The city sight-seeing photos I added to the previous post are from today.

This hotel is pretty cool. We had the friendliest waitress ever last night for dinner at the hotel restaurant (very posh and almost completely empty as usual). He started by apologizing for his poor English and then went on to recommend Buuzy, a local dumpling specialty, and local vodka. It was delicious. Then he took us out to the 14th floor balcony for us to localize the city attractions and see some fireworks.

Today morning we went back to the 14th floor to have some pretty nice breakfast, and then went to change some euros to Roubles. We walked to the giant head of Lenin statue and saw a fountain which played the Radeczki march.

Then we returned to the reception and asked some help to find a hardware store, to which we took a taxi. There we met another super friendly sales guy, who gave us an extensive tour of the multi-floor complex, and helped us buy fasteners, wire, chain oil, and two old school metal frame backpacks. We returned to the hotel, then went for an overpriced pizza lunch and grocery shopping.

Jerome also bought himself some swimming trunks so he could try the hotel pool. This was seriously anti-climatic. The hotel has a subterranean floor devoted to a gym, a pool, and a sauna. There was even a lady overseeing all this at a desk, but when she realized that we wanted to use the pool and needed some towels, she appeared positively shocked, and went on to nervously search for something in what appeared to be an enormous pile of keys for five minutes. We went back to our room, got our own towels, came back down, changed, and then realized that one pool was ice cold, and the other was … a few degrees above ice cold. It was pretty obvious that nobody ever used these facilities. We did not stay long. It was interesting to note that when we got there, the sauna was open, but by the time we got out of the pool five minutes later, someone (probably the lady) locked the sauna and then left, to be replaced by another lady at the desk. She then motioned toward the elevator, indicating that it is best if we leave now. Bizarre.

In the room I took the backpacks off the metal frames and reassembled them in a way that will make the metal racks not hang down so far, which will let me corner better. I then went down to the bikes in an attempt to mount them, but hurricane strength winds stopped me from doing that. The locals did not seem too disconcerted, apparently such huge winds are normal here!? Supposedly it will even rain tomorrow morning. Depending on how intensive that is, we plan to continue toward lake Baikal tomorrow where we hope to camp. I will probably only be able to write from Irkutsk, in 48 hours from now.

I’ll go now and enjoy my hotel bed while I can.

I did not realize “Escape from Mongolia” will need to be taken so literally, but that’s how we felt we had to do. And urgently.

This morning after packing our bags and hauling them down to the bikes, we were in for another surprise. The outer shell of my Magadan soft bags and the respective straps for attaching them to the motorbike have been stolen overnight. While these bags are not cheap, they are essentially like heavy duty shopping bags that can be attached to the side of a motorbike. Attaching or detaching them is not easy, it takes about 15 minutes each time, so the idea is that there is a waterproof inside bag that can be lifted out and carried up to the hotel with all the valuables. I assumed incorrectly that the outside bags will be worthless to anyone who is not an adventure motorcyclist, and therefore can safely be left in the fenced (but not locked) yard of the hotel, right under out window, during the night.

The fact that nobody spoke even a little English at Selenge hotel in Sukhbaatar did not make things simpler, but once they understood the problem a nice man came along with me to show where I could try to find some sort of improvised replacement. We shopped around an open market for around an hour until I found two “Samsonite” (obviously not authentic) branded polyester bags with handles that were big enough to fit the Magadan inside bags with my stuff. I also bought a roll of clothes line. With the help of some straps I had, the straps we used to secure the bikes for transport in the container, the clothesline, and the ingenuity of the nice man, we tied the bags onto my motorbike, trying to carefully avoid them from touching the hot exhaust and melting or catching fire. I was quite nervous if the improvised construction, which would have been more at home on a pack mule than a motorcycle, would hold up, but it did not budge for the next 350 km.

