DAYS 111-113 (10-12 July 2025) MONGOLIA: Tsagaan Suvarga (White Stupa), Dalanzadgad (Naadam Festival), Yol Valley & Canyon, Khongor Sand Dunes.

 STOP PRESS – THE NAADAM FESTIVAL:

 When I left on my 10-day Odyssey of internal Mongolia, on Thursday 10 July, the Naadam Festival was underway throughout the entire country. Everything closes down and everyone returns to their place of birth or to country towns to celebrate this most important holiday each year at this time. The Naadam Festival is Mongolia’s version of a mini-Olympic Games limited to three traditional national sports: Wrestling, Horse Racing and Archery and started as a men’s games back in 1639. Women have now started to participate in Horse Racing and Archery but not Wrestling. There is an Opening Ceremony, which I saw in Ulaanbaatar and a Closing. There is music, dancing and street food to accompany the sports. It is very colourful since everyone wears the national dress. Naadam lasts for 3 days but on slightly different dates in each town or city. Now for the sports themselves. A total of 512 or 1024 wrestlers meet in a single-elimination tournament that lasts nine or ten rounds. Mongolian traditional wrestling is an untimed competition in which wrestlers lose if they touch the ground with any part of their body other than their feet or hands. Mongolian horse racing as featured in Naadam is a cross-country event, with races 15–30 km long. The length of each race is determined by age class. Up to 1000 horses from any part of Mongolia can be chosen to participate. Race horses are fed a special diet. Children from 5 to 13 are chosen as jockeys and train in the months preceding the races. Cash prizes are awarded to winners. Archery is played in teams of ten. Each archer is given four arrows; the team must hit 33 "surs" or woven targets. Men shoot their arrows from 75 meters away while women shoot theirs from 65 meters away. Traditionally the archers wear their national clothing (Deel) during the competition.

 

DOUBLE STOP PRESS – USSR & MONGOLIA

 

Mongolia was NEVER part of the USSR like the Stans. It was heavily influenced by USSR having adopted Soviet Communism in 1924 and the Cyrillic Alphabet in 1946. When the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Mongolia abandoned communism and became a fully-fledged republic.

 

BACK TO THE TOUR

 

I woke at 515am to be picked up at 6am by my male driver “Loya” and female guide “Baikal” so we could avoid the rush out of the capital because of Day 1 of the Naadam Festival. There was a thunderstorm that night but the sky started to open up and let in the sun as we cruised out of the capital. The landscape started as rolling green-yellow plains and slight hills and after 2hrs flattened out more. Blue sky with wispy clouds made for some great photos as you will see. After 5hrs and 278km we reached the town of Mandalgobi for a fantastic lunch of a beer tasting paddle of meats – not beer !!! We were now in the Gobi surrounded by a sea of yellow-brown rocky sand with an occasional splash of green due to internment rain. The Gobi like the deserts of Australia, can show colour if the rain is adequate and at the right time. Some parts of the Gobi reminded me of the Pamir Highway as the badly beaten road disappeared into the horizon. Elevations stood steady from 1350m at the capital to a high of 1500m with the rest of the trip in between. Just before our destination we stopped to greet 20 camels congregated by the side of the road at which time it stated to sprinkle. Amazing according to Baikal – supposed to be good luck for a tourist to bring rain to the Gobi !!! The last 37km of our trip was completely off road on dirt tracks. We arrived at the Tsagaan Suvarga (White Stupa) at 530pm. It is a ridge of colourful, eroded limestone cliffs that resemble ancient ruins or a Buddhist stupa. The cliffs are made of sedimentary rock, eroded over millions of years, creating a unique, layered appearance. The cliffs are about 30-60 meters high, 400 long with their tops at 1331m above sea level. The cliffs display a range of colours, including white (calcium carbonate), yellow (sulphur dioxide) and red (iron oxide). These cliffs are believed to have been an ancient seabed, and fossils can sometimes be found in the area. Not only are the cliffs impressive but what blows the mind is the vast ocean of nothingness that surrounds them reaching out beyond the horizon in all directions. It is this spot that was my first proper introduction to the Gobi and the vastness of Mongolia. If my photos can convey just a morsel of this then I have done my job. Our first Ger homestay was just 9km from the Stupas. 7 Gers owned by a lovely couple with 3 kids. It is custom to sit down for a Mongolian camel milk tea on arrival – quite mild and a little salty due to the ground water used. The family owns 12 camels that graze on who knows what in a 10km radius from the Gers. The camels know where the Gers are and will always come back if short of food or water. Amazing. I settled down to wine, cheese and olives in my Ger - Kazakhstan was the last time and that seems like a lifetime ago. Our homestay or should I say “Ger-stay” family cooked us up fried lamb strips with noodles and carrot with a nice green salad with tomato. Good enough to energise me for my Gobi run in the morning… especially after a horse meat feast (below)...

