Mongolian Steppe & The Altai Mountains: September 26

We got up at 8am and the hotel was dodgier than I remembered, and we still couldn't wash due to the hotel's plumbing. We went straight to the market looking for a lift to Olgii, roughly 650km away. Their system of negotiating a ride is perplexing, prices change randomly and the departure time, vehicle and driver change regularly. We finally had some breakfast, (noodle soup...again), and then went and asked at the bus station for transportation, one guy was charging US$1000 which we thought was just a little extreme. We rode out of town a few kilometres hoping to flag down a lift, but there was no traffic whatsoever. We decided to head back into town and as soon as we did we saw a fuel truck coming down the highway. After a long time pointing to maps and gesturing to load our bikes on the top of the truck the old boy driving agreed to take us to Khovd 430km up the highway. The journey was exactly how it was described to us - slow, bumpy and with random stops (every kilometre even). The roads are awful for any vehicle let alone a fuel tanker, and we were already sick of any transportation other than our bikes, but at least it was warm. We stopped in the middle of the desert for lunch for over an hour, made another stop at 3am for another couple of hours before getting back on the road for 30 minutes to be dropped at a canteen at 6am, about 30km from Khovd. We tried to get some food inside the canteen and had to resort to waking up the drunk guy sleeping inside to get us some noodles while the cranky old duck was barking instructions from her bed. We stocked up on whatever food we could get, which wasn't much and hoped we didn't have to ride the rest of the way to Khovd.