Abakan is the capital of Khakassia and the biggest city for a long way in any direction, with about 167,000 people on the flat bottom of the Minusinsk Basin, where the Abakan River meets the Yenisei. For a rider it is the great resupply point. Everything you might want after days of empty road is here: fuel on every corner, supermarkets, repair shops, hotels, cafes serving everything from Khakass dumplings to Uzbek plov, and traffic lights that you will be oddly glad to see. Nothing else on the Yenisei Highway towards Kyzyl is as well stocked.
The basin around it has an unexpectedly deep past. Dry hills dotted with burial mounds and standing stones from the Bronze Age onwards lie within an hour or two of the city, and the Khakass, a Turkic people, still live here alongside Russians who arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The local museum is known for its collection of carved stone figures from the steppe, and if you have an hour at the end of the day, it is the best way to understand why this flat land feels so occupied by the dead.
The riding changes character as you leave town. North of the city the highway runs fast and dry across the steppe, but heading south and west toward Tuva it begins to rise, with the Western Sayan filling the horizon and the road following the Yenisei towards the great reservoir behind the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam. The asphalt is generally good, gradients are modest at first, and the bends get longer and more fun as the hills close in. Summer is hot, and by midday the pavement shimmers, so start early. Winter is bitter, and snow can close higher sections.
Fill the tank here even if it is still half full. Beyond Abakan the towns thin out, and a closed station or a queue can spoil an afternoon. Pick up water, snacks and a spare layer, because the weather in the mountains can differ completely from what you left in the basin. And leave a little time to wander the riverfront in the evening, when the heat softens and the long light falls across the bridges and the steppe beyond.