Chasing Genghis Khan

[Hugh Janus]

In Young Frankenstein, the hapless Igor retrieved a brain in a jar for master Fredrick to transplant. Devoid of much cognitive firepower, he figured one labelled “Abnormal” was actually from someone named “Abby Normal.” And hence, the operation went all kinds of Fubar. That’s a long way of saying, after flying halfway around the world to ride for a week in Mongolia – some of the world’s most incredibly pure, natural and undisturbed terrain on the planet – we honestly don’t know which brain types we have. But we can tell you: This is an absolutely mind-blowing, once-in-a-lifetime adventure – even for riders who have done and seen almost everything else.

Getting there is some kind of fun…or maybe not. And oh, the irony (if not downright hypocrisy) in search of moto-purity. Kindly start by hopping on a carbon-puking plane, fly over melting polar ice caps with a stopover in smog-befogged Beijing, and then press on to purest Mongolia. Upon arrival, figure out how to interface with 10 other guys, all hyped and gated up for a weeklong dirt-bike rush.

Most happily our bikes, the tour route, logistics, lodging, meals, ride leaders, chase vehicles and other support, were provided by Nomadic Off-Road for pay (see “Getting There,” below). It’s an all-Husqvarna lineup – electric-start FE 450 and 350 enduros whose narrow single-cylinder layout and scrappy performance made them ideal for navigating Mongolia’s vast steppes, grasslands, dunes, desert, woods, canyons and rivers. They’re so good here, it almost felt normal. But we still knew what we were doing wasn’t.

Mongolia and the vast Gobi Desert. (Art by Robert Martin/)

A Soviet Sandwich

You Rhode Islanders complain about neighbor states Connecticut and Massachusetts much? Stop whining: Mongolia is sandwiched between China and Russia and hasn’t even got a coastline. Which doesn’t help much considering the country is bursting with natural resources like copper, coal, gold and uranium, making it dependent on foreign entities in commerce. This problem in part ranks Mongolia only 92nd in the Human Development Index, which describes a decent, healthy life. That’s a long way below the US at 15th and about in the middle of 189 countries worldwide.

On the other hand, Mongolia is the remnants of a vast empire that, in the early 13th Century, stretched west-to-east from present-day Poland to Korea, and north-to-south from Siberia to the Gulf of Oman and Vietnam. As such, as a contiguous land empire, it topped the British Empire, Great Qing, Deutsche Reich and Imperium Romanum in clout. Comprising some 22 percent of the earth’s total land, the Mongol Empire – founded in 1206 by one Mr. Genghis Khan – was the largest land empire in human history.

Though the tour we took is called “The Sands of Gobi” it’s not all dune riding. (Levon Melikian/)

Nevertheless today, Mongolia is the most sparsely populated sovereign state in the world with about three million inhabitants in 603,900 sq. mi. (Brooklyn has 2.5 million inhabitants in 69.5 sq. mi.) And almost half of this population lives in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Amazingly, a third of all Mongolians are true nomads, their lives hardly unchanged from their ancestors’ – tending their animal herds, really their key source of life, mammon, and currency. At best, it’s a thin but hardy veneer of an ancient culture that has been extinguished in most of the earth’s wild places. Except it’s all still here in Mongolia, where you can go ride dirt bikes.

Told you, not normal.

Hot, Cold, and Really Blue

Mongolia is known as the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky” or “Country of Blue Sky” for good reason – 257 cloudless days a year due to its usual location at the center of a region of high barometric pressure. In the rare cases where clouds do form, they’re endemically and beautifully solid and picturesque – nothing like London’s or Berlin’s gloom-banks, or the Midwest or coastal California’s depressing overcast. In our nine days in August 2019 we did not experience rain. 

