9-day Journey to Central Mongolia tour

Met at Ulaanbaatar, the coldest capital city on Earth — winter here hits −40°C — and home to nearly half of Mongolia's population. The other half live in a country three times the size of France with almost no fences in it. Mongolia has the lowest population density of any sovereign state, and you are about to find out what that actually feels like.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

West out of the city and the buildings simply stop. Khögnö Khan is granite, forest, steppe and a ruined monastery destroyed in the 17th century in a war between Mongol factions — the monks were killed on the spot and the place was never rebuilt. Beside it, the Elsen Tasarkhai sand dunes, a strip of Gobi that has wandered a long way north. You sleep in a ger camp.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

Kharkhorin is the site of Karakorum, the capital Genghis Khan chose and his son Ögedei built — the administrative centre of the largest contiguous land empire in history, which ran from Korea to Hungary. Almost nothing is left; the stones were carted off in 1586 to build Erdene Zuu, the first Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, whose wall carries 108 stupas. What survives of Karakorum is a stone tortoise in a field, and it is oddly moving.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

South-west into the Khangai mountains to Tsenkher, where water comes out of the ground at 85°C and is piped into open-air pools. You are sitting in hot water at altitude, in larch forest, in the middle of Mongolia, with nothing else around. It is the best night of most people's trip.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

Into the Orkhon Valley, which is UNESCO-listed not for its scenery but for what it means: this valley has been the seat of steppe power for two thousand years — Xiongnu, Turks, Uighurs, and finally the Mongols all ran their empires from here. The Orkhon waterfall drops 20 metres into a basalt gorge. Herders still move their gers through this valley on the same cycle they always have.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

Khustai holds the takhi — Przewalski's horse, the only true wild horse left on Earth, never domesticated by anyone. It was extinct in the wild by 1969 and every animal alive today descends from a dozen or so kept in zoos. They were reintroduced here in 1992 and there are now hundreds. You go out at dusk, when they come down to drink, and you watch an animal that came back from nothing.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

A night with a herding family in their ger — the felt tent that has housed this culture for two thousand years, and which two people can put up in an hour. You will be given airag, fermented mare's milk, and it is polite to try it. You may be shown how to milk, or how to make dried curd, or how to catch a horse with a lasso on a pole. Roughly a quarter of Mongolians still live this way.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

Back east to the capital — and after a week on the steppe, the return to traffic and buildings is genuinely disorienting.

Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.

A transfer to Ulaanbaatar airport for your flight. End of our services.