INTRO
Greetings fellow motorcycle and travel enthusiasts,
My name is Bruno, I am a serious motorcycle fanatic from the kingdom of Belgium, currently 29 years on the clock (sorry if my English is weird, I haven’t written any piece what so ever since college).
I love driving motorbikes, always have, love travelling too, and always looking for nice motorcycle destinations. So after staring at google earth long enough, Mongolia seemed like a nice country to go ride round a bit on a motorbike. And I have been wanting to undertake a "real" adventure for some time now. Never done anything like this before though. My usual motorcycling travels are around Europe and include hotels, , steaks and comfy beds. Not really a camper either. I actually only ever camp at Tomorrowland or some other festivals (cutting down on that lately though).
But I'm hitting thirties and so I guess I felt it was time for such a thing, Mongolia it is! since I only had 2 weeks vacation left from work, I couldn't drive my own KTM Adventure all the way over there (wouldn't that be a journey), and to ship it by plane is just too expensive.
Rental it is then…
Not many rental companies in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar (Ulan-Bator). Also my endless going on about my trip whenever I saw my friends, had 2 of them convinced to join me, which I was very stoked about. They are both close friends and brilliant motorcycle drivers called Chappy and Tom (28 & 25 years old, I think). But now I had to find 3 decent bikes to carry us around on a 1200km trip around central Mongolia, most of it off-road.
I ended up with Cheke tours just outside the capital, website is Cheke Tours
Friendly but strict and hard lady runs the business.
She rents out 150cc Mustang Shineray for 13€/day. After some research they appear to be "the real nomad bikes" and all locals drive it and they have good knowledge about fixing it with a hammer and a kitchen knife if needed.
Seems all a bit too good to be true for this kind of money, but I decided to go for it. There was not much choice anyway and I read (some) good reviews about Cheke online. So in the next parts you can read about our experience in Mongolia and some nice photos I hope you will enjoy.
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Part 1 – OFF WE GO!

So here we are then, flights booked, motorcycles reserved, vaccinations received (not so fun), passports and international driving licenses acquired, camping gear sorted out (very last minute).Below a picture of us ready to go at Dusseldorf airport (cheaper than flying from Brussels)
Standing left is Tom, I am the tall guy in the middle and Chappy on the right.

We booked flights with China Air going over Beijing, which was all good, except for the food. But hey, nothing a good Chinese Ying Yang couldn’t fix (at least I think it was called that). Arriving in Ulaanbaatar a good 20hours after leaving Dusseldorf, I immediately got a good send of Mongolia’s nature. As you fly over and approach to land you can already see vast beautiful sceneries without any infrastructure in it, yessss just what I hoped!

The capital city from looked like one of those huge sovjet cities you’ve seen in the news.

After immigration and money change we took a taxi to the hotel I’d booked via booking.com. By the way in Mongolia I was officially a millionaire for a few days 600€ is about 1.3million Mongolian Tugrik, which was quite a few centimeters of money.

The first night in Mongolia did not go in too well though. We arrived at our hotel after a maniacal taxi ride just when the evening fell and it got dark. The hotel was “OK” for a 50 USD per night but was not in a very good part of the city (as we were already advised on the plane by a local passenger).
The Life hotel had no restaurant so we went out a few blocks to eat some pasta, which was quite good. But when we wanted to go to a bar we got hassled by a few drunks, Mongolia has quite a serious alcohol problem combined with high unemployment. They spoke no English and we had no idea what they wanted. They shouted and grabbed Jonas for some unknown reason and tried to drag him off to somewhere. After some shouting and pulling we got Chappy free of the fat drunk his grip on him. We realized the situation was bleak as it was a 15 to 3 man stand down in a strange country where NOBODY speak English. So yeah I yelled to run back to the hotel which was just a few 100meters away. These drunken sods would never be able to outrun us I assumed. They did try very hard however, they followed close on our heels all the way up to the hotel. We ran straight to the security guard (who also did the reception but spoke no English).
But it was no problem as the drunks did not enter the hotel, they stayed outside a while and took off again.
Below you see the morning view from the hotel of the street where we ran away the night before.

