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Report from a two-months tour through Mongolia. The tour was self-supported and self-organized. We cycled 3000 km around the Changai Mountains and through Gobi Desert

Wide steppes, wild horses, and two mountain bikes - Mongolia

Waltraud
2004-03-05 08:22:30

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Mongolia Mountainbike Expedition

Andy Heßberg & Waltraud Schulze; (1996)

The planning and preparation

Mongolia. We have decided to explore this country by bike. But, there is so little information available on Mongolia in general, and on biking in Mongolia in particular. We organized the whole tour by ourselves, half a year of planning prior to the tour. Since we had no reliable information on whether or not one could buy food in back-country towns, and if so, what kind of food that would be, we decided to bring all the food with us, we were going to need for our seven week's tour. The advantage of this was, that we were totally independent and we hat the type and amounts of food we needed. We planned for 4 Mcal a day which was about 800 g dry weight of food a day. You can imagine that for seven weeks, a lot of stuff accumulated: when we left for Mongolia, we were carrying a total of about 90 kg of food, consisting of dried fruit, a self made cereal mixture, pemmikan, self made candybars (something like Cliff bars), powerbars, milk powder, noodles, rice, instant mashed potatoes, instant souce powder, marzipan, a mixture of nuts, tea bags, soybean oil, and sugar. The only things we ever bought during the tour was sugar, and some noodles (we wanted to eat more than our food plan allowed us). In addition to all the food we were carrying our personal camping gear (about 15 kg per person). Now there was a big question: How the hell do we get 120 kg of equipment plus two bikes to Mongolia? We decided to travel by train. This had the advantage that the luggage was always with us, and on the train they don't charge for overweight. So we spent one and a half week traveling from Prague to Ulaan Baatar via Moscow and on the Transsiberian Railway. This worked totally well and we arrived in Ulan Bator with all our luggage complete on September 2nd. We spent two day in Ulan Bator (we had booked a family stay with a travel agency: ...