Chita has the odd distinction of being both a big city and a place that feels like the edge of the world. With about 300,000 people, it is the capital of Zabaykalsky Krai and sits in a bowl of hills where the Chita and Ingoda rivers meet, beyond Lake Baikal and well before the Pacific. It began in the seventeenth century as a Cossack outpost, grew with the arrival of the Trans-Siberian Railway around the turn of the twentieth century, and became widely known earlier as a place of exile. Several Decembrist officers, who had led an uprising against the tsar in 1825, were sent here, and their presence left a mark of learning and culture in a town that might otherwise have remained a frontier camp.
For a rider arriving from the west, Chita is the first real city after a long run of taiga and steppe, and it offers everything you may want: fuel stations on every main road, large supermarkets, cafes serving everything from Buryat dumplings to burgers, hotels of every grade and mechanics who have seen plenty of tired bikes. The streets can be busy at rush hour, and the cobbled and patched pavement of older districts is rough, but the centre is easy to find and the setting is pleasant.
South and east of the city, the road toward the Dauria steppe is a different story. The highway crosses rolling grassland, with long gentle rises and wide, open views. Wind is common, and summer thunderstorms can be violent, with brief, heavy rain. Winters are bitterly cold and dry, with hard frost from November to March, so the riding season is short, running from late May to early September. July and August bring warmth, and the grass turns green and then gold across the hills.
Take time for the centre. The old Decembrist church and the museum devoted to the exiles are worth a short visit, and the cathedral and the main square show the confidence of a provincial capital that has always had to manage on its own. Local food leans on meat, dumplings and Siberian pelmeni, and you can find surprisingly good coffee near the main street. Fill the tank before heading out, because the steppe villages are small and the distances long.