In the morning we received a breakfast which tasted very off so we did not go for that. Since we would depart on our motorcycle trip the next day, we felt we needed a boost. Also we were not looking forward to meet the drunks from the night before again, who knew where we stayed. So we decided to go for one of the best hotels in the city and give ourselves a treat. We stayed at the Chinggis Khan Hotel, which was rated on booking.com more than 150€ per night. Arriving at the desk however got us rooms for 65USD per night each, nice deal
The hotel also has a huge supermarket in it, where a lot of wealthy Mongolians shop. Since we would be out for 10 days we needed to stack up on a lot of food, and so we did. After a massive shopping spree and a bill of roughly 500000 Mongolian Tugrik we were ready to go! In the evening we enjoyed a last good steak and s in the excellent restaurant and discovered that the 40 USD massage you could have in the spa of the hotel, was not just a massage at all

PART 2 – motorcycles!
So the big day arrived.
We get up in good spirits and all excited about what we are about to do.
We get in the taxi and after some unnecessary stops and detours from our cheeky driver who proudly wanted to show off his city, we arrive at Cheke tours.It’s located near a main road just outside the city in a small village, does not look like a business at all actually, but I did not expect much more to be honest.

The bikes were lined up and looking in good nick, thoroughly used already, but in good nick. We paid Cheke, who said the deposit for the bike was 700€ instead as 500€ on the website. But I did not feel like arguing and paid for the three bikes, a gps (very old one), a map and some cooking pots and a gas stove. We tied up our luggage and were keen to get going.

Above picture demonstrates the noobs we are at these kind of endeavors. We tied our water on top of the rack of the steering wheel, which is a very smart plan if you prefer endless steering wobble from 9 liters of water sloshing around on your front wheel. Also Cheke got us a bit nervous by talking about careless drunk drivers without insurance, robbers and aggressive drunk man in the open country side.

So with small hearts and high hopes we set off…for about 500 meters.
We pulled up at a gas station just outside Cheke’s and after filling up with dino juice, Tom’s bike did not start again and we could not find the problem. We went to get the mechanic that works at Cheke’s (who wore army boots and had a ring with the nazi swastika on it) to fix the bike. We don’t know what the problem was, as our right winged but friendly mechanic spoke no English. But it must have been quite a big problem it took him almost 2 hours to fix it. It was something with the carburetor that’s all we know.

PART 3 – THE STEPPES

We had a route on the gps which we would use as a guideline, a 1000km tour around central Mongolia. We could cut or change our route with the map, we had planned to add some extra km’s to the route as we went along.

Tom’s bike was now fixed and we set off again. The sun was up, we had an immense blue sky and a comfy 25 degrees Celsius.
After 20km main road our gps vaguely told us to leave the tarmac and hit the Mongolian steppes.

The next hours we spent getting used to our odd steering bikes (we had already moved the water to the back of the bikes and laughed at how stupid we were to attach them on our steering wheel in the first place) and enjoyed the loneliness and the smooth dirt tracks, this is awesome riding . Even with a small 150cc Chinese bike with an amount of horsepower barely in the double digits, and we packed quite a bit of luggage, too much in fact.

After a good (half) days ride we hit a dead end on very steep hill which almost killed the clutch of Tom’s bike and we had to go back down, tricky stuff this with lots of big sharp rocks.

After the tricky decent we called it a day and set up camp at the edge of a small forest.
We enjoyed our first night out with some lasagna on a campfire, some techno beats and the very cheap Mongolian Ghengiss Khan vodka which served quite good for the with some cola

After a short sleep disturbed by many birds, we enjoyed a breakfast of snickers and pineapple (yeah I know…) and a beautiful sunrise.

We packed our gear and set off again, much more relaxed then the day before. We were still driving great smooth dirt tracks and were now crossing the vast plains up to the famous Orkhon regions and it’s valley’s.


I was having a blast and was enjoying every minute of it, very confidently steering the rather agile but unstable Mustang Shineray round the bends, over the crests and through the patches of sand. Staring at the beautiful scenery too long however caused me to end up in a patch of sand I could have avoided and I was already near top speed (which is +/- 70km/h). So not much power left to lift the front wheel by opening the throttle. I had a big wobble and off I went crashing right hand down, smashing my wrist in the ground. I broke my right wrist at 2 places 6 weeks earlier on my KTM Adventure, the bike had no damage though.
Luckily it did not break it again and only had to deal with a hurt wrist, hurt pride and some painful scuffmarks. This unfortunate dirt excursion did not temper my fun though and after about an hour I had driven it off and was enjoying the ride once again.

