The target today was Khovd. We woke up to a unsurprisingly amazing morning yet again! I’ve never seen this much blue sky before.
Paul’s knee was slowly getting better every day. We packed up the bikes and headed off.
Lots of livestock as normal.
I would say to pay close attention to the signs, but something you just can’t.
We even saw snow capped mountains. Apologies for the dark edges, I must have knocked a setting on my camera.
This was a well used track and the surface was pretty good to make some decent time on and get up to speed. We kept on following the telegraph poles.
You’ll notice the water bottle in the photo above. Some of the other photos show us carrying our rubbish bag too until we can get to a town to dispose of it. One thing that is a bit sad is that litter appears to be quite a big issue in Mongolia. Not many people seem to clear up after themselves. Eve when we arrived into towns sometimes and people saw us popping our rubbish bag into a bin they appeared quite surprised. A shame really as sometimes it spoils the great scenery. Anyhow ..
We approached Ulgii (one of two towns called this) that has a big lake on its shores which of course attracts birds. No … not the type in bikinis!
A lake, Mongolia, snow capped mountains in the distance, it was great. The riding around the lake was a bit hard going though with lots of up/down quite narrow tracks at places so not too many photos unfortunately as I was paying attention to not falling off.
Imagine living here!
This family were packing up the Yurt and moving.
What a landscape … and we had it all to ourselves most of the time. Wow!
The day was good going really and we were enjoying it as always. As we approached Khovd though we had quite a surprise… lush green meadows and streams! It even had that meadow type smell to it. It was such a contrast to the past few days. We even had tarmac!
We rolled into Khovd and found a hotel. It was at one time obviously quite a grand place but was quite run down. It was nice though, clean etc. Paul and I were quite excited to have a shower. Just remember not to touch the light switch in the shower with wet hands!
We were allowed to park the bikes around the back of the hotel for safety which most places did for us but I never thought the bikes would be in any danger in any of the places we had been in. There was a supermarket next door and after dinner Paul and I scoffed ice creams and chocolates!
This was the southern point in our little detour to avoid the river crossings. Tomorrow we would be heading back north toward the Russian border and the Altai mountains.