Doig Tom - Mörön to Möröи: two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MRN TO MRN

Dont read this book with a broken ribyoull ache from cover to cover. Should become a classic of Mongolian cycling literature.

Tim Krabb, author of The Rider

Tom Doig is not your average traveller and Mrn to Mrn is not like any other travel book. Bowel-splittingly hilarious and irresistibly absurd, this book is for everyone whos ever asked themselves the golden question of travel: Why the f**k not?

Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

Funnier than Bill Bryson ... Doig is Hemingway in a unitard.

Chris Flynn, author of A Tiger in Eden

moron2moron.com

Two men, two bikes,
one Mongolian misadventure

TOM DOIG

First published in 2013

Copyright Tom Doig 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

The author gratefully acknowledges the use of excerpts from the following books:
Mongolia: Travels in the Untamed Land, Jasper Becker (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 1992)
Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia, Jill Lawless (ECW Press, 2000)
Mongolia, ed Michael Kohn (Lonely Planet, 2008) (fifth edition)
Mongolian Phrasebook, Alan J K Sanders, J Bat-Ireedui, Tsogt Gombosuren (Lonely Planet, 2008)
(second edition)
Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray (Picador, 1985)
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2003)
The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century,
Anonymous (trans Igor de Rachewiltz, Leiden, 2006)
Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited, Owen Lattimore (Oxford University Press, 1962)
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse (Penguin, 1927)

Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 126 4

EISBN 978 1 74343 439 0

Internal design by Squirt Creative
Insert photographs Tama Pugsley 2010
Map by Darian Causby
Set in 12/15 pt Dante by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Tama Pugsleynumber one moron!

The QR codes throughout the book and on the back cover
bring videos taken during the morons time in Mongolia
directly to your phone.

Scan the QR code images and youll be taken
straight to the action.

QR code readers can be downloaded free from the web for
your smartphone.

Scan the QR code on the back cover to watch the
Mrn to Mrn trailer.

CONTENTS

PART TWO: THE ROCKY, SANDY, MUDDY, FLOODED TRACK
LESS TRAVELLED

Beyond the rivers
You will perhaps lose courage,
But continue to advance
In the same way;
Beyond the mountains
You will perhaps lose heart,
But think of nothing else apart from your mission.

ANONYMOUS, The Secret History of the Mongols
(13th century)

Human beings must have dreams or they will go nowhere.

DAVID HASSELHOFF, Dont Hassel the Hoff
(21st century)

F irst, a rumbling.
You can sense it before you can feel it: a sick sweetness in the air, a metal tingle in your mouth. Put your ear to the ground. How many? How far? You cant tell.

On the horizon: dust clouds. A gale blowing in across the plains. Drop your hoe, leave the turnips in the fields. Hitch up your pants and run! Sound the alarmthen cross yourself. Brace yourself.

Are there really just Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Looks like ... more than four. A horde. Barbarians. Huns. Mongols. Heathens, fanatical heathens, heeding no rules or customs of civilised man, their horses snorting and frothing at the mouth, crazed, toothpaste rabid. Their entire language one unending obscenity.

Where do they come fromthe ends of the earth? The delirium of our worst fever-dreams? The depths of Lake Baikal, its bottomless black crevices leading straight to the underworldto Hell itself?

The steppes!

The unharvested wastelands, home of serpent, buzzard, wolfand death. Think of your children. Your women. Think of heads on sticks, intestines in the treesthis is the bubonic plague come uninvited, the Black Death in human form, a disease-ridden, flea-bitten foreign nightmare rampaging for no earthly reason except victory and carnage. These beasts dont bargain. They dont haggle. They storm in out of nowhere, out of the sky, reeking of unwashed stables, rancid tents, abominations on goatskin rugs. All they want is spoils. Loot. Vodka and cheese. Their unwashed hair and bloodshot blue eyes, their cracked lips, noses flaking and pink.

Tork. Tchtooork! Blye-ait-shlerg!

What are they saying? Pointing at a book. Tossing their money around. Rubbing our flag in the dirt. A peasant with gold is still a peasant. They want to guzzle devil-water and disgrace themselves in the fields of our ancestors. Steal our women. Enslave our children. Wrestle our drunkards. Shit on our country. Piss on our historyand laugh about it.

The morons are here.

I n July 2010, me and my best mate Tama Pugsley cycled 1487 kilometres across northern Mongolia from a small town called Mrn to a smaller town also called Mrn. Our motivation was brutally simple: there were two towns called Mrn, and we were two morons. It had to be done.

Even if it didnt, we were going to do it anyway.

I first noticed this moronic coincidence back in the year 2000. At the time I was an unemployed 21-year-old English Lit graduate, surprised and disappointed that Y2K had failed to cause the worlds financial markets to collapse like everyone had predicted. I was living in Wellington with my parents and like most young Kiwis I spent a lot of time reading atlases and plotting my escape. One blustery winters day I was daydreaming somewhere north of Southeast Asia when I saw the two Mrns. They were pretty close togetherit was a pretty small atlasand suddenly everything came into focus.