The ride came about when last Christmas he mentioned that it’s always something he really wanted to do. Never one to turn down a cycling opportunity I agreed to do the trip straight away. So, a little later in the year than we’d thought (due to me being in Mongolia for 3 months) we set off on the 3 day, 100+ miles, hill climbing marathon from Winchester to Eastbourne.

And… it went almost entirely without any problems. No fallings off, some light rain on the 3rd day but nothing to slow us down, no mechanical breakdowns, relatively few aches and pains and most of all: NO PUNCTURES! After my previous experiences (with between 4 and 8 riders) having just 2 people (and 2 bikes – both in good working order) made things a lot more straightforward.

Thanks again to Liz for luggage support on the first day (after that we carried it).

We also discovered some amazing vegetable curry pasties in the general store in a little village called Jevington – last stop (and 2 hills) from Eastbourne. So good we went back for a second one (though they got my second one wrong and it turned out to be cheese and onion – still bitter about this!).

Here’s a video I put together of the trip – some gimmicky stuff in this one:

A great way to round off the summer of cycling. Now I’m not commuting I’m looking for some more cycling challenges to motivate me to keep the fitness up through the winter. Anyone???

I also spent much of the first evening in the pub being ridiculed for apparently ordering a Pina Colada last year. However, now I check back to last year’s writeup I realise it was actually a Mojito which is so much more manly and underserving of criticism. We also realised that – since he has been on EVERY SINGLE group bike trip I’ve ever organised, Andy is probably a completely imaginary friend of mine because that’s totally implausible. Chris and Mark may well be imaginary as well (there are people other than me in the video right?!).

So anyway onto the incidents:

• Chris broke his chain. (Just like last time!)
• Mark also broke his chain several times and had to take a link out each time. With his chain getting shorter by the minute, after the first morning Mark took his bike for it’s annual service at the shop at Glyncorrwg. (just like last time!)
• I got bitten by mosquitos (just like last time – though I was wearing repellent so I managed to keep it to around 30 bites this year)
• Andy fell off (who can believe it – just like last time!) At least this year it wasn’t on the very first section.
• With a grazed body and swollen knee from falling on rock, Andy managed to soldier on and ride the rest of the first day but ducked out of the second day (yep – just like last time). Next year body armour for Andy!

Anyway this year, instead of photos – we have video! This should hopefully give people an idea of what it’s like mountain biking at a custom built trail center. Think: endless, glorious single track, challenging technical stuff and awesome downhill but of course – you have to get up the hill first…

This will suit if:

• you missed out on the black run and want to see what its like
• you would enjoy seeing me fail hopelessly to keep up with Mark – still king of downhill! Given that I was hardly braking he obviously wasn’t at all…

We have:

• Sukhbaatar square, the main square in Ulaanbaatar.
• Giant Buddah and Zeisan war memorial.
• Terelj national park where I stayed in a Ger for the night (amazing waking up to all those oranges and blues)
• Bogd Khan winter palace (run down apart from one section that has been renovated)
•  Giant stainless steal Genghis Khan statue. Really really big, and only built in 2006 – the plans are to surround it with smaller statues of his army.

So first stop – the cloth stores – and picking out fabrics and buttons for suits and shirts. This was great fun, though a little hard to tell how things would turn out to the inexperienced. Total cost for materials: about £35.

The tailor I was recommended is not one of the expensive, upmarket ones. I’ve spoken to people who have tried both expensive and cheap tailors and found that both are variable in quality across different jobs, but the expensive ones are no less variable than the cheap ones. So the tailor I used has a small shop in the center of Ulaanbaatar with a big desk, a curtain to change behind and 3 sewing machines partially hidden behind screens. I took along my existing suit and my best fitting shirt to leave with her to more or less replicate (with a few requested adjustments). Cost for tailoring for a suit, separate trousers, separate jacket and 3 shirts: about £135. This included 2 main fittings and one final check, but I’m sure I could have had more if I’d liked.

If I were to have something made here again, I’d seriously think about bringing materials out from the UK – the quality and range of fabrics and buttons are better. I’d also experiment more with specifying interesting things like different fabrics inside cuffs, collars, suit linings and pockets. Overall though I’m very pleased with the results and to have doubled the size of my business wardrobe.

Here’s the process documented in photos:

First – Google Chrome/toolbar insists on popping up and reporting that the web page is in either Russian or Bulgarian and makes a friendly offer to translate it. There’s a drop down allowing you to select other languages, but alas Mongolian isn’t one of them. Google basically doesn’t yet support Mongolian. Not much we can do about this.

The other software that doesn’t properly support Mongolian is Windows. We are talking Windows XP here (used by almost everyone in Mongolia) – though it supports Cyrillic in window title bars it doesn’t support those extra Mongolian characters, rendering them with the good old empty rectangle symbol. It would be interesting to try some more recent versions of Windows to see if they have similar issues.

We did a poll of how the 3 major banks in Mongolia handle this and found 3 different solutions – one uses English in the title tag, despite the site being in Mongolian, one just lives with the missing characters and the other replaces them with other characters that look a bit like them (in fact it does this across it’s whole site not just the title tag). We picked what we thought was the best compromise and went with true Mongolian Cyrillic for the main content and the look-a-like replacement scheme for the title tag. Apparently this replacement scheme is fairly common on Mongolian sites and even includes use of the Euro symbol!

After the translated Chinese menu post, some people have expressed concern that I am able to eat properly and am not living on a diet of exploded cows and Overlord’s elbows… (ahh bless – thanks for caring – I now know who the motherly types are!) So here’s my assurance that Mongolian food is actually relatively free of weirdness and is quite edible.

Having said that – it is also rather free of fruit and vegetables  – its a traditionally nomadic society after all, living off the meat and dairy products from the family herd. For that matter it’s also fairly free of carbohydrates. Oh and flavor – not that much of that either. Yes folks, it’s like an enforced Atkins diet and if I didn’t try not to, it would be quite easy to end up eating beef 3 times a day.

Some photos to prove I’m actually eating rather well (albeit not particularly healthily):

I’m actually back in the UK right now for a short break before heading back to Mongolia for my second stint. In a backlash against the Mongolian diet, I’m eating tons of vegetables and fruit and am vowing to seriously cut down on meat when I go back there. For more on why this is a good idea, check out Michael’s article on how not to get cancer.

The restaurant was an experience not to be missed – we of course asked to be served specifically the most ‘north’ Korean dishes and the dining experience was completed with an overhead TV playing communist propaganda style music videos.