Mongolia is the emptiest country on Earth — three million people in a land the size of Western Europe, most of them nomadic, none of them fenced in. You sleep in a ger on the steppe, drink salty milk tea with herders, ride camels into the Gobi’s singing dunes, and drive for hours without seeing a road, let alone a building.
Gobi Desert & Dinosaurs » 9-Day Southern Mongolia Expedition is a 9-day private tour of Mongolia, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You sleep in traditional ger camps with beds and full board across the countryside, and a 4-star hotel in Ulaanbaatar, moving by private 4×4 with a steppe driver.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $2490 per person for two travellers down to $1620 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
9-day Mongolia itinerary
Met at Ulaanbaatar and driven into the coldest capital in the world. Sukhbaatar Square has an enormous seated Genghis Khan at one end of it — a man erased from official memory for seventy Soviet years and now on the banknotes, the airport and the vodka. Half the country lives in this city; the other half live in a landmass three times the size of France, and there are more horses than people.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Gandan is the monastery that survived: Stalin's purge of 1937 destroyed around eight hundred monasteries and killed perhaps eighteen thousand monks, and Gandan was left open as a showpiece. Inside stands a 26-metre gilded Buddha — the original was taken to the USSR and melted for bullets; this one was rebuilt in 1996. The National Museum, then the Narantuul 'black market', which sells everything up to and including a complete ger. Then south into the Gobi — which is not sand but a cold rock-and-grass desert the size of Poland — six hours to Mandalgovi.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
The Flaming Cliffs are where Roy Chapman Andrews, in 1922, found the first dinosaur eggs ever identified — proving that dinosaurs laid them. Velociraptor was found here too, and the famous 'fighting dinosaurs' fossil, a velociraptor and protoceratops locked together in the moment a dune collapsed on both of them. The sandstone goes orange-red at sunset, which is where the name comes from.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Khongoryn Els runs 180 kilometres and rises 300 metres — these are the sand dunes people picture when they picture the Gobi, and they hum. When the sand slides, it produces a deep resonant note you can hear a long way off. You climb one at sunset, which is much harder than it looks, and come down in about ninety seconds. Camels in the morning.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Yolyn Am is a narrow gorge in the Gurvan Saikhan mountains where the sun barely reaches, and where an ice field survives at the bottom into July — ice in the middle of a desert. Lammergeier and ibex live on the walls above. You walk in along the stream, and it gets steadily colder as you go.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Steppe country and a herder family: an afternoon of archery — one of the 'three manly sports' of Naadam, with horse racing and wrestling — and the chance to see how a household that owns several hundred animals and no fixed address actually runs.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Khermen Tsav is a red canyon in the far Gobi that palaeontologists rate among the richest fossil beds on Earth, and getting there is a long day on no road at all. You are, functionally, alone. There are bone fragments visible in the ground, and the rule is that you look and you do not take.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Sainshand is the eastern Gobi and the site of Khamaryn Khiid, the monastery of the 19th-century monk, poet and playwright Danzanravjaa. Behind it lies what Mongolians call the Shambhala energy centre — a stretch of desert marked with stupas where pilgrims come to meditate, and where the reception is, by widespread local agreement, better than anywhere else on Earth. Then the overnight train north.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
A transfer to Ulaanbaatar airport for your flight. End of our services.
