Classic Mongolia Highlights
This spectacular event includes competitions based on speed, agility, and accuracy of these magnificent Golden Eagles and some great Kazakh traditional games such as Bushkashi, Tiyn Ter, archery and traditional camel racing etc are also organized on the festival days.
This fantastic festival celebrating the Kazakhs' honoured Eagle is also a celebration of Kazakh traditional heritage. In order to maintain the event as a festival for the Kazakhs themselves, attendance is limited. The highlight of this fantastic trip is interacting with the Kazakhs and other ethnic groups and living with them for a couple of days to take part in the eagle training and get to know about the unique Kazakh culture. Landscape and cultural sightseeing blend easily in Mongolia – you will have the chance to visit families of nomads, remote Buddhist monasteries and traditional events, and to take part in horse-riding or guided walking if you wish – there are also endless opportunities for photography.
- 4WD Land Cruiser
- 1-12 Guests
- 10-Day, 9-Night
- Full-Time English-Speaking Guide
- Available June - September
INCLUTIONS & EXCLUSIONS
Inclusions:
- All ground transport in a private 4WD vehicle
- Professional English-speaking guide throughout
- 9 nights accommodation (mix of ger camps, nomadic family stays, and 1 hotel night)
- All meals as listed in the itinerary
- Camel riding at Khongor Sand Dunes
- Horse trekking at Hustai National Park
- All national park and site entrance fees
- Drinking water throughout
- Airport pick-up and drop-off in Ulaanbaatar
Exclusions:
- International flights to/from Ulaanbaatar
- Travel insurance (required)
- Visa fees
- Personal spending and souvenirs
- Alcoholic beverages
- Optional upgrades (en-suite ger camps, extra activities)
- Tips for guide and driver (appreciated)
from our gallery
Your guide meets you at Chinggis Khaan International Airport and transfers you to your hotel in central Ulaanbaatar. The city moves at a pace that can take a moment to calibrate — traffic, construction, and the constant hum of a place that has grown faster than almost any capital in recent decades. Over dinner, your guide walks you through the ten days ahead: two distinct regions, three different landscapes, and more open space than most people see in a lifetime.
The morning starts at Gandan Monastery, Ulaanbaatar’s most important Buddhist site, where monks chant the morning prayer beneath a 26-metre gilded statue of Janraisag. Then you head east into the mountains. Terelj National Park is only 80 kilometres from the capital but feels entirely removed from it — river valleys, towering rock formations, and horse herds grazing on slopes that turn gold in the afternoon light. Your ger camp sits in a meadow within earshot of the river.
The Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex at Tsonjin Boldog is one of those landmarks that earns its reputation. Fifty-four metres of polished stainless steel rise from the open steppe — the world’s largest equestrian statue, and the only one you can climb inside. The viewing platform at the horse’s head looks out over a landscape the great Khan himself would recognise. Then the road west opens into pure steppe: no fences, no billboards, just the occasional ger and a herd moving across the horizon.
In the 13th century, Karakorum was the centre of an empire that stretched from Korea to Hungary. Today it is a small town with a world-class museum and, inside a walled compound just beside it, Erdene Zuu — Mongolia’s oldest Buddhist monastery, built partly from the rubble of the imperial city. The 108 white stupas of its outer wall are visible for kilometres across the flat valley. Your guide brings the history alive: what was built here, what was destroyed, and what survived. The Orkhon Valley itself is a UNESCO World Heritage site — a river corridor that has been the heartland of every major Mongolian civilisation for two millennia.
A morning ride in the Orkhon Valley is a good way to understand why Mongolian culture and horsemanship are inseparable — the valley is wide, the grass long, and the horses know this land better than any map. The afternoon drive south marks the transition between the lush central Mongolia you have been travelling through and the drier semi-desert of the pre-Gobi. By the time you stop for the night at a herding family’s ger, the landscape has already begun its subtle shift toward the south.
Tsagaan Suvarga — White Stupa — is a formation of layered limestone and sandstone terraces that rise from the desert floor in pale bands of white, cream, and russet. Stand at the rim and the drop below is sudden, the desert floor laid flat to every horizon. This is the gateway to the Gobi proper: by the time you make camp that evening, the vegetation has thinned, the gravel has taken over from the grass, and the sky at night is enormous.
Two of the Gobi’s signature landscapes in one day. The morning belongs to Bayanzag — the Flaming Cliffs, where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered the world’s first fossilised dinosaur eggs in 1923. The red sandstone canyon rim is at its most dramatic in early light. The afternoon drive brings you to Khongor: 180 kilometres of dunes, the largest in Mongolia. A Bactrian camel carries you along the base as the sun drops behind the crests, the sand lit orange from below.
Yoliin Am is a narrow gorge carved into the Zuun Saikhan mountains where, even in midsummer, the rock walls stay cold enough to preserve a floor of ice. You hike in through progressively tighter canyon walls, watched by lammergeier vultures riding thermals above. It is one of those places that does not feel like it should exist in the middle of a desert — the surprise of it is part of what makes it stay with you. The long drive north begins the return arc of the journey.
Hustai National Park is home to one of the world’s most successful wildlife rewilding programmes. The takhi — Przewalski’s horse, the last truly wild horse species — was extinct in the wild by the 1960s. A Dutch-Mongolian programme began returning captive-bred animals to this mountain steppe in 1992, and there are now over 400 in the park. You ride out in the late afternoon with a local ranger to find them — usually in small herds on the upper slopes, moving slowly across the grass. Seeing them on their own terms, while on horseback yourself, is something that stays with you long after you leave.
The last morning in the countryside always has a particular quality. The drive back to Ulaanbaatar takes less than two hours from Hustai, but the ten days between your arrival and this return feel considerably longer — in the best possible sense. There is time in the afternoon for a final wander through the city: the Narantuul market for souvenirs, the State Department Store for cashmere. A farewell dinner in the evening, and then the airport. You leave with a very different sense of what Mongolia is.
