Mongolia's many faces

What do you have in mind when thinking about Mongolia?
For me, it was mainly open spaces and plenty of horses. Every little girl's dream coming true, simply galopping through beautiful landscape. (Though to be honest, so far I've only seen boys and men on horses...).
Tom thought about vast open spaces as well, but dreamt more about the off-road routes than the horses.
Both expectations have been met, but there is so much more!
Plenty of open spaces for sure, featuring varying landscapes. Rocky desert, sand dunes, dry river beds, ice canyons ("yolin am" still had a bit of ice in it when we visited end of June. During some years, the ice never vanishes, despite it being in the middle of a desert.). Lots of nothingness, dotted with the occasional ger (Mongolian yurts that can be moved as needed), housing herds of different animals. We've seen horses, cows, sheep, goats, camels and even one guy with a few pigs (very rare as pig isn't eaten here). Apparently there is also only one chicken farm in all of Mongolia (they might be difficult to keep through winter?) hence we haven't seen any so far.
But we've also seen beautiful Mongolian guard dogs (from the safe distance of our car as these guys are well trained to safeguard and you don't want to get too close without the owner around).
Flies and mozzies have been rare so far, but we've been told that will change once we're close to lakes.
As it's spring time there are plenty of young animals and I can't get enough of watching them roaming around freely with their mums. I can also get equally obsessed with watching a tiny lizard in the desert. It's like watching "Planet Earth" in real life.
So much to see, so little to do. Without any source of water to cool down (we now realise how spoilt we were in Russia), our campsites are chosen fairly randomly, allowing us to hike or bike a bit, but mostly simply marvel at the landscape. Taking in the nothingness.Read more