The whole fixing process took another hour, so we only set out toward the border around noon again. The process on the mongolian side was like a parody of socialist buerocracy: First, a soldier, who nicely enough waved us past a big column of waiting cars and trucks checked our passports and waved us on to the next checkpoint. There, the passports were checked again, and we were handed a small white slip of paper that we were asked to fill out. Next, we were told to stop in front and enter a large building, where we were told to queue at one desk. At that desk something was scribbled on our white papers, and it was stamped for a first time. We were forwarded to a second desk. There, a man who was otherwise busy surfing the internet stamped our papers a second time, and send us through a metal detector (which beeped for everyone; it did not matter) to passport control. Our passports were controlled and stamped. Meanwhile a second lady checked my white paper and said that something was not OK; we were to return to the first desk, but had to hand the white paper to a different man this time, who also stamped it, but then handed it over to the lady next to her. She said that she needed to see our import documentation (Carnet ATA) for the motorcycles, and the registrations, which we presented. She processed the Carnet, asked us to sign it, and took our white slip of paper to the websurfing man, who stamped it again. At this point (though I may be forgetting a step) we were told that we could leave. A soldier outside asked for the white slip, checked the stamps, and stamped our visa. We could finally go and queue at the Russian checkpoint.

On the Russian side we were not allowed to jump to the head of the queue, but on the other hand the process was a bit less painful. Our passports and visas were controlled and stamped. Then they asked for import documentation for our bikes, which we again presented. They took us aside into an administrative building as well, where a senior officer looked at our paperwork (he did not seem to have seen such documentation before) and asked if we spoke Russian. Since we did not, a nice junior guy got to translate from English. It was decided that we should complete new standard import documentation for the bikes, which we did, in 2 manual copies each. This was then handed to a lady who typed it all into the computer and we got to enter Russia. We did not have to pay anything, which was a good thing given that at this point we were almost completely out of Mongolian cash and we had no Rubles.

We then rode for 250 km to Ulan Ude over a single road that ranged from perfect highway quality in some places to nightmarish sand dunes in others, and everything in-between. We stopped for lunch (canned fish and cookies) at a highway side shrine, where we gave our last bits of Mongolian cash to some passing locals.

Ulan Ude is a decent sized city with passable traffic. We tried to find the most imposing hotel we could see, which we found in the shape of the Sagaan Morin, from whence I am writing this. Supposedly it has a swimming pool and a gym, not to mention wifi in the room. Unfortunately it does not have closed parking from the bikes, but this time I really removed everything that can be taken off.

I reserved for two nights, which should give us a bit of time to relax as well as to look for some more decent replacement luggage for me. Very happy to be here. 🙂

Update: One funny incident I forgot to mention: While driving, the otherwise mostly decent highway was completely closed off at three different maybe 1 km long sections, forcing the entire traffic off-road, onto the sand next to the road. And there was some pretty serious traffic: maybe one car or truck per second. The sand was quite deep in some places, and I felt the bike drift sometimes. I first slowed down from about 50 km/h to 30 km/h, but then the car drivers behind us started overtaking aggressively, and leaving us in a dense cloud of dust which made me unable to see the road, which was important to know where the sand was more shallow. I became even more concerned when I saw that a rig (ger.: Sattelschlepper) hauling a trailer of fuel was coming up close behind us. I imagined that slipping in the sand now would have very unpleasant consequences. After a while I lost my nerves and we pulled over, letting the trailer pass. He however also pulled over ahead of us. I waited, but he did not move. I thought he perhaps enjoyed ‘tailgating’ us. But then the driver got out of the cabin and walked to Jerome, with a bag in his hands! Apparently a plastic bag with Jerome’s supermarket shoes that was tied down on his back set has dropped off, and this trucker has collected it, and was now giving it back. Wow! A very nice first experience in Russia indeed.

I am writing from an internet cafe while Jerome is waiting outside, probably hungry, so I will be brief.

In the morning we packed up and left UB. After driving north in sunny weather and low traffic for 3 hours, we had a lunch break in the grass somewhere. After 3 more hours we arrived in Sukhbataar. We checked into a hotel that has no internet but is otherwise pretty OK, double room cost 77000 MGT. We plan to cross over to Russia tomorrow morning. Other than that we’ll try to get some food here and chill out. This place seems to be the size of a small village.