Nomadic Off-Road tours run from March through September, expressly to avoid the cold winters that plague the Gobi Desert. For example, while summer temps can hit 102° F, winter can smack you harder than Sister Mary Elephant with a -44° F blow to the knuckles. (Only she won’t be teaching class in Buddhist Mongolia, we promise.) Bottom line here: The seven-month riding season cherry-picks the best seasonal weather. But regardless, desert temps can change as much as 63° F within 24 hours, making the well-placed overnight stops essential.

Yurts under the prevailing clear blue sky. Though we had a few days with clouds, this is Mongolia weather--and also tour accommodations. (Levon Melikian/)

The Wild West in the Far East

In the kitschy 1982 movie Timerider, a desert racer got time-machined back to the American West in 1875, finding himself among cowboys and gunslingers aboard his race-kitted Yamaha XT500. Naturally the film was a low-budget job, but it did offer a tantalizing idea: How cool it would be to ride ancient lands on a modern dirtbike. In Mongolia, you can do it – except for the Hollywood script and cast. And did we mention, if you’ve ever dreamed of such a real-life adventure: There are almost. No. People. Here! The Wild West is the Far East.

A summer Saturday in Mongolia is not like the Mojave Desert or Sleeping Bear Dunes, where riding is now restricted or prohibited. Instead imagine the hills and valleys of Mars, throw in some lakes and clear-running rivers, green pastures and the occasional woods, and then drop in on a Husqvarna FE 450. It’s all yours.

The “Sands of Gobi” tour we took encompasses an amazing and spectacular mix of beautiful curved hills with fine-grain sand and rocky mountains with sharp canyons all surrounded by an endless landscape with gravel tracks and small trees. And absolute stunning scenery no matter what route you take. But maybe there’s a better word than stunning here. How about mind-melting? Cognitive-cratering? Prefrontal-cortex-shredding? Whatever, the expanses are so wide and far, and so unending, and so untouched, riding across Mongolia off-road does cognitively redefine what it means to ride dirt bikes, the industrial revolution’s ultimate replacement for the horse with now over a century of development behind it.

From the first BSAs and Nortons of 1920 at the gravely Isle of Man to racing across Mongolian steppes on a modern fuel-injected 450 may compare in terms of adventure. But the modern bikes’ bulletproof engineering, electric starters, and suspension as tough as the terrain allow as much speed as you can handle, and make riding modern bikes here a godlike experience.

Vast expanse and little population lend a remarkable feeling of freedom as we traveled Mongolia. (Levon Melikian/)

Alone, and Loving It

Since we were off-road almost all the time, we got to experience Mongolia like few people do. Truly. Our tour company, Nomadic Off-Road, takes only a couple hundred riders a year through different regions of the country, in small groups of a dozen or more. We are here to say, it’s really and truly unspoiled nature.

And at certain times – always unexpected – we were strongly reminded of the isolation enveloping us like a vast blanket. For instance, the amazement of riding along in a pack across a steppe, and then having to slow when encountering a crossroad occupied by nomadic families herding hundreds of wild horses or camels. It’s freaking real, not some movie or ancient story. So much of Mongolia is actually nomadic, either fully or to some extent; think of that the next time you’re bottled up in traffic trying to get from home to downtown. Way more people drive to work in LA every morning than live in all of Mongolia.

On our weeklong tour in Summer 2019 we covered around 750 miles, riding at 40 to 55 mph across the stony plain. Our maximum distance covered on one day was about 200 miles, which was fairly exhausting considering it was all off-road. 

Inside the gers, also known as yurts, was a comfortable circular space for sleeping. Central buildings provided toilets and showers, and there was Wi-Fi. (Levon Melikian/)

Nite Moves

Guess what? Mongolia is 100-percent McDonalds and Motel 6 free! So instead, at the end of every day’s route, we pulled into either a predefined tent area or an area with semi-permanent gers (aka yurts), cylindrical tents set up in well-equipped camps and staffed by the tour operators. We’ll admit to feeling some degree of guilt about this, given the centuries of hot, cold, and hard life experienced by the nomadic population. But on the other hand, with the daily per-capita income of Mongolians only $1.25, it felt good to know that a portion of the tour costs go to programs for the Mongolian people.

