how to motorbike Mongolia (a guide)

Step 1: Go to Mongolia in the summer. Avoid any other times of the year.

Step 2: Find a motorbike rental agency.

Step 3: Learn to ride a motorbike. Cheap Chinese bikes are preferable (easy to fix).

Step 4: Impress the motorbike rental agency owner (who may or may not be french and named Claude) with your newfound motorbike skills. Convince them that you can be rented a motorbike by passing a French motorbike driving test [informal]. Do so with flying colors.

Step 5: Acquire motorbike gear. Ideally a nice pair of biking gloves, a baklava, a tent, and a LifeStraw. Tennis shoes are permissible motorbiking shoes. And a poncho.

Step 6: Pick a direction. Drive. Destinations are less important than doing cool tricks on your bike.

Step 7: Do cool tricks on your bike (if you jump a bump, you’re doing it right).

Step 8: Realize that you’re bougie and don’t want to camp every night. Find a hotel by following Mongolian locals into theirs.

Step 9: Find a karaoke bar and drink beer. Drink Mongolian beer when possible. Don’t drive after.

Step 10: Sleep.

Step 11: Wake up, eat breakfast (ice cream preferred). Find the nearest Genghis Khan statue (bonus points if you visit the tallest equestrian statue in the world while you're at it).

Step 12: Start off-roading. Feel euphoric feelings as you ride through perfect grass-fields filled with majestic herds of wild horses galloping around you. Feel like you’re a raiding marauder horseman in Genghis Khan’s army in the 1200s.

Step 13: Fall over. Then again. Then again. Quickly realize you’re over your head. Realize that this will be one of the most challenging things you’ve ever done.

Find traditional Mongolian shamanistic prayer pikes called “Ovoo”. Pray.

Realize you’re starving after all of your mediocre riding. Find a village. Let them direct you to a ger camp.

Arrive as the sun sets. Meet a bunch of extremely inviting Taiwanese travelers eating a feast outside of the camp. Join them. Drink beers and share stories as the moon rises over the horizon.

Connect to the ger camp’s starlink. Go to the designated shower ger. Convert it into your personal spa. Take the best shower of your life.

The next day, point at the steepest mountain nearby, and decide that you are going to climb it.

Get stuck on the side of a steep 45 degree cliff where your bike wheels keep slipping downhill.

Figure out a way out of it (fall a few times in the process). Decide not to try to tackle a 30 degree slope with watermelon sized rocks on our rickety chinese motorbikes. Go back.

Race each other on flat dirt roads to the nearest town. Eat delicious Mongolian fried meat pies, dumplings, and noodles.

Find the nearest ger camp. Get laughed at. Pick a different one. Arrive as the sun is setting and it starts raining. See a double rainbow and the most beautiful golden sunset you’ve ever seen, as horse herds trot around you and the rain drizzles on your face. Cry a bit (only a bit).

Spend the next few days camping in increasingly eclectic places. Start off camping by a river with wolves stalking your food at night (the wolves come a few meters away). Skinny dip in the river.

Run out of fuel for your camp stove. Ask neighboring nomadic locals. Get offered a bunch of free cans of fuel and food. Try your best to refuse (challenging).

Cook the best tuna pasta of your life. Drive.

Drive through a hill filled with the most colorful flowers you’ve ever seen - green, blue, red, purple, yellow, white…

Do a mini photoshoot with your motorbike. Caption: “not my first rodeo” (it is your first rodeo).

Drive through mud. Fall over, bruise your shin. Then bruise your other shin. Then your ankle. Then your foot.

Run out of food. Realize things are getting very remote and that you haven’t seen another sign of civilization for half the day. Slowly run out of battery in your phones (and your portable batteries). Watch the sun set as you race to find shelter.

Right as dusk is hitting, spot a ger camp a few kilometers away.

Arrive and see large vehicles.

Try to ask for shelter. Offer to pay generously. Run into translation issues.

Wait for the captain of the camp to arrive. When he arrives, realize he speaks Russian. Speak Russian together. Become best friends. He lets you choose your price. Pay generously.

Take hot showers, eat delicious food, get offered lollipops, charge every electronic device you have. Take pictures of the officers’ families and print them out as gifts.

Wake up the next day at 6am. Eat breakfast and bid goodbye to your new friends. Leave a thank you note. Say goodbye to the last sign of civilization for the next 24 hours.

Begin your journey to find Genghis Khan’s burial site. Don’t realize that you are about to ride for 16 hours nonstop through roads that these motorbikes are absolutely not made for.

Encounter your first obstacle: a flooded road. On either side, deep, muddy swamp. Decide to try the swamp.

Get stuck. Use the strength of 3 full grown men to get the bike out of the mud (don't skip leg day).

Get stuck again. And again. And again.

One hour later, get back on the road. Note that you’re playing a real-life version of Mario Kart, but instead of the road being rainbow, the road is brown, muddy, and constantly flooded.

Realize your bike’s battery is dead. Kickstart it every time you let go of the clutch. Do this while falling every 10 minutes on terrain such as: sand, gravel, pebbles, rocky roads that felt like sand, constant flooded roads and muddy obstacles, swamp, big potholes one after the other, “underwater bridges”, grass fields.

Make consolation tuna pasta. Realize you’re running out of food again.

Notice your bike’s fuel gauge is showing half empty.

Continue getting stuck. Help your bike mates constantly to pull/push bikes out of mud. Do this 15 more times.

Watch your clothes turn impossibly dirty. Laugh.

8 hours later, make it to a tower commemorating Genghis Khan. Look at the road ahead and realize it’ll be the same but steeper. Take out vodka.

Hear horses in the distance. Glance over the hill, and see a group of 5 horse riders approaching.

Speak to one of them - the group’s shaman. Hear him tell you that he’s never seen foreigners this remote, much less on motorbikes. He wonders at how you made it this far. Exchange contacts. He tells you to not go farther - that there are bears and that it becomes religiously sacred to go beyond that point.

Turn around. Drive back as night approaches. Encounter all of the same obstacles, but this time cross them at night. Feel like a Special Forces soldier. Watch shooting stars and realize you may have never been this deep in the middle of nowhere.

Burn your leg twice on the motorbikes exhaust.

Watch your friend waterlog their bike. It doesn’t start anymore.

Wheelie the bike to get the water out. Then burn the remaining water away. Start the bike.

Make it out of the park at 2am. Figure out a way around a locked gate. Set up a camp site, and sleep a deep, painful, satisfying sleep.

Stop by the military camp the next day. Try to pay for fuel. Get given fuel for free. Eat the best meal of your life.

Hit the open road. Drive next to wild-running horse herds. Drive along dirt roads situated in endless Mongolian grassfields. Let Mongolian kids drive your bike.

Fix a broken clutch with a twig. Drive hours to the nearest village. Fix the dead bike battery and the clutch.

Meet a Mongolian wrestler who competed at the National Stadium the week before for the National Naadam Festival.

Meet French-speaking Mongolians at a restaurant.

Drive through a dust storm. Get offered free dinner at a fancy lodge.

Finally, make it back to civilization: the capital, Ulaanbaatar. See another double rainbow.

Return the motorbikes. Decide you’ll buy three back home.

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Step 57: Party with the shaman you met a few days before. Hear him tell you about his efforts to legalize weed in Mongolia.

Step 58: See a doctor about your sunburns, burns, bruises, etc. Text your mom: “All good 👍”.

Step 59: Sleep for a week straight. Burn your pants. Fly to China.

P.S. Your mileage may vary. Please consult an expert before riding motorbikes (or burning pants).