September 27

The first few cars we saw were going in the wrong direction and there wasn't much traffic so we prepared for the ride into town, which someone told us was actually 55km.  As we headed off we saw three one-tonne trucks heading up the road, we flagged them down and they were heading to Olgii.  We were pretty relieved as we were both not feeling up to riding today.  We hammered it into Khovd in about half an hour where the drivers stopped for breakfast and we managed to get chips and chocolate, we were still starving.  Then we went to the mechanic.  Then we went to the bank.  Then we went to a Kazakh village about 20 minutes in the opposite direction to where we needed to go.  We picked up about 8 bags of potatoes and we needed to re-pack the bikes in a position where they wouldn't be destroyed by this guy's wild driving.  We headed back to Khovd so we could get on the road to Olgii and dickhead hits the same bump we got 4 feet of air on the way out at about 110km/h and this time the truck isn't sounding good.  Luckily, it was only the bash plate rubbing against the tyre, and once it was fixed we were finally able to get going after stopping over 4 hours ago.  We found the customary thing to do is stop every 10km for a piss (these guys can urinate like noone else) and to kick the tyres.  Marty got a dressing down for resting his foot on the dash of the truck, however the drivers happily slammed their doors into one another when opening them.  The road is OK in small parts, but is usually massive rocks, river, sand and corrugations.  We stopped at a canteen about 80km into the journey, and it took the cooks over an hour to whip up the typical noodle soup served everywhere.  We were going a little mad from all the stop/start and the length of time we had been on the road, we resorted to throwing rocks at a can for half an hour to calm down.  It took nearly 3 days straight driving to get just over 800kms.  Eventually we could see Olgii but old mate still had a few tricks, getting the truck sideways at 8o clicks in the soft sand of the newly graded road and simply laughing it off as if he were impressing us.  Snowy mountains surrounded the town as well as Tolbo Nuur, the lake on the way in, and we passed lots of Kazakh families loaded onto trucks - Olgii is a stronghold of Kazakh culture.  We finally got on to the bitumen of the city and got a flat tyre about one kilometre from the hotel.  He was good enough to drive on and we checked in to another run down hotel which claimed to have hot water but really didn't; it was our first shower in over a week so we didn't care too much.  We then went to a Turkish restaurant and ate 4 meals each.

Kazakh village, lots of potatoes

The touring party

Views coming into Olgii