So pretty pleasant day so far. 🙂

We did not go anywhere today, but it was still a pretty cool day. Actually, let me start with yesterday evening. After doing the blog update and writing a mixed online review of our hotel, we were debating our options with Jerome. The two main questions were: Where do I find a mechanic, and where do we go now. Couchsurfing suddenly came to my mind, and I logged into their site, which I have not visited for ages. It turns out that there is a CS community in UB, and by incredible coincidence, their 3x / year community meeting was at a restaurant in the center that day!! It was announced to start at 8 PM. It was already 22:30, but I still put on some still little wet clothes and boots to go there by cab.

The restaurant was deserted like most places, except for a single table with 3 local guys. I asked if they were from Couchsurfing and they happily affirmed. I was so happy about this I invited them for a round of local beer and told them my story so far. They promised to help with the mechanic, and explained that this year the summer is indeed unusually rainy. They said that in dry weather I could hope to get to Tsaganuur in about a week. In wet weather all bets are off. Nyam, who spoke excellent German and English, as he has studied in Germany and even knew some of my Zurich Couchsurfing mates said that it would be a big shame if I would not end up driving through Mongolia, but agreed that it was risky in this weather and our Google maps based time budgeting was completely unrealistic.

I returned to the hotel around 2 AM and slept till 9-ish. Jerome turned his back at the hotel breakfast so I ate both of our portions. This time it was actually better than the previous days, with yummy bacon (Sure it was soggy rather than crispy, and partly cold, but no matter how hard they try, there is no way for them to make me not like bacon.) replacing the disgusting sausage and soup. I also picked up our laundry in return for 38000 MNT, and asked the reception about a motorbike mechanic. They phoned two different people who seem to have recommended more people, and pretty quickly I was on the phone with an English speaking dude who was interested in helping. I asked him to come to the hotel and look at the bike. I only told him that I had a broken blinker and kept the broken windshield to myself, hoping not to scare him off.

A very cool looking guy arrived on a Harley Sportster (!) not much later. He looked at the bike, and demonstrated that the blinker only had a wire lose which when plugged back in made it work immediately. I was a bit embarrassed about not fixing this myself, but of course I was too exhausted to spend time looking at the bike in detail the previous day. He was clearly looking for more of a challenge, which we agreed was the broken windshield. He still needed to run some errands, but we agreed to meet at the hotel at 1PM and drive to his workshop. We used the time to buy some water, more canned food and even a pair of shoes for Jerome to use while his boots were wet.

It turned out that while my phone cannot call numbers here, I can send and receive text messages, so we were able to coordinate his second coming that way. I rode with him through some fortunately mild traffic to an area with panel housing construction sites reminiscent of the are behind the Munkasor housing project in Szigetszentmiklos where I lived when I was in 5th grade. We were greeted by a huge dog, a little dog, and Chimit’s wife, who brought us sweet Korean coffee. He had a bunch of bikes in various stages of deconstruction in his garage, and all the tools one could need. We talked about our families, and about traveling. He was a great guy with lots of experience and lots of interesting things to share. His sister is living in Frankfurt am Main, so he has also traveled in Europe. He said he often fixes bikes for tourists who wreck them in the Mongolian countryside like I did. It was amazing how he improvised: He had some junk bike parts lying around that he scavenged for the right screws and rubber fittings. He cut a piece of plexiglass to the right shape with an electric saw and polished it flawless. He basically made an all new windshield for the bike from scratch in about an hour. I mentioned to him that the bike pulled to one side, which he proceeded to fix by having me loosen the bolts that held the front suspension and then twisting the wheel to one side using the handle of a shovel. He also noticed that the handle bar was a bit bent, which we also readjusted, though the grip heating (!!! I was so stupid (I hope just temporarily, due to the cold) the previous day that I completely forgot about the bike’s grip heating feature.) was too hard to remove in such short time that we decided not to try and fix this completely. We also removed the front wheel and re-greased the axle. I also noticed a small hair crack on a piece of the axle assembly that he recommended I get fixed in Russia. In general he has me do all the simple work myself which was great because I learned a lot. Take that, aloof Swiss mechanics who have never let me into their garage, not even to look!