After a few hours and a few snack stops (mainly snickers) we reached a horse reserve which was fenced all around, this appeared to be one of the few fences that exist in all of Mongolia. The Mongolians are a nomad people and all the land is free for all to live and herd cattle, this means that we foreigners can go and camp where we want, within the reasonable boundaries of personal space I suppose. And space the Mongolians have enough, they are roughly 3 million people, and almost half live in Ulaanbaatar. However in this particular reserve that we had to cross, it was not allowed to camp. Since it was only 4pm we decided to cross the reserve which would be 13km until the other end of the fence as we had learned from the locals running the reserve.
The reserve was stunning but the roads were very deep and fine sand, with beautiful sand dunes in the background.

Progress was slow and we did not get to see any horse in the reserve, we did however see horses everywhere outside the reserve. After 13km of wrestling trough the sand and stopping occasionally to enjoy the scenery, we arrived at the other side of the reserve. By that time we needed to pitch camp before it got dark. We met an old man who drove the same Shineray bikes as us, and had his old lady on the back. He urged us to follow him to his ger (yurt as we know it, that is a Mongolian nomadic tent). We had to give full throttle to keep up with this skilled old man with his lady sitting undisturbed behind him. After a few kilometers chasing the old timer we arrived at his ger. Nicely build and decorated, as were most of the gers we had seen up to then. I did not take any pictures of them though as I had been told that the Mongolian nomads are not too keen on them or their home being photographed.
We were however invited for a nice snack of cheese and some sort of rock hard bread which almost broke my teeth. We also got some nice sweet yak milk and some sour fermented yak milk which tasted really strong. After explaining in hand/sign language what we were doing in Mongolia and after showing on the map where we came from, we were invited to put up our tent near this old friendly man’s ger and cattle and dogs.

We put up our tents and enjoyed the vast beautiful view of the steppes ahead of us as you can see in the picture above. Also one of the old man’s dogs felt very protective over us and he stayed with us almost the entire evening.

When we were having our luxury evening diner (pasta out of a can spiced with vodka) we were joined by the friendly old man and we invited him for some pasta.

There was some iffy weather coming in and the old man let us know we were free to shelter in his ger if the weather would actually become too bad for our tents, but this turned out not to be required. The bad weather passed us by and we spent a lovely evening out in the open with some poker games and some cuba libre. At night however we were visited by plenty of noisy cows grazing around us and the dogs barking at those cows.
We woke up with the sun rising in what seemed to be another beautiful morning.

Lovely temperatures and again blue skies so we ate our breakfast of snickers and oreo’s in good spirit and set off for another day of riding.
To my surprise we had to do a few kilometers of tarmac which was quite a welcome relief.
Although I love “offroading” and that is the main reason we chose Mongolia to drive through, being able to relax for a bit on tarmac is always a nice breather. However Mongolian tarmac seemed to be more dangerous than the dirt tracks as we had to dodge pothole after pothole. And I am not talking about European potholes here, these babies were mostly a meter in diameter and easily half a meter deep. Catch one of those with your front wheel and your holiday is over for sure.
After a short but stressy tarmac drive we passed a little town with a very “Farwest” look to it.

Not surprisingly a good deal of the locals already were quite drunk by now, and it was not even midday yet! We caused quite a scene by shopping for some more water and cola in the local stores, and were assisted by the very small, friendly but very drunk man in picture above. He enjoyed very much repeating everything we said but did help out strapping our groceries on the bikes very well.

After some time on the mesmerizingly straight road we were keen to leave the tarmac again, and so we did…

We were hoping to reach the Ugii lake before the evening fell as we were all looking forward to wash ourselves up in some fresh clean mountain water. However the road was long and our stomachs were empty so we called it a day after driving 7 hours straight and we pitched the tent, no lake in sight. Minutes after erecting the tents we were visited by 4 local nomads on 2 Shineray Mustang bikes like the ones we had. After a brief exchange of pleasantries and information by hand language and a good deal of candy, the nomads set off again to their respective gers. We saw them ride up a mountain very far away, which means they must have jumped on their bikes as soon as they saw our little convoy rolling up. They covered all that distance just to fulfill their curious minds and see who was crazy enough to ride in this part of their world, unguided and not being part of any touristic group.

In above picture you see the mountain in question where the nomads came from, there gers are so far away you can’t even see them in the picture.
As we were eating a nice pasta meal with some lasagna as dessert we noticed a big big storm rolling in. We braced our tents with the storm lines and the many volcanic rocks we found surrounding us.
We were a bit unnerved as we were totally alone here and did not have a backup plan if the weather would overpower our tents. But still we made the best of it and kept fooling around outside as long as we dared

minutes later the rain came down…hard, accompanied by bright lightning and heavy thunder. Quite exciting but I could not make any video of it as the rain would have killed my cam for sure.

