We are currently (May 2015) in Jargalant Mongolia, Joe and myself started bugging in Bayankhongor 26 days ago, the first few hundred kilometers were hilly technical terrain until we got to the Gobi desert. This bought wide open terrain, strong winds with violent dust devils in the afternoons, and heavy buggys due to the amount of water we needed to cover the large distances between towns.
We then abandoned our original route and turned north for a change of scenery. We had some vast areas of rolling green hills and 10 days of crosswind kiting in cold north winds. We got to our goal Buyr lake on day 23 and as we still had over 10 days left on our Mongolian visas we decided to try and ride the same crosswind back west on our original southern route. This is proving challenging because our high wind kites don’t go upwind very well.
We are mostly using single skin kites, small 2 line NPW21 NASA wings 1m-3m for strong winds, 2 depower foils 4&6m, and a range of fixed bridle single skin kites 2m-8m. The buggys have large drybags at the sides so the extra weight doesn’t upset the handling. There’s a foot operated front brake to prevent the buggy over running the kite when going downwind and also a friction drive regenerative brake to charge our battery’s.
Cheers
Gavin Mulvay and Joe Steffert.