ULAANBAATAR – BEIJING

In the afternoon we have a meeting with the railway big boss who promised to arrange the departure of our bikes from Ulaanbaatar and we find out that all the operation has been cancelled. Allegedly, China requires the request and the reply is usually not received. Son of a bitch, could he really not inform us the day before yesterday?! Next, we head to Air China: it’s alright with them, though. We just have to dismantle the bikes so they get through the small boing that goes to Beijing door. We are also advised to visit Mongolian Express that sends cargo, and it seems to be a nice company. A Mongolian named Baira describes us the real situation: cargo documents will be processed for at least three days and it’s better to send the bikes to Laos via North Korea. Luckily, we have our ATA carnet; otherwise nobody would even take this charge. The price for the entire operation with the destination Beijing is 800$, which sounds extremely enticing: destination Laos without dismantling the bikes would cost us 4000$. We make our last call to our ATA carnet manager to Beijing and ask directly: will we be able to drive our bikes from Beijing to Laos by ourselves. The answer is “no, we could not” since, again, we don’t have some kind of permissions. Okay, then we are going to Laos. Enough once! Tomorrow we are going to pack up our horses.