Day 13, 14 into Ulaan Bataar:

I messed up the day counts so, there is no day 12.

Along with 10 others, we rode the trucks into Ulaan Baatar.  The thought of riding into the wind for another 150km was too much.  Besides getting to have another rest day and to spend the day in YuBee, was too attractive.  I have commented that, yes we are here to ride across Asia, but we are here to see the countries, not just ride through them - I gather I am be quoted on this point a fair bit.

Ulaan Baatar (yes there are lots of spellings), is not at all what I was expecting.  It is a very large modern young alive city.  Tremendous energy to the place.  It does suffer from having grown exponentially - the traffic grid lock is almost total.  In our taxi ride in and out of town, the 3 miles in town took a full hour each way (see more below).This is explained in that, back in the 1960’s YuBee had a population of 40,000, today it has a population of over a million and growing quickly - everywhere there is construction.  The suburbs vary from what easily could be anywhere in Richmond, to trailer parks where all the buildings are Yurts (called Gur’s in Mongolia), to one acre concrete blocked off pastures with a Gur for the home.  Livestock are grazing effectively everywhere - more populace than the deer i Oak Bay.

Yesterday, after we arrived we hired a taxi that took us out to the Chingess Hann statue - many of the cars here are right hand drive (but they drive “normal” on the right), I gather this is another export destination for used Japanese cars - and they are very aggressive in the very crowded conditions  two inches space is too much — good entertainment itself in just the ride.  The statue complex itself was very impressive, the largest horse statue in the world.  

The little dots above the horses ears are people:

I am not surprised that it is quite cold in the morning, normal desert, but today in YuBee it has been very cold all day - back to wearing socks.

Check out this youtube video of a Mongolian school bus delivering small kids to school - based on what I have seen, I believe it is real:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKzuaPzip34