Or ‘Chinggis Khaan’, as he is known here. We suspect this after arriving at Chinggis Khaan International Airport, checking into the the Chinggis Khaan Hotel, via Chinggis Khaan Avenue – well, you get the picture. His likeness is on every denomination of banknote. There’s even a beer named after him.
Nobody knows what the gent actually looked like in real life, because he refused to have his portrait done. The is the famous Yuan Portrait, done long after his death.
From now on, we’ll refer to him as ‘Genghis Khan‘, since that the name he’s known by in the West.
We’re staying at the Chinggis Khaan Hotel, a better class of hotel than we usually opt for. It’s walkable distance to most sights we’re interested in, which is important because Mongolia has no Yandex/Uber equivalent, and as far as we can see doesn’t even seem to have taxis. Besides, traffic is bad most of the time in Ulaanbaatar.
We manage to put all the pieces together – renting a 4X4, renting some camping equipment, buying whatever else we need at the handy Emart superstore steps away from our hotel – and drive south. We turn off the road at a small village and go overland in search of a particular yurt camp. (They call them ‘gers‘ in Mongolia, but we’re used to the word ‘yurt’.)
This is what we’ve read about – multiple trails crisscrossing the countryside, no signs whatsoever. After 35 KMs, we get within a few KMs of our destination and give up. So we simply pull over and set up camp.
We spend a nice evening with only munching cows and a billion stars for company. Next day, we make our way down some pretty rocky trails.
We had been confronted with these stretches the day before and decided they were impassable. So we take an alternate route. On the alternate route, there is an equally challenging goatpath, but we spy a group of travelers make it down successfully. So do we. And now our confidence level is a little bit higher.
Next stop is the Tsagaan Suvarga, or White Stupa, which isn’t really a stupa at all, but a rock formation.
It’s windy and sandstorm-y, so we stay at an interesting resort, the Gobi Caravanserai.
It departs from the almost-universal idea that everything in Mongolia should be a yurt.
It’s a good place to get away from it all.
We drive to the Yolyn Am, a valley with a gorge that’s popular with hikers. We think the valley itself is scenic enough, as the hiking trail looks like it might be crowded, judging by the number of vehicles in the parking lot.
We spend the night camped near the top of a hill.
Keeping us amused are the saxaul sparrows – bold little creatures that hop around within centimeters of our feet.
We drive to Khongoryn Els, site of some of the highest dunes in the Gobi.
On our way to the Flaming Cliffs, we pass through the small village of Bulgan. Some kind of festival is going on at the edge of town, in which women dressed in traditional clothing and mounted on horses sing songs, some old, some modern.
This is how we spend our days – we drive for hours at a time through countryside without seeing a soul, then come across villages with gas stations, mini marts, maybe a hotel of some kind. Kind of like Australia.
The area around the Flaming Cliffs is famous for its numerous important dinosaur fossil finds. Especially the work of Roy Chapman Andrews, a possible model for Indiana Jones. He also held some crackpot theory that humans originated in Central Asia.
This makes us eager to visit the Dinosaur Museum when we get back to Ulaanbaatar.
Sight or Insight of the Day
We usually don’t do things that we consider risky. A lot of people are put off self-driving in Mongolia because – well, many reasons. No roads. Bad roads. No signs. Animals everywhere. Long distances of nothing but beautiful scenery. Possible breakdown. Needless to say, at the very least, you need a dependable vehicle. (These are not cheap.)
More than once, locals have marveled at us for having neither a driver nor a guide.
BUT – We have an ace-in-the-hole: a mobile Starlink receiver.
This is an additional US$10.00 daily extra that we have with our rental vehicle. It takes care of the problem of relying on internet navigation when you have no internet. It attaches to the hood (or elsewhere) with non-marring magnets that grip even in the roughest conditions, so we always have connectivity.
That doesn’t mean that we never get lost. For us, apps like Google Maps and Maps.Me behave, shall we say, imperfectly? We learn that navigating Mongolian roads is as much of an art as a science. We get better at it as we go.