You won’t easily find a Starbucks, but local flavor for refreshments was always welcome. (Levon Melikian/)

The camps usually had a main building with flush-toilet bathrooms and showers as well as breakfast and dinner seating. In case you plan on reimagining your Mongolian enduro tour as a digital-detox week, that will be a tough call, because all camps we stayed in had decent cell connections and Wi-Fi hotspots. Balance that with walking outside and staring up at the brightest Milky Way you’ll likely ever see and your internal wiring is just going to fry.

It’s hard to imagine a better way to explore Mongolia than on a motorcycle. (Levon Melikian/)

 

This Magic Moment

What’s cool about bikes is that they feed you on so many levels. There’s the kinesiology – the joy of being in motion. And then, the thrill of mastering a powerful machine (well, most of the time when you’re not dug into a sand dune or laying it down in a river). Being exposed in the elements, inhaling, feeling, and sensing all that surrounds us. Stack these ride experiences atop the almost unfathomable remoteness of Mongolia and you’re seriously going to be talking a lot inside your helmet.

Layered atop a week of high points during our Mongolia trek, were still more high points – like 100-ft. rogue waves rearing above mere 50-ft. cyclonic waves 2,000 miles at sea. Here are a few of the most memorable realizations that were so good, we just have to share.

Author Jens Mueffelmann with the giant statue of Genghis Kahn not far from capitol Ulaanbaatar. And also a bird of prey… Quite the photo op. (Levon Melikian/)

1. The Name is Khan. Genghis Khan.

So you grew up on the South Side, you say? That’s pretty chill, but it’s not as chill as having Genghis Khan as your pops. Yep. Because in the late 1990s, a team of geneticists discovered that about 8 percent of today’s Asian population in the former Mongol Empire can be traced directly to this iconic symbol of Mongolian culture.

Predictably then, among Mongols, Genghis Khan is a larger-than-life figure. He’s been revered for centuries and now streets, buildings, an airport, university and even beers are branded with his name. Oh, and there’s a 131-ft. tall statue of Mongolia’s “master procreator” on horseback, holding a golden whip.

If you’re into horses as much as horsepower, the statue is about an hour’s drive from Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar, where Genghis Khan’s actual horse is said to have been foaled. If you go, just think of the bragging rights you’ll earn: beholding the largest equestrian statue in the world; gaining an impressive panoramic view from the vicinity of said horse’s head; and seeing an impressive volume of tourists. Otherwise, skip this day trip.

We reached the Yol Am Glacier not by Husky but by horseback, then on foot. (Levon Melikian/)

2. The Yol Am Glacier

Relax, this is not a dessert at Outback Steakhouse. Instead, this extraordinary phenomenon in Mongolia’s vast southern Gobi Desert, is a glacier literally tagging the desert courtesy of a deep canyon that captures snow during winter, and then protects it from the blazing sun in mid-year. To reach it, we got off our 50-hp Huskys, swung aboard little 1-hp Mongolian horses, and then switched to our own personal biped-power to reach the glacier.

Going from moto to Mongolian horse to feet tramping on slippery ice to experience both desert and glacier within hours – this picturesque place defines the Mongolian extremes perfectly. Even better, our slow final approach to the glacier let us eyeball wildlife jumping high in the cliffs and circling majestically in the sky. And burning through nearby sand dunes later in the day made this unbelievable contrast even better. Take that, Barstow!

3. Freaking Real Dinosaur Fossils

Hey kids: No boring geography lessons here! While in the Gobi Desert, Nomadic Off-Road tour led us to a place called Bayanzag, or in a more touristy tongue, the “Land of Dinosaurs” or “Flaming Cliffs.” Curious how long these famously red cliffs – also in southern Mongolia – have been lying around undisturbed? Let us answer this way. Get off your bike here, walk around a bit, and when you see white bits of rock underfoot, reach down and pick one up. That’s a dinosaur fossil – and 70-million-year-old fossil at that. And you thought an ’89 Honda Transalp was old!

