![\"485490_10151792169269291_1337755917_n\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/crankpunk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/485490_10151792169269291_1337755917_n.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\nit was grey, cold, miserable and wet, the road was bad, rammed with traffic, wastelands of gutted or incomplete (it was hard to tell the difference) shells of buildings littered the eyeline, pavements looked like they’d recently been bombed, people by the road looked numb and pinched and hard and tough and i loved every second of it. in the distance, bleak and unforgiving, lay hills and peaks, glimpses of the hinterland. their tracks were already calling out to me.<\/p>\n
‘come,’ they said. ‘we’ve been waiting.’<\/p>\n
i spent the first day walking around the city, struck by the Russianness of the place, clambering over half-finished sidewalks and ditches, jumping over puddles of mud and dodging splashes from passing cars and trying to get a bead on the town. but it wasn’t possible, not for the whole time i was there. i love exploring cities and i’ve been to countless, and always i can quickly get my bearings and get a sense of the place pretty quickly – but not UB.<\/p>\n this is a frontier town. it exists on an edge, literally, metaphorically and even philosophically. comforts are few and expensive and the overall feel of the city is one of hardness. i found that Mongolian people are not too quick to throw out smiles, not that they are unfriendly, but there is a sense that there are far more pressing things to be concerned with than civil niceties. like surviving. like getting through. like not being dead. with nature at its most extreme never very far away at all the grip on life is one you better be sure of. there can be no wavering here, and even if the populace of UB live amongst the apartments and the shiny facades of hotels and new shopping malls, it is not much other than a pretense. just a few short kilometers away from the shabby downtown area there are the ger areas, where the poor (the normal?) live still in traditional housing, jammed up close together on hillsides overlooking the city on mud streets that overflow with the refuse the inhabitants produce.<\/p>\n the roads on the outskirts feature manholes with no covers, though some are crudely cemented over, others bear evidence of tampering, with the hole half-gaping and the busted lid nearby. i asked a Mongolian guy why this was. ‘when it is really cold, people go down there to keep warm, in the night. there can be sometimes 5,000 people in one area, down there in the sewers. when the sun comes up, they come up.’<\/p>\n as i said, this is one tough town.<\/p>\n i got the bike fixed up next day, went out in 14 degree rain and wind for three hours, couldn’t find a decent trail and promptly came down with a cold that quickly developed into a 48-hour bout of ‘flu. two days in bed was not what i needed after weeks of disrupted training, but it wouldn’t have made much difference as the weather deteriorated outside the fogged-up window of my room. this weather, they said, was ‘unusually bad.’<\/p>\n by wednesday afternoon, 3 days before the race was to start, i felt better and the weather was spectacular so i suited up and headed out. three hours into what was shaping up to be the best ride of my life, i flatted on a mountain. or rather, i ‘holed’. the rent in the tire was unfixable, so i trekked a good 7km down a mountain through a small hamlet where curious, weather-kissed faces with beautiful eyes peeked out at me through gaps in fences or from behind dented aluminum doorways, and down to a road.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n