After working for about four hours he let me go without any payment. He told me his rates, but said I can pay him however much I liked. Wow. I did not have as much cash on me as I wanted to give him, so we agreed that he’d later come by the hotel (he had more errands to run and had no time to come with me immediately) to collect, which he did. Anyway, super nice guy. I hope I see him again sometime, maybe if they come out to Europe again. They are expecting their first daughter, maybe my sons Marci and Moric would like to meet her. 🙂

Regarding going through Mongolia to Tsaganuur vs. going north to Russia, he agreed its a shame to take the easy way, but confirmed that I could not expect any mechanic to help with the bike out in the boonies should it have further problems, and that he had low confidence in the reliability of BMW 650-s in general. Hmm.

I rode back to the hotel by myself through the city, confirming that I was starting to be able to find my way through UB and its crazy traffic. People clearly don’t see foreigners on bikes a lot here; everywhere I turn people wave to me and yield to me in traffic. Amazing.

Jerome was already worried where I stayed so long. He made me an instant ramen noodle soup which I enjoyed in a hot bath. Later we went to the center by taxi and bought a large two layer Russian made tent (They put The North Face logo on the packaging but only the brand of the presumably Chinese or Russian maker was printed on the tent itself. Of course the sales woman claimed it was authentic The North Face.) for 360000 MNT, exchanged some more Euros for local currency, and went for an overpriced Pizza dinner. Now we’re back to the hotel and its again getting late. We will drive off toward the northern border tomorrow.

I would really love to go drive cross country to Tsaganuur, but we already lost 4 days with our crazy little rain expedition, and a realistic estimate for this trip would be maybe 8 or 9 more days, which now includes days probably lost due to bad weather. This means we might not be able to be back in Zurich in 5 weeks as planned, which is bad for me and a deal breaker for Jerome.

Hmmmm. Still not decided about what to do next.

PS: I updated the Aug 26, 27 and 28 posts with photos.

I am very happy to be writing this update from the hotel again. The night was horrible. It kept pouring all through the night, and we hardly had any space due to being two plus a lot of luggage in a tiny tent. We had to keep worrying about touching the tent walls with the sleeping bags which were wet and ice cold. Also, almost all our clothes were wet. Fortunately the sleeping bags stayed dry through the night, which was probably a few degrees positive celsius. It was tolerable, but this was with wearing several layers in the sleeping bag. We slept a maybe 30 minutes at a time, not on purpose but either because of the heavy winds and water dreshing in on the tent, or just because we were nervous and cold.

The morning was disappointing. At 6am it was still raining hard. At 9 am it let up a bit, so we packed all our wet stuff onto the bikes, put on our wet biking clothes, and started to ride back through the mud very very slowly. I was in fact positively surprised that our bikes started up at all after standing in this storm all night. We made it through particularly bad spots by one person getting off, and helping to push / hold up the other person’s bike. We took turns like this, while it was again raining. Eventually we gained confidence and experience about which surfaces were more or less slippery. There is grass, there are big stones, there is gravel, there are potholes full of water, there is sand, and there is mud. It is interesting how each has very different grip when wet. It is really unfortunate that we never practiced off-road riding in safer conditions. I felt like we were doing the equivalent of jumping off a mountain with a paraglider with zero training.

Anyway, we fortunately made it back to the paved road (a stretch of maybe 15 km that took us an hour or two), where we rode at 80 km/h toward UB. Not faster because despite being the main road in the country, it has enormous potholes, sometimes an entire lane has collapsed due to erosion, and one has to move to the oncoming lane. It is instructive to watch the sverwing of the cars ahead.

It was getting even colder, and of course it was raining. I had to stop several times to warm my hands with the exhaust, I was losing all feeling in the totally drenched gloves.

Finally we made it into UB, and the giant permanent traffic jam. Here we immediately tried the first two hotels, but the first had no rooms, and the second had a russian guy who thought that what I need most right now was some russian vodka (rather than getting warm and dry), so we ended up going on to the familar hotel. Interestingly sitting for an hour in the traffic jam was not so bad because the exhaust fumes for all the cars make it cozy warm in there.

We are now in the hotel, which we booked for 2 nights. We gave all our wet stuff to the laundry to wash and dry, and draped all the non-washable wet stuff all over the room.

