Mongolia = big
Most people visit Mongolia for its great outdoors. The legendary nomadic culture can be seen and experienced best first-hand outside of the capital city of Ulan Bator (sometimes translated form the Cyrillic script as Ulaan Baatar). Although it’s technically possible to find a car and travel around by yourself, this isn’t really advised.
This is a vast country, with virtually no infrastructure apart from some (admittedly good quality) roads linking Ulan Bator to provincial towns. If you break down you could be a long way from anywhere, and much of the country requires local knowledge of off-road routes to navigate. The chances are you don’t know the local weather either, and it can get bad at any time of year.
Apart from the environment and the elements, it’s not necessarily safe for travellers. Locals may not take too kindly to stray travellers getting lost on their patch, or might try to take advantage of people who don’t know what they’re doing.
There’s also no train network and there aren’t even really buses – most ‘public’ transport consists of the same 11 seater vans that you can hire from private tour operators, without the personal driver and guide.
Thankfully, there’s nothing overly-commercialised or contrived about Mongolia just yet, and having a guide makes everything easier, safer and more informative, adding to rather than hampering your experience.
Guides are best
The best way to organise your trip is to book when you arrive in Ulan Bator. It’s good to know in advance which parts of the country – and which aspects of Mongolia – interest you most: the traditional nomadic culture, the wildlife, the scenery, etc.
There are also specific activities which you may have seen or heard of that you might like to try, like horseback riding, camel riding, camping, eagle hunting, cultural trips to learn about the Mongol Empire, staying in a real nomad family’s tent, etc.
And finally, there are the different regions of the country which may have excited and interested you to come here, from the Gobi desert which covers over half of the country’s southern end, to the beautiful rolling hills and steppes (grasslands) in northern Mongolia.
As a side note, I did also come across groups of maybe 10-12 enduro bike riders travelling as a group with support vehicle across the desert, so a more extreme niche like that is definitely worth looking into if that’s your thing (I was a bit jealous).
How to plan your trip
The amount and length of trips you can do depends on your budget, how much time you have and any other preferences, like whether you want a private tour or to share with other travellers. There are many tour companies in Ulan Bator who can provide you with local guides and drivers for multi-day trips to each region of the country, depending on your needs.
We did 3 separate trips to the Gobi desert (5 days), Northern Mongolia (Khuvsgal Nuur)(6 days) and Western Mongolia (Altai mountains)(8 days) in just over 3 and a half weeks, with short returning breaks to Ulan Bator of one or two days each in between trips. It’s possible to combine regions into one trip simply by driving or flying to the next destination rather than back to UB. One group I met were travelling the whole country in one long six-week trip. It’s also possible to go for shorter trips than the ones I outlined. Most tour companies are flexible to travellers’ needs – just ask!
Click here for a guide to what you can see in the various regions of Mongolia.
We booked our trips with Golden Gobi* tours, located just around the corner from the State Department Store on Peace Avenue, and would highly recommend them. They were able to make custom tours for my father, my brother and I to both the Gobi desert region and the northern Khuvsgal Province region, which toured through gorgeous mountainous grasslands and steppes, and featured horseback riding, staying with reindeer herders and camping on the stunning Khuvsgal Lake. Read more about those trips here.
*I’ve mentioned and linked to this tour operator purely because I used their services and genuinely recommended them. Their guides and drivers were friendly, knowledgeable, careful, diligent and genuinely warm, and helped to make our whole trip as good as it was. I haven’t received any payment or any other perks, nor did they ask me to link to or advertise their service. Anything I link to on this site is something I’ve used and enjoyed myself and would recommend to anyone to use.
Tour features
We were able to tell the tour company what we wanted to see, our budget and any other requirements, and they were able to arrange accordingly.
Each tour included a guide and driver who were incredibly friendly, helpful and knowledgeable, and in our case were local to the regions we were visiting (we stopped off at our driver Oggi’s home house on the way back to UB from the Gobi desert for tea and lunch).
The guide and driver bring food supplies and cook 3 meals a day, and bringing your own snacks and supplies like toiletries, sun cream, toilet paper, etc is recommended.
Accommodation
Accommodation is included, but this is Mongolia, and therefore accommodation in the wilderness means tents. It’s what you come for. On each trip, this was a combination of camping tents, gers erected for tourists, and even sharing gers with families living in the countryside, arranged as necessary by our guide – told you they were useful.
All of this adds up to the best camping trip you’ve ever been on. There were no showers or toilets for several days at a time (some tourist camps did have facilities), which to be honest gets fun after a while. There’s not many who’d come this far if they weren’t prepared for this aspect of the trip. Even my 75 year old dad managed just fine, hardy enough soul that he is.
Along with no facilities of course, there was no internet. My brother and I had actually bought local sim cards for quite cheap in UB but once we were out in the wilds we saw the real benefit in not using them and they remained in our bags for the whole trip.
Pleasure in the simple daily routines of waking and getting up, having breakfast, enjoying tea, doing your business in whatever woods or deserted spot you could find, packing up and enjoying the long drives, often through desert oceans with endless horizons or through repetitive rolling hills that never got boring. Photos, hikes, learning Mongolian phrases and history and culture from the endlessly helpful and friendly guides – there was a lot to fill each day despite the lengthy driving.