In the morning the storm had passed and we all made it without problems. Below picture is taken from a hill nearby where Tom wanted to photograph some giant vultures, but they escaped his lens. You see our tents in the middle of the frame in the picture below. (I have to lower the quality of some pictures or I would run out of upload space before the story ends)

However Chappy had hurt his shoulder during the night (I did not dare to ask how) and was in considerable pain. We feared that he got some sort infection to his muscle or tendons of the shoulder, which would be quite an issue as we were nowhere near tarmac or villages. So we (he) had no choice and we pumped him full of Dafalgan painkillers and told him to keep his shoulder warm and get on with it. The driving itself was a lot smoother due to the heavy rainfall that night. All the dust was packed up and we could blast over the damp dirt roads, avoiding the puddles because they were very slippery. Due to Chappy’s shoulder calamities the luggage on his bike was not properly secured and we had to stop many times to pick stuff up that fell from his bike. In below picture you see me repairing our 5kg bag of rice after it made another tumble. This rice bag had fallen a few times already and now was mostly contained by duct tape rather than the original packaging.


We also felt that the temperature had dropped considerably compared to the previous days. We wondered if this was due to the rainfall, or if we reached the end of the “Mongolian summer”. Normally the summer ends in Mongolia halfway through September, and since it was already 5 September now it could be we would have to dress a lot warmer from now on.

Also Tom’s bike in above picture was very difficult to get started that morning, and he complained about his clutch which started slipping a lot after every gear change or serious incline.
Then after all we reached the Ugii lake, where we had planned to wash up and enjoy some skinny dipping.

However since it still was quite chilly at that time, we skipped the swimming and just freshed up a bit, refilled our water bottles and enjoyed the company of a very sweet dog.

People warned us before our trip not to touch or approach Mongolian dogs as they can carry diseases and are not very used to human contact and can be very bity, but I could not resist petting this sweet lovely dog and hoped I would be immune by now from the Mongolian bacteria.
Meanwhile we saw some heavy rainclouds approach from across the massive lake and decided to each wear our rain suites. We left the lake behind us and set off for another day of driving the beautiful Mongolian dirt tracks, which we came to love by now. Just gotta watch out for the sharp rocks!
Not even 5 minutes after we left the lake my clutch cable snapped in the middle of a very steep hill. I had all the trouble in the world getting the underpowered bike to the top of the hill without stalling, as I could not shift down without declutching (very clunky gearbox). Luckily Cheke had provided us with some spare parts for the bikes and one of those parts was a spare clutch cable, so we got to work and got the cable replaced in less than 15 minutes.

When we were just about finished a friendly local nomad passed by on the now familiar nomad bike and stopped to help. His help was not needed however but we enjoyed a funny conversation in hand language, and the nomad enjoyed his first tasting ever of some Pringles chips. He loved it so much he kept asking if he could eat some more, and finally he ate the whole can

Above picture shows my bike in front after our repair job, and the nomad’s bike in the background where we are posing with our new friend with his belly full of chips.
The rest of the day we enjoyed the dirt tracks and stayed clear of any rain, although it sometimes got very close. The dirt track by now were getting very twisty with very steep sections we had to do in 1st gear or the bike would stall. Very fun stuff this and I enjoyed every minute of the tricky ride.
By now we were approaching the large mining town Kharkorin and we knew there was to be a tarmac road in our path any minute now. Since it is not advised to camp near a tarmac road or village (the drunkies, remember? ) we called it an early day and looked for a suitable camping spot. It was only 16pm by now which is the earliest we stopped driving since we first started. We found a nice spot in an open stretch between a monastery and a local nomad family.

Since we had so much time to spend this evening we decided to prepare ourselves a festive diner with all ingredients we had. So we made a nice stew with rice, tuna fish, tomato sauce and some lasagna to add some meat to the dish. That sounded all very nice to us but I must admit the result looked less tasty than I would have imagined.

Also we did not boiled the rice long enough and it tasted exactly as it looked unfortunately, damn we are shabby cooks

Thank you for sharing! I wait the the rest of the story.

__________________
Motorcycle Adventures around the world
http://rtw-adventures.com/

you're welcome, I posted the last parts so now the story is complete, I hope you enjoy it!

