TravellingStrom

Mayan Prophecy Countdown

We had contact with the shipping dude and would meet up at midday in his office on the other side of town. So, this morning I got started on the bike repair, there was no real hurry now as the deadline of 20th September was out the window 😦 But, maybe I could get some more stuff done. I wanted to clean the air box, but as I had filled the tank prior to trucking it here, I would need to drain the tank, or nearly empty it anyway. First things first though, I stripped the whole of the pannier system off, the tail piece and unbolted the seat mount sub frame from the main frame, this allowed me to access the stripped bolt hole much easier and I could then feed in a bolt from the other side, where there was thread, and start cutting a new thread with one of the new bolts I had bought yesterday.

That took a while to get sorted but in the end I did get the bolt to catch and managed to remount the whole system correctly. I am still not happy though, I would prefer a proper sized TAP, maybe another day when I get back home, for now I will keep an eye on that area.

Around 11am we all piled into some cabs, the flag me down ones not the ones with dodgy meters 🙂 We headed past the train museum until we found the correct building and met up with the owner of Air Cargo Mongolia. But on the way we had a normal traffic jam, caused by some idiot who decided to do a Uturn, then found there was not enough room, so they blocked both our lanes and one from the other direction, because another car was right up his arse and left the first idiot with nowhere to go!!!!

Once at the transport company, we were given some details about shipping the bikes out. Basically the bike would need to be dismantled a bit, the front wheel off, the windscreen and handlebars off, the battery out and no fuel with the tank open for two days to air it out. This could be done at the place they have, where the bike would then be placed on a pallet, wrapped in plastic sheeting and sent into bonded storage. The bonded storage would be cheaper here than at the destination, so that decision would need to be made before final payment and leaving the country. It is all based on volumetric weight, most of the bikes would be about the same, it would depend on the crate size in the end rather than actual weight.

Neil jumped in with both feet and said he would bring his bike down on Monday for crating and he would fly out the next day, he would be the test pilot, but basically I think now the tour was ended, he just wanted out and to be by himself. I personally needed to think a bit more about where and when I would go, I was sort of at a loss, the whole trip had lost its meaning and new decisions needed to be made. I decided to think about it for a few days and make a gut decision then.

As this is Mongolia, I knew Genghis Kahn was from here and I also knew he had a big empire, but this map on the office wall was showing me he owned a lot more than I ever expected!

It looked like he owned most of the continent, very impressive! So, we all had some thinking and decisions to make, but the next big one was food as we were all starved. We found this joint up the road a ways and piled in and found that the menu had pictures, always a good thing in a strange country where the language is extremely hard to understand let alone read it or speak it!

It was here I managed to get a bit more than I bargained for. Basically there was a picture of chook pieces, but it had the word 1kg next to it. So, I tried to pass on the information using signs and pointing to my leg, that I wanted 3 pieces of chook leg, I did this by holding up 3 fingers and pointing to my thighs. There was some merriment amongst the others at the table when what actually arrived was nothing like the picture, I got my three pieces of chook, it was crumbed, it also came with rice and some type of salad stuff but the worst part was there were three plates of it!!! I had to send the others away, there was some major miscommunication happening there and lucky for me the staff got themselves on the outside of the extra tucker, whew this is hard work!!

Mind you after the meal, we got the bill and they did try and charge me for the three meals, lol, that was corrected in a hurry! Most of us then went our separate ways, some going to the Black Market, some to the town centre but I wanted to head back to the Oasis and work on the bike. Which is what happened, but I did not work too hard, I grabbed some internet time and did some updating of the blog, which was seriously behind times.

The evening was beer and vodka, it was Friday night and during the evening we decided to have a final dinner together tomorrow night probably while we were still all here. A few of the others wanted to go for a ride into the Gobi desert at some stage and camp out, personally I still needed to do bike repairs before going anywhere and I was in no rush to do that until I could decide on a direction.

It was a late night and another cool one, but the Oasis was a comfortable place to be in, good tucker, cold beer and nice people, I am starting to form the opinion though that it may become a crab pot, easy to get in, hard to get out!!!

Cheers from Ulan Batar, Mongolia
TravellingStrom