Mongolia Travel Blogs

Golden Leaves and Mongolian Cheese
Oct 2, 2008 (44 photos)

... ;Once they sent us the name of the nearest city our coworker Michael helped us find out how to get there. Well, Inner Mongolia is shaped something like a crescent moon lying on its belly, and Ningxia is a thumb poking into that belly.  We figured ...

Trans Mongolian Express: Day 6
Jul 30, 2006 (5 photos)

"Dirty" There isn't a shower on the Trans-Mongolian Express. I thought I'd wait until now to throw that out there. Unless you have a first class cabin like some kind of loser, there is no shower. No bath, no anything. Well, not quite anything. ...

Hotel Facilities
Aug 9, 2006

... the local tour guide who was insisting we went on a tour of the nearby grasslands that were 'almost as good as passing through Mongolia itself', and so far had been successful. The phone rang at one stage and Vinny had a rather strange conversation with a ...

Our First Steppe into Mongolia
Mar 20, 2005 (6 photos)

... statue dominated the centre of the square. From here we walked to one of the only remaining (original) Buddist temples in Mongolia (Stalin had destroyed the rest and slaughtered all the monks in the late 1930s) This temple had survived only because Stalin ...

Mongolia
Oct 12, 2007 (76 photos)

... horse riding in Central Mongolia, 4 in the capital Ulaanbaatar, and 11 on a 2000km journey around Western and Southern Mongolia in a jeep. Before commencing our journey the hostel owner stressed the importance of forming a good team between us, our ...

Back to UB
Feb 5, 2009 (28 photos)

... of the city. Then Declan slid down the hill and nearly killed himself. This turns out to be the theme of our stay in Mongolia, but more of that later...   We had dinner in an amazing all-you-can-eat Mongolian BBQ. As Russian food wasn't really up ...

Beijing to Karakhorin
Oct 15, 2006 (10 photos)

... towering structures, and just so many people in every nook and cranny of the city. I suppose the contrast with Mongolia makes observations like these especially stark. Mao's smiling portrait still looks proudly over tianamin square, touched up by " ...

Reflection
Nov 25, 2006

... and is only going to change more. It's such a balancing act, retaining a culture, yet embracing change. For a country like Mongolia, it is particularly precarious since the independence and freedom of living the life of a nomad is the antithesis of the ...

Back in Ulan Bator
Feb 8, 2006

Arrived back in UB and taken to our first hotel of the trip which feels like complete luxury - and indoor toilets!! Have had a walk around UB today looking at the shops (although not allowed to buy anything). Had a huge lunch which set us back about 2 ...

Adventures out West
Aug 19, 2006 (14 photos)

... , and will be making our way to the furthest western point of the country in the next few days, where there are glaciers. Mongolia is amazing! I never believed you could fall in love with a country, but I have head over heels fallen for Mongolia! The ...

Three Days
Dec 12, 2006

  Nee hao I was in Beijing for three days this last time. We made it out to the contempory art district in the north est of the city.  This is well worth visiting.  There are many galleries, jewellery and ceramic and other shops ...

Driving and driving and driving....
Oct 23, 2006 (5 photos)

Sainbainuu, Just a brief update. I am back from Zavkan and Khovd aimags after a pretty cool trip. Snow covered the central plateau of the country. The expression "blanket" of snow pretty well describes how the countryside looked - it was beautiful. ...

Day 13
Sep 27, 2006 (15 photos)

... local police of a state visit by the Czech Prime Minister and either a high ranking Buddha priest or the head of state for Mongolia. Either way we were told to get off the road for four hours while they looked around the same temple we were heading for. ...

Day 14
Sep 28, 2006 (13 photos)

... . Back home if you went horse riding you'd get a helmet and a briefing session and a guide that spoke English. Still we're in Mongolia so none of those were applicable and all we were told was the word to make it go "Choo". Walking away from the Ger on ...

Day 11
Sep 25, 2006 (3 photos)

... but it was a relief to be feeling part of civilised humanity again. We even got our laundry done - phew! Ulan Bataar, Mongolia's capital, is a strange city but by far the least grandiose capital city I've ever been to. Old Soviet apartment blocks and ...

