Trip to Mongolia

by Biedjee

Trip to Mongolia Gobi. Gobi means 'desert' in Mongolian, but actually the Mongolian language knows 33 different words for 'desert'. In the following five days we would see pretty much all 33 different types of desert the Gobi has to offer, with at least 10-15 different types of landscape on the first day. We started with brownish sand desert and snow capped mountains, then came hills, rocks, mountains, yellow steppe, gravel and what else. Every hour or so the landscape just changed completely!

And to our big surprise the Gobi is taming with wildlife as well! The Gobi desert is the least densely populated part on earth, with only 0.5 people per square kilometer, yet it supports so much wildlife. Of course there are goats, sheep, yaks/cows, horses and camels everywhere, as the Mongolians are traditionally nomadic herders, and some 35% of it population is still nomadic and roaming the steppes in search of grazing grounds.

And as expected the border between wild and domesticated is pretty blurry with these herds.
But we also saw a herd of gazelle running away from our car, and we saw thousands of little desert rats scurrying to their holes, avoiding to get run over. Slightly less visible, but also roaming the gobi are wild ass, snow leopards and even an endemic bear!

And apart from mammals we saw many, many birds. Some very big cranes wandered the desert floor; finches flew in front of our car, as if leading the way; huge golden eagles soared in the sky; and I even saw a rare falcon, which disappeared as soon as it noticed my camera :-( trip to Mongolia


We had lunch in a little roadside restaurant, where we saw the first 'ger', a traditional felt tent (yurt) which is still used by a majority of Mongolians as housing.

The restaurant gave us our first experience in Mongolian cuisine, serving the infamous "soup with food", i.e. a watery noodle soup with mutton. And when I say mutton picture every possible part of a sheep cut in pieces and chucked in your soup. Half of the stuff floating in my soup resembled stuff I'd always sworn never to eat...

Late afternoon we arrived in the village of Edernedalai, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere consisting of no more than a couple of sandy streets, a handful of concrete buildings and a bunch of gers around it. Surprisingly enough the village also houses a beautiful Buddhist monastery, Damba Darjalan Süm, built in the 1800s, which was one of the very few monasteries to survive Stalinist purges by becoming a warehouse and shop.

Some 20 kilometres outside of Edernedalai we stayed the night with a nomadic family, sleeping in their spare ger. The place was literally near-perfect: beautiful surroundings (pretty much the middle of nowhere, and I have to say that nowhere is stunning!), a lovely decorated ger (which all of us forgot to photograph), very good food (miles better than the bland lunch we'd had) and an outhouse with a sit-down toilet (which as we would later find out is a rare luxury in Mongolia).

A brilliant first day of our trip to Mongolia!