Anyway, this fossil bed is famous for the bad-ass Velociraptor and Oviraptur, and US explorer Roy Chapman Andrews’ 1923 finding of two dinosaurs that had fought to the death. In all, eight predatory dinosaurs – including eggs, bones and skulls – have been discovered at this ancient sea-bottom. And oh yeah, Andrews’ exploits were so legendary that he’s said to be the inspiration of the Indiana Jones movie character.

Two more tidbits: Andrews later became a director of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which displays similar fossils. And even if dinosaurs aren’t your thing, the freak-tastic sunrises and sunsets will be. This scenery here is like Death Valley on speed.

4. Racing the Dunes

Watch the Dakar Rally some winter and lie that you don’t admire the sh!t out of the guys who race their 450s through the massive dunes. Well, we tried it in Mongolia (on our Yol Am Glacier day, above) and can report it’s a next-level experience. But also, like Bruce Brown said about trials in On Any Sunday: “It looks easy. Don’t believe it.”

Every rider in our group needed time to figure out how to ride the dunes without digging into the super fine-grained sand (tip: second gear, weight back and gas it!). After that, it was full-throttle up and then down the 1,000-ft. high dunes. Surprisingly, while we were riding the dunes changed color from yellow in midday to reddish at sunset, like some atomic-powered EDM stage production.

Except we had our own soundtrack, thank you!

Nomadic Off-Road support vehicles to carry luggage and other useful items for the tour. Nomadic Off-Road is also the Mongolian Husqvarna importer. (Levon Melikian/)

Getting There

We booked our tour through nomadicoffroad.mn, which has operated Mongolia enduro tours for over five years. Top enduro equipment is ensured because Nomadic Off-Road is Mongolia’s exclusive importer and dealer for Husqvarna.

All of us received brand-new FE 350 or FE 450 enduros in top condition. They were just right for the tour ahead of us: strong and flexible, light and forgiving. For participants who could not bring their own riding gear, the company rents boots, pants, body and knee armor, jersey, helmet, goggles, and gloves.

En route, the support team consisted of an excellent bilingual (Mongolian and English) tour manager, an enduro guide, a factory-trained Husqvarna mechanic, and two assistants. A chef, traveling with the crew in support vehicles, prepared Western-style meals and provided nice surprises during our ride breaks. We had three support vehicles in total carrying luggage, food, tents, etc. as well as spare parts and even complete bikes. As expected in this rough terrain, we suffered a few tire flats, but repairs took only about 15 minutes.

The Money Part

Except for an early-booking discount, we paid full price for our Nomadic Off-Road tour. The regular price for the nine-day “Sands of Gobi” tour we joined was US $4,000 per person. It was worth every dollar and included transit from and back to the airport, enduro rental, gas, all meals during the tour as well as snacks, sodas, etc., all overnight costs, and all park fees. We separately paid for our own flights and about US $200 for riding gear rental. Neck braces are not available for rent, so if you want one, bring it along.

As you might expect, the tour group was a global mix. Best to hook up with riders of similar skill level and communicate with your guide about pace and ride difficulty before setting off. (Levon Melikian/)

Mongolian Dream Team (Mostly)

Nomadic Off-Road offers a broad variety of tours throughout the year for riders from all continents. Our team of 10 guests included a mix of Americans, Portuguese, Germans, and Macanese with exciting backgrounds ranging from a war-challenged top-gun fighter pilot trainer to a (legal) cannabis farmer and dealer. All of them were adventurers with energetic personalities who were looking for the ultimate riding kick – natural style. So it was not surprising that we had great chats during the breaks and in the evenings. And this comradery led to real friendships; our “Gobi or Go Home” WhatsApp chat is still active almost a year later.

