Ak-Dovurak means white clay in Tuvan, and the name comes from the pale deposits that gave the town its reason to exist. It grew in the 1950s around an asbestos mine in the western part of the Tuva Republic, and for decades the extraction and processing plant shaped everything about the place. Today around twelve thousand people live in a mix of Soviet blocks and low wooden houses spread across a dry valley, with the little town of Kyzyl-Mazhalyk just over four kilometres away.
For a rider it is a good place to take stock. After a long climb out of the Yenisei basin and across the dry Tuvan uplands, the town offers fuel, shops, simple cafes and a bed for the night, which counts for a lot in a region where settlements can be a day apart. Larger Teeli is thirty kilometres or so away, but beyond that, supplies thin out, so fill up here before heading further. Nothing about the town is polished, but the people are direct and often curious about travellers on motorcycles.
The landscape around it is classic Tuva: treeless hills the colour of toast, long valleys of steppe, and the ridge of the Tannu-Ola range somewhere off to the south. The road is mostly asphalt but badly broken in places, with frost heave and potholes that you want to see before you hit them. Summer is dry and hot, and the sky is a deep, clean blue, while winter is fierce and the wind can cut across the open ground. Late spring and early autumn are the best seasons, with light that makes the hills glow.
Tuva has its own culture, distinct from the rest of Russia. The Tuvans are Turkic-speaking herders with a Buddhist and shamanic tradition, and the republic only joined the Soviet Union in 1944, having been independent for some years before. The country is famous for throat-singing, a technique in which a single singer produces two or more notes at once, and you may hear it on a car radio or at a market. Buy some local bread, drink the salty milk tea if you are offered it, and let the day settle.