrictions, the number 1 rule in such places being ‘Don’t create a problem’, but we really wanted to know if we would be diverted round the coal mine road across hundreds of kilometres with no food and little water. When we reached the turn-off to the mine road, looking in disbelief at the many kilometres of coal trucks queuing to dump their loads just across the Chinese border, there were two cars blocking our way. A white sedan was empty and a black sedan with opaque windows had its engine running. We cycled quietly by, holding our breaths. Nothing.
We cycled hard for five kilometres across the high desert plain till we were out of sight of the cars and let our breaths out. Then we cycled hard for another ten kilometres to our turn-off onto a faint gravel track towards the Bulgan River. Another three kilometres later we ate a juicy peach and jumped around with excitement, we were in our final Altai mountain range.
Jane on track to the Mongolian Altai Mountains.
Mongolia is beautiful and stark and great for camping. This final two weeks of our ride took us south to north through the mountains, to Olgii and lastly Khovd from where we flew out. For the first few days there were no gers and no animals, which was eerie compared with central Mongolia where there’s usually a herder and a ger in sight. We weren’t clear whether the animals had been slaughtered in the foot and mouth cull or moved elsewhere.
Idyllic campsite in Mongolia on the Bulgan River.
The near finale of our trip was our encounter with the pissed off policeman near our seventh Altai. It was Naadam – the Mongolian summer festival of the three manly sports (horse riding, archery and wrestling) which is equivalent to our Christmas-New Year holiday. The policeman’s family were in his bogged-down car. It was hot. Mosquitoes were biting. He looked stupid. Why not have a go at two random foreigners cycling down the river?
Chris and I argue our way down the Sagsai after the policeman turns his back on us. What should we do? We don’t want to cycle back up the pass at nearly 2800m from which we have descended. We never want to cycle back on a route if we can help it! We also want our last Altai. Then we argue about whether we should have known or could have known about the Chinese border issue. Then we argue about which way to go across a swampy bit of terrain because we are tired and hungry and there are more mosquitoes.
We conclude Altai is our goal and if we get dragged off from there we will have completed our collection. We will find somewhere to stay rather than camping so we don’t look like we are trying to tiptoe around, avoiding the authorities. As a result we have an entertaining afternoon and evening with Jenta, her fifteen-year old daughter Minjuu who speaks very good English after only two years of classes, 4 year old Denise whose name spelled trouble, and an assortment of other children coming and going.
The next day we cycle up the Sagsai with nary a border guard in sight but beautiful orange and red rocks in the cliffs either side of the river.
In the end the border police never got us but the trip was indeed, ‘okay’. Way better than okay, in fact.
Chris cycling into Buyant, home of the tent knockdown (but that's another story...).
Morning tea in a ger.