The weird thing is that I seem to have gotten used to not eating. We had at most one filling meal a day since we got here but strangely I am not hungry. We want to go out anyway to eat somehow, but I am wearing my swimming trunks right now as paradoxically its the only thing I have now that is not wet. The hotel restaurant is an option, or I could google food delivery!?

We have a few worries now: Our Russian visa is specifically for the Tsaganuur crossing, I am not sure if they will let us through in the northern border.

Second, my bike’s blinkers don’t work, which is a problem. I will try to get it fixed somehow tomorrow.

Anyway, it feels good not to be cold and not worry about running out of water or freezing in the night. We will be much more careful from now on, this was a learning experience.

(I am transcribing this from an audio recording I made on my mobile phone last night.)

Ok. Hello. Because we don’t have any kind of phone reception right now, or internet, this is kind of my journal update for today, August 27th.

We got up around 8:30 in the hotel New West. I had hotel breakfast…last night Jerome realized that he did not bring a sleeping bag, so he went to buy one while I had breakfast. He took a cab there and got ripped off by the cab driver. He came back, bought a sleeping bag, I had the same terrible breakfast I got two days earlier. Then we basically took all of our packed stuff, which we packed the previous night, and carried it down to the bikes, put everything on the bikes, rode to the nearest and very close gas station where we had both of the bikes and the jerry can filled up with 92 octane gas. We also checked the tire pressures, and they were way too low, so we had a local direct us to an air wending shack, so we filled up the tires. We also had a tussle getting rid of a totally drunken guy who insisted on leaning on our bikes. I had to throw him to the ground but he climbed back up and did not want to leave us alone. In the end I stopped a local car coming from the gas station, the guys in there made him leave.
We tried to find this road that leads in the western direction out of Ulan Bator. Initially we got onto the northern road. After about an hour and 30 wasted kilometers we finally found the western road, and started riding all the way to this place 120 km out (Bayankhangai) where we were going to turn off the paved road and ride toward Bulgan. (While passing through town an old lady threw a rock toward my bike. Fortunately she threw like an old lady.) We also refueled there again just to be safe.

The road became a dirt road and became harder and harder to ride, especially because it was raining for most of the day on and off. Eventually we got to a really muddy part where I first dropped my bike, but nothing bad happened. Really the bike just fell over because the ground was too soft. Then Jerome dropped his bike trying to cross a very deep muddy puddle. All this time we were going 30 km/h tops. At this point we were just next to some natives who got stuck with their own pick up truck in the mud. We helped them push the car out of the mud and we got some vodka in return. They were very friendly and told us they were fans of Chelsea and Manchester United. Unfortunately we could not communicate about anything else. They showed us the direction to Bulgan.

It was just another dirt track. So we started going along it and after driving for 10 minutes, my bike fell over in the mud. I flew a good distance but fortunately was not hurt. However my windscreen and my left front blinker were destroyed, as well as my helmet visor damaged (it no longer closes properly). It was not obviously muddy but it was very slippery. Jerome correctly observed that the thread of our tires was getting completely clogged with mud so it was becoming super slippery. Then basically immediately after we noticed that we were being eaten by mosquitoes, a torrential downpour started. We were already completely uncertain whether to continue because we were nowhere compared to where we wanted to be. We were making very very slow progress. We put up a tent and decided to sit through the storm inside the tent. Unfortunately my cheapo tent is not waterproof at all, so we were using my wet t-shirt to soak up the water that was coming in and wring it out outside. Eventually the rain stopped, but it was already 6 pm, and we decided not to keep going, as the rain made the ground so soft that it was now completely impossible to go with the bikes without falling. We decided to wait through the night in the tent. We draped Jerome’s tent on top of my tent to create two layers which stopped it from raining inside. We took all my stuff inside and left Jerome’s waterproof luggage on his bike. We ate some canned herring and cookies, as by then it was again raining heavily — so no use trying the camping burner.

