Gobi and Terelj Tour 8 Days
Eight days for the Gobi's cliffs, canyon, dunes and monastery ruins, then Khugnu Tarna, Terelj National Park and the Chinggis Khaan statue.
A cold desert
Green open land, thousands of camels and mirages that look like a great ocean: this is the Gobi, one of the most visited places in Mongolia. The Gobi is a cold desert, with frost and sometimes snow on its dunes. Besides lying quite far north, it sits on a plateau roughly 910 to 1,520 metres above sea level, which keeps temperatures low. About 194 millimetres of rain falls in an average year, and in winter the wind carries snow down from Siberia. Temperatures range from −40°C in winter to 45°C in summer. This tour covers the Gobi and Terelj National Park in eight days.
Day by Day
The scarp of Tsagaan Suvarga is in Ulziit soum of Dundgovi province. Its sheer east-facing slope looks like the ruins of an ancient city from a distance. The cliff is 30 metres high and 100 metres wide, and the wind has shaped it over thousands of years. It was once the floor of a sea, and the different colours in the rock are layers of sediment laid down over millions of years.
Yol valley lies in the north-east of the Zuun Saikhan mountains and has been one of the main attractions of the Gobi for decades. Very wide at the entrance, it gradually narrows into a remarkable gorge. In spring a thick corridor of ice two or three kilometres long winds through the gorge, and it often lasts into July. We also walk into Mukhar Shivert canyon, where a frozen waterfall stands for most of the year.
The Khongor sand dunes in Sevrei soum are the largest and most spectacular dunes in Mongolia. Known as the "singing dunes", they are up to 300 metres high, 20 kilometres wide and about 100 kilometres long. They are bordered by lush green vegetation along the small Khongor river, which is fed by underground springs from the surrounding mountains.
The Flaming Cliffs are in Umnugovi, the South Gobi province. Their Mongolian name, Bayanzag, means "rich in saxaul", an endangered Central Asian tree 2 to 9 metres tall whose roots protect the soil from erosion. Important palaeontological discoveries have been made here, above all by the American Roy Chapman Andrews in the 1920s: fossilised dinosaur eggs and specimens of Velociraptor. The nickname "Flaming Cliffs" comes from the orange-red rock of the cliffs.
Ongi monastery is the ruin of a large monastery on the bank of the Ongi river, in Saikhan Ovoo soum of Dundgovi province. It had 28 temples and other buildings, and about 1,000 lamas lived there before it was destroyed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Some of its stupas are still standing.
Khugnu Khan nature reserve covers 46,990 hectares in Rashaant soum of Bulgan province, at the point where three provinces meet. Alongside its mountains, the reserve has a remarkable stretch of sand dunes about 80 kilometres long, and the scenery is a striking mix of desert, mountain, river and green grassland. There are two monasteries in the reserve, Uvgun temple and Erdenekhamba monastery.
Terelj is one of the most popular destinations around Ulaanbaatar. It has been protected since the 1960s and became a national park in 1993, and it is connected to the city by a paved road. Wildlife in the park includes brown bears, grey wolves, foxes and more than 200 species of birds, and the Tuul river flows through it. Gorkhi-Terelj National Park also has many rock formations popular with climbers. We hike to Turtle Rock and the Ariyapala meditation centre.
The Chinggis Khaan statue at Tsonjin Boldog, on the bank of the Tuul river, is 40 metres tall and shows Chinggis Khaan on horseback. It faces east, towards his birthplace. Afterwards we drive back to Ulaanbaatar.
