Oh, can I start?
Lots of camping, lots of being outdoors, getting lots of exercise.
I have a massive challenge to go and prepare for and then do.
I love mountain biking and I love adventure.
As a person I quite like big challenges, so to sort of bring all these things together,
they're the main reasons I think.
Both of us, the aim of the trip was not to cycle on the road.
It's much more fun basically because you're thinking about the surface
and about the physical acts of cycling.
You've got a map of Mongolia and half of the stuff when it doesn't exist
and half of what you do find isn't on it.
This is basically the worst part of the bike trip.
It's getting out of a big city.
There's all the traffic and views in industrial areas.
What do you think Andy?
Yeah, I really want to get out of the city as quickly as possible.
I was just saying to Andy that it looks quite a bit like the Scottish Highlands around here.
I'm sure I'm not the first person who said that.
This is a really, really beautiful place to camp.
The landscape has become more free, failing and more basically wild
and the road is just a track now.
It's really good to be out here now.
It looks really alien and foreign and brilliant and gorgeous.
And obviously it's somebody's home where we are right now
where we've put our tents and got our camp set up and stuff.
It's a piece of land which somebody uses for their livelihood
and it's obviously really important to remember and respect that
while we're doing what we're doing.
I don't suppose people out here see that many guys riding bikes
across their country from the other side of the planet.
So yeah, let's hope it continues to go really, really well.
This is a pretty tough, this is a pretty steep climb
and the road is not particularly smooth.
I guess you could say it's very rocky and pretty steep.
A bicycle is such a slow way to travel.
I mean, I walked up some of that climb
and I was pretty much going probably the same speed as Tom was going up there
and he was pedaling.
It is frustrating at times going that slowly.
I think it's like a humbling process somehow.
It's kind of a centering process to go slowly
and I guess it's sort of, I suppose you might say, a mellitude.
It's so nice just to have all this time to forget about
the silly little stuff that occupies life when you're back home.
It's so good to kind of just get things in perspective.
It is a very, very massive kind of place to be in.
The scale of the landscape just completely dominates your experience.
There's not a lot of people, but they are so well dispersed in the countryside
that you never seem to be far away from anyone.
What is the purpose of staying in a hotel like this?
Mainly I'm really interested in wallpaper
because I'm a wallpaper designer by trade.
And I come to these sort of places and I get ideas.
If you look around, there's at least five different patterns in this room.
You have one on here. It's a kind of faded beige.
You've got one on here. It's like South American Inca.
Here you've got Victorian England.
Here, Edwardian England.
A wonderful kind of faux art nouveau on the glass.
This is the minimal postmodern.
As you see here, it's very simple.
It's a square. It's beautiful.
Welcome to Bulgan.
It seems to be a Mongolian character trait.
Ignore foreigners.
I'd like to know why though.
I'd really like to know why.
Because they're not ignoring us in a kind of nasty way,
just in a kind of we don't exist kind of way.
This is it. This is Bulgan.
This is the main street with all the stuff on it.
Park over there, hotel over there, mountains all around.
This is it.
I guess it's just a roadside shrine,
but it's a bit funny to find it so far away from any kind of major route.
Because we're quite a long way off any major route right now.
The track is very faint.
It's a bit like a farm track somewhere in Dartmoor or something like that.
I don't know. It's not really that pretty.
It's like there's just a load of vodka bottles here.
It's like a pile of rubbish, but it's like a token of sort of saying
this is not just wilderness.
This is where humans come through as well.
Because it is a bit daunting,
because we're just in the middle of this forest
and we haven't seen anybody for ages.
The other night, this guy came over to our tent
and made jokes about wolves eating us in the night.
Then during the night, I heard wolves howling.
Well, if anything does happen in the night,
you can be damn sure we're going to be filming it.
Even if it's our own deaths,
we're going to be there with the cameras.
You're going to see it all happening live.
We're hoping the fire is going to keep away the bad things.
And now we know how cavemen invented music.
We don't know how they invented techno though.
We're just vibing with the pink clouds in the sky.
