Mongolian Magic

Words & Photos: Jane Shearer

“Why Mongolia,” people asked when we told them about our bikepacking plans.
“Because it’s my 60th birthday and I want to celebrate it by camping in the middle of nowhere in Mongolia,” I said.
“Hmmm…,” was the most common response from men. “Go girl,” the more common rejoinder from women.

We had planned to go to Mongolia mid-2020, based on a bikepacking friend telling us how much he enjoyed cycling there. Like the rest of the world, we stayed home in mid-2020, but I didn’t drop the country off my agenda.

We did a lot of research prior to our trip – Mongolia is a less well-known destination. I searched the internet for routes done by others and found a small selection, including the Khangai Traverse, on bikepacking.com. We cobbled together a potential trajectory from a variety of other people’s trips and connectors between them but left our exact route open to change because we were uncertain how hard the cycling would be, the availability of food and water, how bad the weather might get…

Our research included a lot of consideration of our bikepacking set-up. At times we would need to carry up to five days' food and one to one and a half days of water… our bikepacking bags couldn’t handle that. We decided to swap out our tail bags for Old Mountain Elkhorn racks with King Cages on each side to take 2 litre water bottles. This worked well – allowing us to carry varying amounts of food on top of the rack, depending on resupply options.

Another limitation was availability of camping gas – limited according to the internet. On the ground, we only found standard camping gas cylinders in the capital Ulan Baatar, Mörön (the third largest city) and the Fairfield Guest House in Tsertseleg. However, tall, thin butane canisters are available in every Mongolian village (and are very common across Asia). We left our MSR Windburner at home and bought a Kovea Spider with an adapter that allowed us to connect butane canisters. Result… we love the Kovea Spider. It performed flawlessly, including simmering very well indeed, and we generally got 5 days of burning out of a single butane canister (there was the odd dud canister).

We flew from Ulan Baatar to Mörön in the centre-north of Mongolia. Mörön is 100km south of Lake Khovsgol, the largest body of freshwater in Mongolia and itself just south of the Russian border (we saw neither drones nor explosions). Outside the airport, we put our bikes together under the interested eyes of the airport staff then cycled off into what felt like the unknown but, on reflection, seems like a very doable bikepacking destination.

One surprise in Mongolia was that (of the places we visited) only Ulan Baatar has reticulated water and sewage. This was particularly surprising in Mörön, as the fifth largest city in Mongolia. To be fair, at around 36,000 people, Mörön is not so large. Of the 3.5 million people living in Mongolia, 1.7 million live in Ulan Baatar. Erdenet and Darkhan have around 100,000 each, and everywhere else has fewer than 50,000 people. The lack of 3 waters left us keen to spend most of our time camping rather than hotelling. Hygiene is suboptimal and the toilets (which have a floorboard left out as the hole through which to do your business) are entirely missable.

Mongolian food turned out to be perfectly adequate in shops and generally less-than-exciting in the few restaurants we found. Many villages don’t have an eating place, but if you ask at a shop, someone will offer to cook you a meal. Our experience of being offered a meal was tsuivan i.e. a heaped plate of pasta with fatty mutton. If we were lucky there might be a few shreds of carrot included. No wonder the herder we offered a cheese and capsicum sandwich to, slid the capsicum onto the ground. Mongolians don’t do veges because you can’t grow veges in 3 months of summer when you are moving between your spring, summer, autumn and winter camps. While Mongolian herders are nomadic, their seasonal campsites are only a few kilometres apart. To be fair to Mongolians on the culinary front, Chris’s favourite restaurant food was khushuur – Mongolian meat pies deep fried and filled with mutton…

Shops, on the other hand, have a range of foodstuffs albeit dominated by fizzy drinks, chips, biscuits and pasta. Dire reports we found on the internet of shops with limited offerings are not correct.

Nearly everywhere had potatoes, carrots, cabbage and onions. Many places also had capsicum and cucumber and mushrooms. Bread was common, sometimes brown. Butter, cheese, yoghurt and eggs were plentiful; life got better once we discovered you could buy a small chunk of butter or cheese off the multi-kilo lump in the fridge. We discovered tofu blocks and kimchi sachets, as well as spicy instant noodles – there are many South Koreans tourists in Mongolia. There were dried vegetables, particularly spring onions and often potato. Oats, nuts and a plethora of dried fruit were also abundant.

Shopping is an entertaining and time-consuming Mongolian experience – you have to think of it as a lucky dip. Even a tiny village might have six convenience stores and no two would have the same stock. You visit each shop hoping for an exciting find… might there be Snickers Bars here? Or cashews and almonds? Oh please, let there be an apple somewhere!

While the Mongolian landscape is not as varied as some places we have travelled, each segment of our trip was different. Our 7-day loop from Mörön to Lake Khovsgol and back was over relatively low hills with lots of forest and rivers. Lake Khovsgol is beautiful and we avoided the touristed SW corner, finding a campsite on the east side of the lake with no one in sight.

South of Mörön we cycled for 5 days to reach White Lake (Terkhiin Tsaagan Lake) over some painfully steep passes as we travelled perpendicular to increasingly high ranges with ever fewer trees. The road was better formed than further north as it’s a main thoroughfare from the tarseal highway that connects to Ulan Baatar. We found some big rivers to sit in at the end of hellishly hot days – a heat wave in the mid-thirties swept across the country. White Lake was beautiful at the west end but tourist hell at the east end – hordes of Mongolians jet boating and driving to a landscape covered in ger (Mongolian yurt) camps with a new multi-lane highway being built creating clouds of dust and disturbance.

From White Lake we cycled for 12 days south then northeast to reach Tsertserleg, home of the Fairfield Guesthouse which had the best-ever coffee and bakery (well, it was pretty good and many things are amazing when compared to pasta and fatty mutton). Fairfield is run by Australians who are exceptionally helpful to cycle tourists, including us when Chris’s tyre split off the bead in the middle of the remote loop. This section of our trip included the highest pass at 3000m, the furthest distance between villages – 5 days, the hardest river crossing (hip deep and turbid) and the most beautiful range – of red rocks (a special present for Jane on her 60th birthday, as well as Chris’s failing tyre).

From Tsetserleg to Kharkhorin, the oldest city in Mongolia, was a quick three days through lower hills and forests to reach the beautiful Orkhon River Valley. Thunderstorms were becoming more frequent and more intense. We were very pleased to find our Durston tent withstood marble-sized hail. The Durston proved an excellent choice – we’ve always had tunnel tents because they are bombproof in bad weather but they aren’t spacious. The Durston X-Mid 2 is 1.6 kg for a tent with two doors, two large vestibules and in which two people can sit up and one larger person can wiggle around. And it’s pretty cheap compared with many other tents, as well as robust!

We experienced Naadam, the Mongolian summer festival, in Kharkhorin. We watched horse racing which involves a lot of waiting and then 20 seconds of excitement while child riders thunder past on their steeds (they trot 25km out then gallop 25km back to the end point).

We watched Mongolian wrestling, which looks odd to our eyes. Men wearing tiny tops, a rope around their waist, budgie smuggler briefs and pixie boots circle each other for minutes grasping each other’s clothing. The general outcome is that, after ongoing grappling for minutes, or tens of minutes, one of the wrestlers suddenly overcomes the other and throws him on the ground.

Over the 7 days from Kharkhorin to Ulan Baatar, the hills got lower and the trees disappeared, as did water, which was mostly found in unpleasant muddy trickles. We saw the strange Mongolian attraction of the mini-Gobi, where large numbers of holidaying families took pictures of each other riding camels on a small belt of sand dunes. The last three days of our trip were downstream of Ulan Bataar on the river the city boarders. Initially we put aqua tabs in and boiled the water, but then we lost our nerve and bought water instead – we normally try not to buy throw away water bottles given how they use large amounts of resource and litter landscapes across Asia.

We entered Ulan Baatar on pleasantly empty highways because everyone had gone on summer holiday to their traditional rural land. Ulan Baatar is not beautiful, but it’s nowhere near the blot on the landscape I’ve heard it described as. In winter it is pretty bad, given the horrific air pollution from the coal-fired power plants (we arrived to a view of the Number 3 power plant emitting vapour). However Ulan Bataar is an up and coming centre - built on mining, with growing suburbs, lots of new glass towers, a range of restaurants, and views across the valley of the sacred Bogd Khan mountain covered in conifers.

I loved Mongolia – loved camping nearly every night, the stunning cloud forms and the amazing quiet in which you can hear birds chirping. It’s only when you are in a place with little to no vehicles, no air traffic and no permanent structures that you realise how noisy western environments normally are.

People were friendly and unhurried – there’s nowhere to go in a rush across the steppe. I’m already thinking about returning to see the Altai mountains in the east, which rise to 3000m on the Chinese border. If you go to Mongolia, don’t make it a quick trip – this is a place to take slowly, sinking into the herding pace of life.