Tom Doig

Mongolia is a vast landlocked country. It is best known for the Mogul emperor Ghengis Khaan who ruled this rugged wilderness in the 13th century. Tom and Tama, one of his closest friends, decided to cycle across the country from a northern town called Moron to another smaller town called Moron, 900 odd miles away. They kind of felt it had to be done. They packed their bags with a barely passable phrasebook and some weird spandex suits and bought their bikes in China, and they were ready. Sort of...

Cycling through the beautiful Mongolian countryside they encountered all sorts of natural and manmade hazards, including floods, massive hailstones, underpant wrestling, uncross able rivers, fields full of marijuana and mad dogs. The locals were mostly pleased to see them, and those that didn’t stop to offer them a lift would provide delicacies such as dried fermented milk from a horse, unidentifiable meat and probably far too much of the local Chinggis Khaan vodka. It is a harsh country to cycle through too; there are few roads and they ended up on mostly tracks, with the odd swamp just to make life much harder.

Overall it is not a bad book, but it is nothing exceptional either. Their woeful lack of preparation is quite amusing, and he does write quite well of the people and places he sees, but it is pretty crude at times and there weren’t any really laugh out loud moments for me. It is full of antipodean vernacular too, which after a while does grate.… (altro)