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Originally Posted by Forestwiz
thanks for this Maria.sounds like I should get out of Mongolia west ,at Ulgii, and skip Baikal (my original plan) .It actually makes lot more sense.definetly a shorter way.
distances are great. more than what looks like on the map..  and I have about a month from the China/Mongolia border to get to Europe/Italy
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A month from the Chinese border to Italy?
I'd say this is barely enough to do anything other than drive the most direct route.
I would also say to maximise your time in Mongolia.
As Maria has said, Altai is well worth riding through. Once you hit Novosibirsk there's really nothing along the main TSH of any interest until the Urals.
Once you hit the Urals, you can head south a bit into the mountains of Bashkortostan. Near Miass you can take a road south towards Beloretsk, then follow it westwards, and connect back to the main road just outside Ufa.
As well as the nice scenery, this also cuts out the worst part of the M5 which (at least in 2011) is a winding two lane highway full of trucks and cars illegally overtaking (it's almost all double white lines) when the police aren't watching.
You could actually stick on small roads by riding down to Orenburg then west to the Volga in Samara, south to Saratov then west to Voronezh, Kursk and Kyiv, thus avoiding Moscow.
As for weather, this year is very unsettled so you just have to see what you get.
EO
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EurasiaOverland a memoir of one quarter of a million kilometres by road through all of the Former USSR, Western and Southern Asia.
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