So right now we’re actually pretty warm, it’s not that cold. And its now almost 9’o clock. We saw one truck drive by here that saw we had pitched tent by the side of the road, but he did not stop so it kind of implies that they don’t think that we’re in mortal danger, either that or they just did not care. We’re now in our sleeping bags, we’re going to try to sleep until the morning, we hope that the rain is going to stop and that the sun will dry up some of this, and then we will try to drive back to Ulan Bator, and then take the northern way toward Russia, where the roads are supposed to be better. We lost the mood to drive off road in this weather, this could be nice if its dry, but if its wet its really impossible to make progress at the rate we’d need. So we will just go toward Russia and hope for some paved roads. So that’s the plan. We still have maybe like two liters of water here, that we definitely need to stock up on, as soon as we get somewhere. Well, yeah, that’s it. So we’ll try to get some sleep. We’re kind of feeling uneasy right now. Ok, bye bye.

We slept pretty well despite having had to put Jerome on the couch and yielding the single blanket to him as compensation. We tried asking for a second blanket but the receptionist told us this is something that only the hotel manager could approve for us who apparently never turned up.

In the morning we decided to skip the terrible hotel breakfast and to check out immediately, putting our luggage into storage. We took a taxi to office of the transportation company. On the more than hour long drive there (without traffic it would have been under 5 minutes) we experienced probably the worst traffic jams I ever saw, despite the cabbie’s best efforts to bypass them. We were stuck within suburbs on unpaved roads in terrible dust, just inching forward within a honking mass. In general there seem to be no paricular rush hours … the traffic jam seems all encompassing and permanent. We’re not sure where everyone is going because there don’t seem to be a lot interesting of places to go within the city.

The head office of the logistics company seems to be in a pretty important office building because we passed two separate foreign delegations of suits on our way up to the seventh floor. Unfortunately there the nice girl who previously emailed me that the bikes have arrived told me in perfect German that she is disappointed that we came here, as she specifically told the receptionist in the hotel that he is to send us to the warehouse, which is a 20 minute walk from the office building. Another taxi ride did not seem to make sense, so we walked, and found it pretty easily after asking a few locals for corrective directions.

At the warehouse was another friendly lady who spoke pretty good English. She managed a gigantic yard full of shipping containers. She directed one of the containers to be moved from a stack to the floor using a huge container crane. When we saw the way the crane handles the containers (swinging it around, tipping it about 35 degrees, then slamming it down), it was not surprising to find that one of the straps fixing Jerome’s bike has torn, and the bike has slammed its left handle bar clean through the wooden box that contained it, breaking off the clutch level in the process. We were quite worried when we first saw this, but it turned out that the only important thing that broke was the screw holding the lever. One of the friendly warehouse workers rushed to the rescue and got us a screw from somewhere exactly the right size. The day was saved. I paid 10000 MNT for the import papers, and 35000 MNT as hopefully generous tips to the workers who (in stark contrast to the warehouse workers in germany) took great interest in our bikes and helped in every way they could.

We assembled the bikes in only about three hours. I was the one who made the most idiotic mistake of the day: I forgot to take my ignition key along from the hotel. So I had to take a cab back to the hotel, get the key, and buy a canister of premium 92 octane fuel on the way back. Both ways took less time than just the way there in the morning, fortunately — this cabbie second seemed a bit more luck with route planning. Before we left, the warehouse lady asked us if we were a couple. Apparently it is not usual for two men to take crazy trips together. In general all mongolians who we informed that we were planning to drive cross country through their lands just shake their heads in disbelief. She asked if we’re not worried about the bears. We said we were not, though this did scare Jerome a little. 🙂

We drove the bikes back to the hotel in the bumper to bumper traffic, and got permission to park them in a locked yard behind the building. This was at 4pm. But being tired and not having properly packed our bags yet (in other words, combine the luggage that came in the shipping crates with the stuff we brought on the plane in a way that fits on the bikes), and having come up with more ideas for grociery shopping, we decided to stay in the hotel for another night.

We ate dinner (that’s right, our first meal for the day aside from a shared nashi-fruit) in a posh looking hotel restaurant which like all posh looking hotel restaurants were completely vacant other than the army of bored staff. We had a pizza to be on the safe side. We wanted to know what was on the pizza. The waitresses did not speak english here, so in the end one of them pulled out her i-phone (everyone has iphones here, newer ones than I do) and after some typing showed me the screen that had a bear on it and the words “flesh, meat”. We were not sure what exactly to make of this, but we said it was OK. We had some Chengghis Gold Vodka to go with it. It turned out to be delicious, and tasted like chicken.

