Today we’ll start out early to beat the traffic with a pick up from your hotel. It’s a couple of hours drive to the Chinggis Khan statue where we’ll set up the bikes next to this imposing 40m high stainless steel statue. From here it’s smooth dirt tracks to warm up the legs before we tackle two short steep passes. The following downhill takes into the park and we cross the Tul river Valley before making our way to Princess Palace Ger camp.
We’ll take a 30km round trip to the Princess Palace. The cycling is epic at times with several stream crossing s and plenty of mud. Our destination, the Buddhist Princess Palace, is famed for the Manchurian princess Gunj who was married to a Mongolian Khan as an intended spy for the Manchu’s. The story goes that she came to favour her adopted people and was eventually assassinated by her own people in the mid 1700′s. Not much remains but ruins and it is sacred to Bhuddists still. The ride there and back is a fantastic, challenging one. Once we return to the ger camp we’ll set of along wide open valleys to the town of Terelj by the Tul River. We’ll stay in ger accommodation this evening.
From Terelj we head up our first steep pass into forest. From here it’s an extremely steep downhill, followed by an extremely long gentle downhill gradient on fast and fun jeep track. The scenery is picturesque with not a tourist to be seen. We’ll wind our way through this wide open valley before tackling a last steep and rocky pass beofre a speedy downhill run to Galchurt, on the outskirts of UB. After packing up the bikes, and maybe a quick swim, we’ll head back to the hotel and the end of the tour.