The Underbelly
Sep 8, 2006 (2 photos)

Sainbainuu This week I began work at World Vision. It has been an eye opening week, that's for sure. On Tuesday, I visisted the city's heating tunnels underground the city, where the street children and other homeless people live during winter. The ...

A week in Bor Undur
Sep 17, 2006

... . So hopefully more vocational training centres will help address this. Actually, as well as being squeezed economically, Mongolia politically is in a very vulnerable position. It's tiny population of less than 2.5 million is sandwiched between two ...

Trans Mongolian Express: Day 5
Jul 29, 2006 (15 photos)

Then train stopped opposite another train at around 5 in the evening. Whether this was 5 in the evening by Moscow time, Beijing time, Ulaan Baator time or British summer time is anybody's guess and not particulary relevant to the story. Our heads were ...

Trans-Mongolian
Jan 11, 2006 (18 photos)

We arrived at the train early but when we boarded we were surprised to find every available storage space in our cabin full of bags and boxes. Where were we supposed to put our stuff? We quickly worked out that one lady was in the wrong cabin so we booted ...

Mongolia
May 23, 2005 (5 photos)

Mongolia is beautiful, full stop. I've never seen such a wild place. We arrived on the 23rd of May into Ulan bataar, the capital, which is an awful looking place. We didn't stay there initially though because we got picked up straight from the airport ( ...

The Beginning - Trans-Mongolian Rail
Jul 21, 2005

... in a public arena at a boarder crossing. A good reminder of how far China has come in such a short time. Entry into Mongolia was just as uneventful, at about 1.30am the officials came into our cabin and stamped my passport while I lay in bed. The ...

The Beauty of Travel, and other musings
Oct 29, 2006 (3 photos)

... . It's funny, because when I arrived and learnt the briefest outline of Mongolian history, ie that the Russians controlled Mongolia as a satellite communist state for about 70 years last century (leaving in 1992) I had kind of assumed that Mongolians ...

Poverty and the Cold
Nov 13, 2006

... by an NGO, with classes every day (b) recieved an amnesty on the anniversary of 800 years since Chinggis established the state of Mongolia (all prisoners in UB were released in July - wasn't that a comforting thought for me as I arrived here - except the ...

On the rails on the Trans Mongolian
Dec 21, 2005 (12 photos)

If you read the last entry from Beijing, you might be thinking "hang on a minute, the Forbidden City and other temples you went to are all very nice, but isn't the Great Wall of China very close to Beijing, and why didn't you go there?" Which is fair ...

Early morning strolls are out of the question...
Dec 22, 2005 (20 photos)

... and a truer sense of scale. A statue of Monsieur Sukhbaatar (Sukh the Hero, leader of the peasant revolution that gave Mongolia its independence in 1921) stands proudly adjacent to the large dial like fresco that marks the actual centre of the city. Kids ...

Bayan Olgii and back to UB
Sep 3, 2006 (7 photos)

... me was definately Tavan Bogd (literally translating to "The Great Five") which are the five peaks which mark the border between Mongolia, Russia, China and Khazakstan. We stayed with Marembeck, a friend of Viktor's friend Gans, and his really nice (very ...

No fences, No Power, No Toilets... The Gobi Desert
Aug 2, 2005 (3 photos)

... that I was the only one that made it. On heading North towards Terelj we stayed at Kharkhorin, which aside from having Mongolia's oldest monestry was also holding a Nadam festival. These are abit like Mongolia's version of an A&P show, the only ...

A Ger in the Country
Jun 18, 2005 (8 photos)

... we were too stingy to pay the extra $10 in order to do this. This is something that really annoyed me about Mongolia. If I'd payed $10 everytime I'd wanted to take pictures inside somewhere then I'd be a whole lot poorer. I'm distracting myself again, what ...

Day 16
Sep 30, 2006 (7 photos)

... while all the formalities took place. At the first Chinese town, our wheel-bogey-things were changed for different guage ones. Mongolia and Russia are on a different guage to most of the rest of the world so trains passing through have to be lifted up ...

The last few days
Dec 4, 2006 (4 photos)

Sain uu everyone, This will be my last blog. I am in the process of packing up all my things (I came with the admirably small eight kilograms, I will be leaving will well over double that!) and on Thursday morning I will be heading south out of ...