We bought some german herring fillet in tomato sauce conserves and Leibnitz crackers on the way back because I already ate most of our supplies of these key rations on the previous night. We ended up finding everything except gas bottles for Jerome’s grill. I feel extremely smart for having bought one that runs on gasolene.

Aside from mild throat aches probably iduced by the smog, we both feel fine. The new SPOT coordinate you see on the map is the location of the warehouse. The plan is to drive off into the wilderness tomorrow morning! I only took a few not particularly interesting photos today, we will upload those at a later date. I need to go packing. 🙂

We landed today morning around 6 am, and made took a private taxi to the hotel, getting only mildly ripped off (paid probably 2x as much as the locals, 30,000 MNT), and checked in. The receptionist even understands a bit of English. He called the warehouse with our bikes for us, and was told that we should come for the bikes on Monday at 10 am. We found the location on some maps he provided. The city does not seem very big at all. We slept a few hours and then got hotel breakfast which was disgusting but we did not get sick, which is awesome. We will now take a walk in the direction of the city center to do some shopping and look for a decent restaurant. I will also try to send a gps spot. So far so good.

Update: Both of us survived the day with only very mild stomach problems (note to self: stop drinking coffee with milk here). Had a pretty decent pizza lunch. Spent most of the day sightseeing in the city. Took lots of pictures. By six PM the jet lag was however making it hard to stay awake, so we just went shopping for imperishable groceries. The selection of western goods is pretty limitless here, as good as pretty much anywhere.

Here are some random photos:

As soon as I decided to do the trip by motorcycle I started looking for a suitable steed.  My first and only motorbike up to this point was my trusty Triumph Street Triple anno 2004. Back then I was young(er) and (more) naive, and I chose it the way young and naive guys would choose a woman, which is to say on looks alone.  I was concerned with image and appearances back then, and so I was wooed by the aggressive styling and british breeding.  It did not help that the unscrupulous salesman told me that it is a perfectly good beginner’s bike.  As a result it took me two falls, several near death experiences, two instructors, two exams, and probably twice the number of expensive lessons to get my mastery of the vehicle to the point where I was able to pass the strict Swiss license exam.  In fact  I only got the license because on my second try I did the exam on a tame rented Honda street bike with only half the engine volume, which handled like a bicycle in comparison.

Fast forward 8 years or so … today I ride my triumph as if it were a bicycle, having grown perfectly accustomed to it after all this time of three season daily riding.  I have ridden it on dirt roads, scraped its belly on steep kerbs, and recently even mastered the hanging off style of cornering.  I now have a fairly good understanding of what it is good at and what not so much.  Probably the most annoying aspect of the bike has nothing to do with the handling but rather the way it is made.  I tried to maintain it myself rather than take it to the Triumph dealer’s workshop for every little thing, but this has proven to be a futile endeavor.  Like modern cars, the bike is not intended to be user serviced.  This starts with the lack of a center stand which makes a bike stand be just the first of a host of specialized tools one would need to buy to be able to do much of anything.  As a result my tinkering has not gone much further than removing the battery over the iciest winter months.  Not to mention that the local Triumph dealers are absolutely unhelpful when it comes to learning how to maintain the bike.

It was clear to me that out in the boonies there may not be an official manufacturer-authorized service station around, so I will need to be able to perform routine maintenance and small repairs myself.  The precondition to doing this is a bike that is built to permit it.  This became the number one requirement for choosing my ride.  The number two requirement was price:  I now had a family to support, we were shopping for a house, and it was clear I did not have the levels of disposable income I once … ahem … disposed over.  So I was looking for something as cheap as possible that would still reliably get me where I needed to go.  Of course the trip should still be fun in the motorcycling sense of the word while lugging a lot of luggage around, so I ruled out anything under 600 cc.

