Mongolia is truly one of the world's last undiscovered travel destinations and the safest country to visit. It is a land where you can experience wide-open spaces, cobalt blue skies, forests, deserts, crystal clear rivers and lakes, and the traditional hospitality of the nomads. Permanent dwellings are few and far between, fences even fewer and the land is owned by the people, like one large National Park.

As a tremendous destination to experience the outdoors, Mongolia also boasts of unique history dating back to the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. Simply put, it is a land of adventure, horses, nomads, and blue sky.



 

SOUTHERN MONGOLIA - The Gobi Desert
The Gobi Desert is a vast zone of desert and desert steppe covering almost 30% of the Mongolian territory and north eastern China. The desert stretches about 3,000 mi/4,830 km along both sides of the Chinese border. Desert is often imagined as a lifeless desert, similar to African deserts. In reality, most part of the Gobi Desert is a land of steppes and many camel breeders inhabit this zone as rich in wildlife and vegetation. It has herds of Bactrian camels (with two humps), wild horses and donkeys, as well as leopards, mountain sheep and ibexes. There is a lot of variety within the Gobi Desert, from wildlife parks and mountains to canyons with dramatic rockfaces. Once the site of an ancient inland sea, the area has dried up and then eroded over the eons, providing paleontologists with magnificent specimens of dinosaur fossils. The Mongolian say that there are 33 different Gobi from which sandy desert occupies 30% of the total area. Climate is extreme with +40° in summer and -40° in winter and very few precipitation.

The Mongolian Government established the Great Gobi desert Strictly Protected Area in 1975 and the United Nations designated in 1991 the Gobi desert as fourth largest Biosphere reserve in the world. 

Mongolia's tourism season is from May to October because of the difficult climate at other times of the year. Visiting out of season is not a problem as long as you can tolerate cold weather, dust storms and difficulties in traveling. If you want to see the Naadam Festival, you'll need to go in July. However, July and August are the two wettest months of the year. The best time to visit the Gobi is June or September as temperatures are not so hot.