While we were eating, the patriarch of the nearby nomad family came by on his Honda and invited us to his ger for some drinks, we invited him to join our meal but after a look at our cooking pot he wisely declined
After our botched diner we hiked over to his ger camp which was about a 15mins walk away. The fact that this man drives a Honda motorbike and not one of our Chinese rattle sheds, indicated this man was above average wealth for a Mongolian nomad. His gers were nicely decorated and he had satellite TV running on car batteries he recharged with solar panels. We sat down on the guest chairs in his main ger and were treated to some of the sweet yak milk we know very well by now. This man also had yak yogurt, which was excellent with some sugar and finally we got the main dish…homemade yak whisky, distilled right in the middle of this man’s house.
They spoke no English though (not surprised of that) so with my best and most polite hand gestures I asked if I could photograph this man. With a cheeky smile he agreed and you can see the house owner with me on below picture and his wife in the back ground.

on below picture is the father of this man, who sleeps in another ger next to this one.

And below you see the whisky distilling setup which is placed on top of the central furnace which is fueled by dried up yak droppings (this gives off a very special but delightful aroma, I am not kidding it smells great)

Our friendly hosts kept filling us up with the home distilled whisky, which was very sweet also and drank very easily, so we got quite drunk (at least I know I did).
After a few hours we wobbled back to our tents, full of energy from the devilish whisky. Actually I keep calling it whisky but I’m not so sure it officially was whisky. But hey, you try and mimic an alcoholic drink by hand language  . The sun was still up and we decided to play a game of baseball using a small bat we brought along to fight off drunkies, if ever needed. This was all very fun until we saw some bad weather closing in again.

We ended this very lovely evening with some vodka and some card games, but the vodka did not mix well with the self-distilled whisky in my stomach and I learned a valuable lesson about Mongolian whisky that night (I shall spare you the details).

The next day we woke up in beautiful sunshine and blue skies once again, business as usual I assumed. However it still was noticeably colder than the first mornings we awoke to the Mongolian steppes. We enjoyed another breakfast of snickers and pineapple (once you get used to this, it’s quite a fulfilling breakfast) and started packing up the tents. While packing up, our camping ground got invaded by a huge flock of goats who did not at all seemed bothered by us.

Time to hit the road it is!
Today we knew we would have follow the tarmac road leading into Kharkorin, this road was in much better nick than the previous stretch of tarmac we encountered earlier on our trip.
The road was completely deserted and arrow straight, which was quite relaxing, and allowed us to make a beautiful poster picture of our rolling trio (picture taken by cam on self-timer)

The scenery on this road was breathtaking and the tarmac was velvet smooth. Our goal was to hit Kharkorin early in the day and stack up on food and water, we were running quite low on the latter. After about 30km of the only smoothness we experienced in Mongolia so far, we reached the town of Kharkorin as seen on below picture taken from the gas station.

We found the only supermarket in town (Mongolian alphabet is in Cyrillic script, so not easy to find since all buildings look like houses in Kharkorin, except the monasteries).
The atmosphere in Kharkorin was quite grim to our liking and everybody stared at us very openly.
We were quite an attraction in the “supermarket” so we hurried getting all we needed and left Kharkorin, not many things to see there anyway, although it was quite interesting to see how the villagers live there in this very remote settlement.
We left the town using our GPS as main guideline, after some trial and error Tom mounted the GPS on his steer, much safer then riding with one hand on the steering wheel and the other tapping on the GPS, as he had been doing so far.

Part 4: ORKHON VALLEY

After leaving Kharkhorin the tarmac ended immediately and we followed a nice dirt track heading up a big hill. The GPS seemed to indicate that our prefabricated route runs south of the river Orkhon so that’s where we headed off to. Below a picture of the majestic view that greeted us from this hill just outside Kharkorin.

This view was staggering as no trace of human life was visible in the entire view ahead, a picture really does not show how vast the landscape ahead was and how immense the sky above.
With high spirits we entered the famous Orkhon valleys and negotiated some of the most beautiful dirt tracks we had seen so far.

Chappy’s shoulder had become less of an issue for him by now and we could really open up the taps on these roads. At top speed we meandered through the thousands of corners and scaled many hills. Every new view was more spectacular than the previous.




Above picture shows an extremely difficult ascent which was only possible in 1st gear, and even some clutch slip was required to make it to the top. Tom’s clutch was behaving badly by now and slipping a lot so he had to be careful to spare his clutch for the remainder of the journey (by now we were only about halfway). Late in the afternoon we noticed the GPS was starting to make no sense and kept changing direction all the time, and became almost useless. We switched back to using maps and discovered we had been riding at the wrong side of the Orkhon river all along. We checked for many places to cross but the river was very wide and strong current due to previous rainfall.