With these requirements in mind I started surfing used vehicle websites.  The first thing I was contemplating, and even took for a test ride was a Suzuki DR 650 for 2500 CHF.  It was the perfect bike in terms of maintainability:  A prehistoric design carburated single cylinder engine that did not have any of the modern day bells and whistles that make things nontrivial.  On the other hand this engine was quite weak compared to ‘modern’ 600 cc single cylinders with high compression ratios and fuel injection, acceleration was so-so.  I also thought the brakes were on the weak side, and the rear sub-frame did not look enthusiastic to carry a lot of load.  Wind protection was also nonexistent.  I read about quite a few people who take such a bike on long journeys with a lot of success, but they tend to have made serious modifications to the stock setup.

In the end I abandoned the Suzuki in favor of a BMW 650 GS.  This one has a single cylinder fuel injected, high compression rotax engine, but the rest of the bike is free of electronic schnickschnack.  I am talking about the ABS-less model from 2000.  This BMW is actually German in name only, as it was built by Aprilia using an Austrian-made engine.  The Italian / multinational heritage becomes obvious as soon as one tries to simply remove the fairings.  At least three of four different screw head types are used seemingly randomly for similar sized screws all over the machine, annoyingly enough.

Over the course of some winter months I spent my daily free time (which is typically between 10 PM, the time we put my son to bed, and midnight) to teach myself some basic maintenance skills. I did buy a semi-official repair manual for the bike, but this glossed over too many details. In the end Youtube and the enthusiast maintained GS FAQ were invaluable in this process. In the end I know how to change the oil, replace the air filter, change the brake pads, change the battery, take out the wheels, and change the tires and inner tubes. I also mounted a luggage frame most of the way before giving up and asking a professional mechanic for help. 🙂 I did not go as far as change my own brake fluid or calibrate the engine valves, but I am pretty sure I could figure these things out too if I had enough time and motivation. I should not need to do those things however for this trip. By far the most annoying aspect of this work was how many different tools one needs. It is obvious that it never occurred to the engineers who came up with this bike that their creativity with fasteners may require that travelers will have to drag half the bike’s weight in tools along with them for journeys to remote locations.

I rode the bike a fair bit during the following spring, and it is really quite comfortable, especially thanks to the custom gel seat and custom windshield that came with it. We were actually going to try the bikes in a longer weekend camping outing but in the end we did not have time for this. The only longer trip I took with it so far was to drive it to Germany and box it up for the logistics company that was going to ship it to Mongolia. On this trip I managed to melt the loose ends of the fastening cables of my soft luggage to the hot exhaust on both sides of the bike. That was annoying and a thing to try to avoid going forward.

Here is a picture of the BMW waiting to be packed up and shipped off. More about this very painful experience later.

It so happens that members of my family are worried to various degrees about my going on this trip. The various degrees culminate with my mom, who is understandably the most worried. One could say she is extremely worried. She tried really hard to convince me not to go, and then to convince others to convince me not to go. Failing this, her next best option will be to call me every few hours for the duration of the trip, to make sure that I am still OK. I looked into automating this process, and it turns out that one can get overpriced satellite communication devices of various kinds to stay in touch to variing degrees, even from areas where there is no cell phone reception. I decided to get a SPOT Satellite Messenger. This is a third generation technology which can send a few rudimentary pre-programmed messages to the interwebs along with my GPS coordinates every time a button is pushed. It is supposedly not super reliable, which is why it is not recommended to be used for emergencies. But it will be a great way to let my mom know that I am still alive, while not necessarily having to talk to her on the phone several times a day. Note that I wouldn’t like that. 🙂

I dubbed my device Mr. Spotty and tested it back home by walking on a playground while my son Marci was playing in the sandbox. I had it send a message from two points about 5 meters apart. Here is a map with the results.

You will be able to track my actual progress by clicking the map link above. I use the Spotwalla service to render the GPS coordinates to google maps, which seems to be a bit nicer than than the service that comes with the SPOT.

We will see how reliably the device performs at the end of the world. One thing that is already a bit bothersome about the little thing is that one needs to pay for an annual subscription fee in addition to the price of the handset, and SPOT reserves the right to automatically extend the subscription every year, just like a magazine subscription. The precise prices seem to vary according to territory, but you can get an idea from the article I linked above.