Getting Lost in Mongolia, the World's Last Truly Nomadic Realm

22.03.2024 - 19:29 / cntraveler.com

When people ask me what is my favorite place in the wide world of places to which I have traveled, there is never any hesitation. I love Mongolia so much that I once spent five months crossing a thousand miles of it on horseback, the baggage horse loaded with a rattling collection of gear, from a temperamental stove to a rapidly disappearing bottle of whiskey. I wrote a book about the journey that was translated into a dozen languages. I fell in love with a Mongolian, an intense affair that unwound over years. It ended two decades ago. She has moved on, wisely. But Mongolia is still there. And it was time to go back.

From the air, the emptiness is always startling. Flying over Mongolia before dawn, I saw no lights below, just unfolding landscapes: a spooling river, a range of mountains surging across steppelands, an empire of grass tipping to undisturbed horizons. Only Greenland and the Falkland Islands have a lower population density. The one sign of habitation were the occasional encampments of round white yurts, known here as gers, which appear suddenly and mysteriously in the grasslands like overnight mushrooms. In a few weeks they will vanish and spring up elsewhere, leaving no trace other than pale circles on the grass as the nomads move to winter pastures. Mongolia is the world's last truly nomadic realm.

Visitor gers at Mandala Altai camp

I landed in Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital and its only real city. With traffic that would shame Manhattan and one of the highest pollution levels in the world, it seemed the antithesis of the country over which it presides. I got out of town as quickly as I could and entered into a landscape that might have been carved by the wind.

I didn't have five months this time. The plan was to spend 10 days in the country, visiting a couple of regions with a driver, a guide, and my photographer friend, Alistair Taylor-Young, to whom I had been enthusing about Mongolia for years. My Mongolian calendar for the trip was surprisingly full. I had an appointment with a shaman. I planned to search for wild horses and visit eagle hunters. In between, I would look for myself, for my connection to this place, for what drew me here, for who I had been all those years ago.

We began at the beginning, among the wild horses and standing stones of Khustain Nuruu National Park. Mongolia was home to the Przewalski's Horse, known in Mongolia as the takhi, the only authentically wild horses left on Earth. But by the 1960s these short and thick-chested creatures had become extinct in the wild. Then in 1992, using stock from zoos, breeders successfully reintroduced them to their homeland in this park.

In Khustain's high valleys, deer stones, so named for the carvings they bear of