Transport
[Typical Russian van used by travellers in Mongolia. These things are surprisingly resilient and capable eating up off-road dirt tracks, ditches and riverbeds. They are quite bumpy and it’s common to be thrown around a bit in the back. The experience is worth the few bumps, however. Pictured here being unloaded to set up another night’s camp on the edge of a forest.]
Our transport was a modern Toyota Landcruiser in the desert, and a very un-modern old Soviet Scooby Doo looking van in the north. Although the battered looking van looked a more unreliable choice of vehicle, once we veered off road it became apparent that it was built for purpose.
Off-road tracks, gravel, riverbeds, vertical ditches, mud and dirt and hill and valley – it ate up everything in its sights and its driver was suitably expert at chewing up whatever ground was in front of him. Off-road, top speeds were only around 30kph in the hilly steppes, sometimes a little faster in the open desert, where at times horizons disappear on all sides like you’re a boat bobbing along in the ocean, the odd sheep’s skull or discarded vodka bottle the only features for miles.
Be warned: the rides are invariably bumpy! Off-road travel is probably not what you’re used to, and at times we were literally thrown from our seats as the driver traversed unforgiving terrain. It wasn’t really possible to nap on some days as the bumps were too much – perfect as you don’t want to miss the scenery. Just enjoy the ride as it’s a lot of fun.
Open (off-) road
[A typical scene of dirt track winding through steppes and gentle hills in Khuvsgal Province, northern Mongolia. We drove for around 5 hours (150 kilometres) along a route similar to this after leaving the main road.]
One of the defining features of travelling in Mongolia is space. This is the world’s least densely populated country proper, after all, with half its residents now living in the capital city, Ulan Bator. As gorgeous as the scenery is, part of the appeal is not having to share it with other people, which can make even the most beautiful of places seem like a bit of a chore or a box-ticking exercise for those with some travelling experience.
Trips often take your hundreds of kilometres from anything resembling a town, and this remote feeling of standing on the edge of a mountain overseeing a valley that stretches far, far across is what it might be like to be on the moon. Being disconnected from phone usage adds to this feeling, a special sense of awe that permeates your body only in places that are this cut off from the world.
Although some routes popular with tour companies may see you cross paths with other travellers, in general you will have days and days where you don’t come across other tourists, or maybe even locals. Our guides were accommodating in keeping us on our own path as much as possible, though it was nice to join up with others from the same company on one or two nights in the desert.
The vastness does mean you should be prepared for long, long drives each day to get from one stop to the next – we drove for anything between two and 10 hours in a single day. It can get repetitive, and it’s almost always bumpy, but most travellers willing to brave it here should be able for it. I’m not sure about those with car-sickness though…
Weather
The weather when we visited in mid-June was beautiful – with blue skies dotted with some cloud cover. It was fresh but not too cold at night, and delightful during the day. Outside of the summer months it does become the coldest capital city in the world, so it’s best to visit between June and August – even May and September can see the end and start of the wintery temperatures that the country gets for up to 9 months of the year.
Outside of the summer, conditions are extreme, with winter lasting for up to 9 months, snowfalls measured by the metre, and temperatures dropping as low as 50°C. Travel is not just inadvisable, it’s impossible and locals told us UB itself was ‘quite depressing’ in the winter.
Thankfully, when I visited in early June, the weather was ideal for travelling in UB, the Gobi desert and ‘up Norf’ in Khuvsgal province. That meant warm or sometimes hot days (20°C – 30°C) and cool (often cold) nights (2°C – 15°C). Even in summer it dropped to near freezing, or even slightly warmer temperatures had bitter winds, so it’s advised to always bring warmer clothes.
Food
In the countryside, you get what anyone else can get, which is usually mutton and dried pasta noodles, served with or without a broth, and may come with vegetables but probably won’t.
We enjoyed a traditional Mongolian barbeque a couple of times, made by packing hot coals onto meat and veg, and this was really tasty. The food is always hearty and you’re damn glad to get it when it comes, at the end of yet another long day’s travelling.
We had a few hours to kill in the provincial city of Moron and our guide brought us to a local tavern for some lunch. Deep-fried mutton burgers dripping in stale grease, mutton having been the staple of our diet for the previous few days, wasn’t the nicest meal I’ve ever had, and a few bites did enough to kill our appetites.
Ulan Bator has a good selection of modern and tasty restaurants and cafes, including good examples of traditional Mongolian cooking, so enjoy these while you can before heading off into the outback. You can always get horse meat or soup served in a sheep’s skull if you’re feeling like indulging your inner nomad.
Conclusion
Travel in Mongolia is not about five-star resorts, or even two-star dives and backpacker laughs. Instead, it’s the best camping trip you’ll ever go on, a proper detachment from whatever your real world is, into a way of life that’s only been updated rather than changed for hundreds of years. The feeling of isolation and escapism provided by the landscape, the vastness and the local way of life is – genuinely – awe-inspiring in a way that man-made sights and attractions can never hope to match.
Once you get used to a day or two of roughing it you’ll be surprised by how long you can go, and genuine interactions with locals are humbling experiences. There’s nothing contrived about travelling here – yet – though as we all know that can change in any part of the world very quickly. Thankfully Mongolia is still only for the interested traveller for now, and if you’re interested at all, I think we both know that you’d love it if you make the effort to go.
Click here to see my guide to travelling the different regions of Mongolia.