We met a few locals who advised us not to cross the river here, since we were quite far off the route by now, we decided to make camp and head back the next day direction Kharkorin where we had been told there was a bridge nearby (which we apparently had missed).

We camped at the location in above picture, which was the most beautiful camping spot I have ever spent the night. That evening, spirits in our camp needed a boost as we felt a bit low having ridden so many kilometers in the wrong direction. We had a double portion of pasta and filled our bellies with all the candy we had brought on the trip. What a bit of food and sweets can’t do to lift your spirits right back up again .
After some washing up at the mosquito infested Orkhon river, we spent the evening dancing on some old-school Dutch rap music guided by vodka and followed by our best campfire stories. Although there was no sign of any camp fires due to NO trees in Mongolia, only the first night we found a small forest and some dry dead wood to make the only camp fire we had in our stay in Mongolia.


Above picture demonstrates our dancing moves with long exposure shot by Tom’s cam, it was almost dark by then but the long exposure makes it look like daylight.

Hi Bruno

I LOVED reading about your Mongolia trip. We are heading there to do the same in June this year and are also hiring Mustangs from Cheke.

I have a question if you don't mind. I am not prepared to leave my passport as she requests for her security deposit, but also am concerned about leaving over $2000 in cash in case we have an issue getting it back on our return. As you have dealt with her, is it a professional enough operation that I should not be concerned it being withheld unreasonably at the end of the trip. In asking this, my contact with her so far has been great and she is very helpful.

I am sure I will have other questions between now and when we depart if you dont mind me running them by you.

Cheers
Lyn

Well, its just $$$'s, passport loss could become a very tricky complicated issue. The good ol' never-ending stories about bike rental shops around the greater Asia region and passport scams... Pay up $$$sucker$$$ or we keep your passport, people (vehicle renter) really still that desperate and naive to hand over passports while engaging with vehicle rental agencies ~ makes me wonder seriously... Ride on!!!

__________________
Somewhere down the road in China since '89 ~ along the route I've learned the hard way that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everybody off is a piece of cake....TBR

Why don't you guy start up a motorbike rental company?
And just put the shoes on.
There you are with all your new bikes to rent out to a person you don't know and you would like some damage waiver money or a passport for security.
How out of the way is that to ask.
So leave your passport or leave some money.
We ride our own Motorbike with respect, do you do the same with a rental?
I am involved with a big Motorbike Rental shop in Thailand with over 200 bikes.
And I can tell you first hand how some of the bikes are returned.
Even if you think you are smart and leave your passport as the deposit and you crash the bike and don't return it, thinking shit I just apply for a new passport and tell your country embassy I have had my passport stolen or lost?
After you are 1 day late returning the bike, we then Email your local Embassy of your country we are holding your Passport as security?
Guess what now you are committing fraud by applying for a new passport.
Has happened a few times now with the end result being you have to come back with the bike.
But now you pay the full price to fix the bike with no favours own end.
Your ass will be kicked.
So play the game by the rules and you will be ok.
Do your research on the hire company for feedback and reviews and you will be fine, or just WALK on.

Hey Lyn,
thank you for your positive comment, I am glad you enjoyed reading it.
I would not call Cheke tours a professional operation, but rather an improvised family business. However I got a good feeling with Cheke and I actually never worried if she would give us trouble to refund our deposit.
When we arrived back at Cheke's, she did not even inspect the bikes for any damages, she was just curious on how our experience was.

Personally I do not advise to leave your passport anywhere but close to you, it is too important. Leave the money and don't worry about it, unless you fold the bikes in half, Chee will refund you without making a hassle.

For all your future questions, I am happy to respond, but write to my email: brunomommens@hotmail.com.

Thank you and enjoy planning your trip
Bruno

Great read, thanks for posting.

Very suprised you encountered so much aggressive behaviour, I have heard Mongolia is one of the friendliest countries you can go to!

I've been renting a bike at Cheke's a few years back (2016 I think). I wouldn't call the operation very "professionnal" but I left my passport anyway, as I didn't have 700€ to leave there at the time. It just stayed in the same drawer she stored it in. She was indeed, really nice and helpfull, tho it depends a lot on your attitude with her. I think was a bit concerned about me when she saw that I went alone with zero experience. She got me one of her newest bikes and was extra helpfull to me

You will have a great time, if it's not already done

Great stuff. Thanks.

__________________
"When you get to the end zone, act like you've been there before". - Vince Lombardi