Although sharing similar mindsets, skill levels in enduro riding varied quite a bit within our team. On top, there were pumped-up dirt-bike riders that loved wheelieing and jumping. And on the other end – including ourselves! – were riders with way less experience. One might assume this skill-level discrepancy makes it challenging for the enduro guide riding ahead. Not in our case. Our guide basically went full throttle, launching a gigantic dust cloud behind him. Consequently, we had a couple of crashes across all skill levels, with a few riders having to switch to the Land Cruisers for the rest of the tour. Smart pilots follow “visual flight rules,” which basically mean, fly where you can see. Also a great idea while riding through thick dust far from home!

20 Thumbs Up

Everyone on our team was satisfied with Nomadic Off-Road. This was to a large extent due to our tour manager Davaa who – having studied in England – was fully bilingual and amazingly service oriented, from the personal pickups at the airport on our arrival day, throughout the tour and even the departure-night party.

As to our enduro guide, it bears repeating to make it clear what you want and expect. In our case this was difficult since the guide did not speak English and apparently was not subordinate in the hierarchy to our best-ever tour manager!

A Few Recommendations

• Upon initial arrival, stay with your team in the hotel.
• If possible, put teams together with similar riding skills, and give the enduro guide clear instructions on speed.
• Meet each morning and agree upon the breaks and stops. We saw a number of wild herds and scenic wonders that the enduro guide just passed by full throttle.
• For departure night consider a nice treat at the Shangri-La Hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
• Skip the day trip to and from the Genghis Khan statue, except if it is en route and convenient during your Mongolian arrival or departure days. In this case, go inside and up the statue.

What Not to Do!

It may sound like Ripley’s Believe It or Not, but following these behavioral “Do Nots” will improve your social standing and relationships in Mongolia. In specific, never:

• Stamp out or douse a fire
• Walk in front of an older person
• Take food from a shared plate with your left hand
• Touch another person’s headcover
• Point at people
• Refuse a gift
• Lean against a support column
• Whistle inside a yurt

Lasting Lessons

Off-roading through Mongolia’s vast and majestic emptiness made us all more aware of the beauty of nature – but also of its vulnerability. Among many examples, enjoying a bonfire at the canyon rim of the Flaming Cliffs and watching a glowing sunset cede to a night sky full of never-before-seen (by us, anyway!) stars made us all humble and closely communed with nature. It also reminded us of our obligation to preserve nature for the generations to come.

A feeling of triumph? Yes, for sure. Also one of responsibility and a renewed sense of awe for the natural world. (Levon Melikian /)

Our Heartfelt Responsibility

This has been a real story by a couple of real guys who went looking for a real good time. And we found it. Even so, we realize that flying across the globe to ride motorcycles through nature and emitting about 1 metric ton of CO2 (and that’s just for just the 10 bikes) for the pure sake of excitement is, in current environmental globalists’ views, pure hedonism.

In return, perhaps as a penance, your authors donated to the Clean Air Task Force, which averted an estimated 250 metric tons of CO2 in conjunction with our tour. Additionally, all participants donated – at the time of their tour bookings – to the “Nomadic Off-Road Foundation” that supports Nomadic families’ kids.

These are big topics, but as the phrase “Think global, act local” infers, the little things matter too. And so, with respect to mitigating direct environmental impacts, while in Mongolia we followed – in spirit at least – an old scuba-divers’ adage: “Take only pictures, leave only bubbles.” In this, our team and the staff constantly watched out that we did not even leave a tiny scrap of paper or a cigarette butt behind.

But the same can’t be said for dust and roost. Braaap!

Source

[alfalfa]

Mongolia is one of the last remaining items on my bucket list.

[XTreme]

2 hours ago, alfalfa said:

Mongolia is one of the last remaining items on my bucket list.

You've been to Spain Rick?

[alfalfa]

3 hours ago, XTreme said:

You've been to Spain Rick?

Yes, rode the Pyrenees a couple of years ago. Love Spain!  Like a clean California and i almost speak the lingo (from immersion here at home <G>)