Still here

I went for a walk again. The next room is quite noise, the truck drivers seems to multiplicity inside there, I think they organized a poker or cards contests. I don’t know. The door of the room is always open since is quite hot and all of them are smoking and without t-shirt or even some without pants. Despite the temperature I decided to go out. If you cannot walk on it, ridding would be impossible, so I prefer to think I can actually walk it.

I think I walked that place in all the possible ways. There are just two parallel big streets along the village; and starting from the main road, six small roads crossing perpendicular the other two. I went today down to the river while watching again the wind. I guess is a cyclist obsession. Here the wind is always quite strong; you can always hear it blowing from inside your room. I try to do some statistics to see the predominant direction by watching the hundreds of Chinese flags that are all around. The wind however seems quite chaotic and random.

I went to the river thinking that I may have the chance to swim on it, or just to sit on the grass and read my only book. The river and the bridge that cross it was however, considered as everything else a strategic point. So several fences surrounded it. It wasn´t impossible to jump in, but with a total of 8 streets I counted at least 7 police stations; 2 big ones and 5 smaller. Jumping to the river would have an exact duration of 3 minutes of refreshing water and 2 hours of answering questions.

So I came back to the hotel and seated in a chair on the porch looking west. 20 km far on the horizon there are some mountains that one can guess have the name Mongolia written on them. Then I started thinking on the road; next days are going to be a bit crazy. We want to cycle to Ulaan Batoor to get there on the 7 (Adam opinion), or between the 8 and 10 (my idea). I would rather get there on the 8, since I need to do and organize a lot in the city, but is difficult to predict.  That would mean 1700 in about 18-21 days. Considering 1 or 2 of rest on the way would mean around 100 km per day, and that’s insane. 100 km a day even 160 is a really easy if you assume: good roads, nice weather, no surprises; and in Mongolia what we know for sure the roads are as bad as they can be, the wind will be hell, and the roads and the km can easily damage our bikes. Luckily I am ridding a Mind Movie bike (always space for some publicity ;)).

I also bet, I will get to Ulaan Batoor before Andy and Alison. We met first time in the middle of a sand storm in Uzbekistan. Later e met again in Bukhara and in Samarkand. Although they go by moto, they are taking it easy visiting a lot of places and going around while I do a straight line. I know they crossed the border 2 days ago, far north west. That would mean that they are now about 2000 km from UB, while we are 1700 km but still needing to wait 2 more days.  We are playing for a Genghis Kahn vodka bottle.