This 10-day Mongolian Impression tour lets you visit some of the country’s most famous attractions, such as Ulaanbaatar, Yol valley, Khongor Sand dunes, Bayanzag, Ongi Temple ruin, Kharakhorum, Khustai National park, Mongol Nomadic Ger camp
10-day Mongolian Impression tour
10-day Mongolia Impression tour: Ulaanbaatar, Yol Valley, Bayanzag Flaming Cliffs and Ongi Temple ruins. Airport transfers, 3-star and 4-star hotels.
Product SKU: MN10/UBN/UBN
Product Brand: RJ Travel - Tour Operator
Product Currency: USD
Product Price: 2988
Product In-Stock: InStock
5
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Ulaanbaatar
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Ulaanbaatar
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3-star and 4-star hotels
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Included
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Bus or 4WD Japanese minivan
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breakfast, lunch, dinner
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June and mid September
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Ulaanbaatar, Yol valley, Khongor Sand dunes, Bayanzag, Ongi Temple ruin, Kharakhorum, Khustai National park, Mongol Nomadic Ger camp
10-day Mongolia itinerary
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.
Fly south into the Gobi and straight out to Yolyn Am, a narrow gorge where the sun barely reaches the floor and an ice field survives into July — ice in a desert. Bearded vultures nest on the walls above; the valley is named for them.
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.
A day with a Gobi herding family and their Bactrian camels — two humps, built for −40°C and +40°C in the same year, and the only reason human beings have ever been able to live out here. You ride, which is less comfortable than a horse and considerably more stable.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Across the Gobi to the Flaming Cliffs, where the first dinosaur eggs ever identified were found in 1922, along with Velociraptor. The sandstone burns orange at sunset — hence the name — and the ground is still, occasionally, giving up bone.
Overnight: ger camp / hotel in Ulaanbaatar.
Ongi was two monasteries facing each other across a river, and around a thousand monks lived here until 1939, when they were destroyed in the purge and the monks were shot or conscripted. The ruins are still ruins — deliberately — and a small temple has been rebuilt beside them. It is the clearest picture in the country of what the 1930s did to Mongolian Buddhism.
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.
Erdene Zuu and the stone tortoise of Karakorum in the morning, then east to Khustai, where Przewalski's horse — the only never-domesticated wild horse on Earth, extinct in the wild by 1969 — was brought back from zoo stock and now runs in hundreds. You go out at dusk to find them, and stay with a herding family.
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.
