July 13th (Day 1): A good start

Ten days after leaving Vancouver, we finally started cycling! We woke up early and had a good breakfast in the guesthouse and set off on the streets of Ulaabaatar a little after 6am. Starting this early meant we avoided the traffic. Drivers have been giving us a wide berth and we've gotten countless friendly waves and hellos.

From Ulaanbaatar to ...

We got a bit off track in the suburbs of Ulaanbaatar and decided to cut across a residential (ger) area back to the main road. Unfortunately we hit a muddy patch and our bikes and shoes got soiled with some of the most tenacious mud we've ever seen (sorry, no pics).

From Ulaanbaatar to ...

The rest of the road was on some of the nicest tarmac in existence. Quite the contrast with what the rest of the roads will be like in Mongolia. About 82km west of Ulaanbaatar we turned off the main road towards Hustayn Nuruu (national park). We followed this sandy side road for about 5km to Moltsog Els tourist ger camp.

From Ulaanbaatar to ...

Despite getting here at the early hour of 1pm, we both promptly passed out on the comfortable beds. We never did end up going the extra 7km to the actual park. After waking up from our siesta we had dinner in the ger restaurant and then got straight to work entertaining you on this blog and uploading some photos (sorry, Chris made a mistake while geocoding them so they are not geocoded today, when we get a faster internet connection we'll re-upload them with geocoding).

From Ulaanbaatar to ...

All is not heavenly though: now that the sun has set the various bugs have invaded our ger. Hopefully they'll leave us alone when we turn the light off and crawl into bed.

Here's a map of our route today (you can also view it in google earth)

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