Whenever you ride your bike in a deserted landscape, it happens. The cyclist shrinks, the sky opens. In the beginning waits the uncertainty, the fear of loneliness. It stuffs at the courage, inforces the disorientation. Sometimes it is the lack of water, the wind, a hostile wasteland. Here it's the coldness, wheel tracks, which vanish in the snow. You think immediately of turning back. And then you start cycling. From now on, you achieve everything.

The route which we got recommended by Kanad, has proved to be a little cyclist's gem. Impressive river valleys, mountains and steppe - a pleasure. But now we're on top of this pass, we have pushed the bike the final kilometers and now we see the road converted to a track. The wind has blown the snow to piles, small waves in brown sand. A white sea in front of us, a huge plain. On the horizon flickers a mirage in the cold, fooling hills in front, where it has no more. We sit down, don't know if we'll get this time against the distance. The temperatures have weakened us, we have felt it in the last days. In the morning we've always remained longer in the sleeping bag, the pressure in the evening to find a warm place to overnight, has become bigger and bigger. Perhaps we can't go on any longer, now that even the road becomes worse, when we need instead of two, maybe three days for the next one hundred kilometers. We eat chocolate, hope that the discouragement will pass. A nomad drives his flock to us. Amazing where people live. We give him the rest of the choclate bar. He chews, sucks on the sweetness. To Naranbulag? He nods. We ask him about yurts on the way. Yes, it has. We begin to push.

Ulangoom is just a few kilometers away from the Russian border. It has more snow, but the road to the east is traveled more frequently. An icy track, excellent terrain for our spikes. At Christmas, we will be in Moron. For sure.
Morning awakening in a yurt. The opening in the roof gets lighter. The man stands up, makes fire. Otherwise, the stove belongs to the woman, but in the morning it's usually the man who light on the fire again. It crackles, yellow light flickers over the framework of the yurt, seeps in the felt, begins to warm. An hour goes by. Then the woman gets up, puts more wood, cooks tea. Salted milk tea. The ice in the pan sizzles, splinters from the heat, melts. There is served cold meat for breakfast. Since long ago we eat everything. Without these fatty pieces of meat we would no longer cycle. It is the third Advent. At Christmas, we will be in Moron. For sure.

We reach a small hill top. The evening light casts shadows, they reach for our bikes. We must come to Harbom, before there are no yurts. Behind us, the sun sets. The sky is burning, the landscape glows. A false sense of warmth. When the sun goes down, it gets immediately freezing cold. Don't look back. Deflecting. Singing hundreds of times the children's song "don't look back, the fox is passing ..." in the head. Behind us, the sun sets.

We reach Harbom in the dark. No village, a yurt. And there 's nobody at home. That's the problem. You might know that it has houses or yurts, but you never have the overnight place for sure. It now takes so little to get out of balance. A breakdown at the wrong time, a sudden fall in temperature, a carelessness in route planning. It is too late to put up a tent and our gear will not be good enough this night.  We try to enter the yurt. The door isn't closed safely. We can move the metal plate aside. We can hardly sleep that night, the pulse races at every sound. What happens when the owner comes home? We'll never know, we remain alone. In the morning we let there the double sum of money, which we normally pay. A dark night. At Christmas, we will be in Moron. For sure.

Sometimes the charm of a country passes, the landscape gets desolate, because you get used to it. People gets commonly, biking exhausting. Not here. The light remains soft, the landscape still, people hardly comprehensible. Maybe we should stop to describe our experiences on this route. Maybe the hardness and beauty, the range in which we are traveling these days, is not expressible.

It is the twenty-fourth December, when we arrive in Moron. Merry Christmas.

We haven't told it to anyone. They would have worried too much. It was too uncertain. And yet, if one has carefully studied our website, maybe one would have noticed. In the link list. Collected pages about cold temperatures, with the bike in the winter over frozen Lake Baikal. No, not that we want to go back to Russia. But here in the north of Moron, on the border with Siberia there's a lake. The Khovsgol Nuur. It is crystal clear, a small brother of the Baikal, and in winter it's traveled by cars and trucks. For that we've cycled in the past few months through the cold. Actually, we always had this goal. It's still a bit early, now in January. But people think that the ice is a foot thick. Enough for motorcycles and lighter vehicles. Enough for our bikes.

Ice is not silent, it wears the depth in itself, reflects the blue of the sky. Ice lives, it crashes, it rips, roars from the deep. Scary. How can we trust it? We feel as pushed into the void. On the shore you can still see rocks and seaweed on the ground, later only a bottomless depth. I've often tried to imagine how it would be to jump with a parachute from an airplane. The feeling of free fall must be stunning for the first time. I've fear of heights and I'm never jumped. Even now I've fear of heights. The adrenaline flows. Awful amazing. Frozen water has thousand forms, it is never the same: white grooved, wavy milky, shattered by brute force, a mirror finish. Sometimes we have to cross large distortions, press ice, it moans and groans. Then again, we cycle on crystal glass. Also, the color changes, the light.

On the third day we reach an open crevasse. The ice is thin, a river flows from the mountains into the lake. From this danger nobody told us. What should we do? Time passes, we have to move on. When crossing a foot and a rear wheel breaks through the ice. Emergency. Shall we move to the shore and make a fire? The village at the north end is only ten kilometers away. Behind us, the sun sets. The sky is burning. Ice and Fire. What range of feelings can we endure yet?

Our visa is running out in a week. The journey continues. After three months in the cold, we've given us the flight from Moron to the capital Ulaanbaatar. This saves us thirty hours in a Russian bus. Thirty hours in a Russian deep freezer. Never before we've had such a flight.