I love running deserts – 360 views all around to the horizon. In this case, no clouds, a cool 20C and flat hard ground. Even with dirt tracks I could not get lost since I could see the distant little Gers I slept in, even from kilometres away. I ran without music to enjoy the deathly silence of the desert. No birds. No animals except for some distant camels. I returned to a nice outdoor brekkie of eggs and local sausage but not before bathing from a bottle of water !!! No showers here !!! I was back on the road at 10am enjoying a dead flat desert ocean for the next 2hrs. Around noon, after 157km, we arrived at a large town called Dalanzadgad, which is at the foot of a mountain range, just like a min Denver in Colorado.  We picked up some lunch to go and headed slightly outside town to the Naadam Festival held by the town. What a visual feast. The athletic track field was packed with people of all ages and most people were wearing the national costume including little kids. I made it in time for the awards ceremony in which medals and certificates are handed to winners of each sport and each round with an army band playing a short tune as each medal is handed out. I was allowed unprecedented access to the awards table and competitors – it must have been the Australia Singlet I was wearing and they probably thought I was Ozzie media shooting it for an Ozzie audience !!! The magical Yol Valley was only 47km away from Dalanzadgad and we arrived at the tourist trail car park at around 3pm.

 

The Yol Valley, known locally as “Yolyn Am”, is part of the Gurvan Saikhan Mountain Range and comprises an open valley followed by a very narrow deep rocky gorge. You drive through the valley to a trailhead car park and then trek 3km through the gorge and back again. The gorge floor is at 2268m but the top of the gorge adds another 200-500m. The valley and gorge are both named after the Yol Bird which is a bird-of-prey (ie, eagle) that I saw half way through my trek. There are also thousands of brown mice that look like guinea pigs which you will see below. To top off the wildlife here is the Snow Leopard !!! Yes, you read right. The weird thing about this gorge is that it contains ice almost all year round !!! How can this be you ask ? Because it snows so much a river forms at the bottom of the gorge and freezes. The gorge is 500m deep and the bottom is always in shadow so the river freezes and never melts. In my case, this summer saw hot winds pass through the gorge floor so the ice did melt !!! Trust my luck !!! Doesn’t matter because the trek was terrific and there was a small river flowing and I managed not to wet my feet by jumping rocks as I crossed it several times. At 5pm we were back at the car park. My driver Loya had gone to town for supplies since my guide Baikal cooks for us when are not at home stays. She carries cooking gear and food in the van. Tonight’s Ger was only 9km from the car park at the entrance to the Yol Valley National Park so by 630pm I was sipping wine and nibbling on cheese and olives. Dinner featured traditional “Mongolian Dumplings” (photo below), which look more like transparent Cornish Pasties with beef mince and chicken inside the ones I ate. A nice side of potato salad and green salad made for a great accompaniment for my James Bond film.

Drama in the morning. Instead of leaving at 7am, my driver replaced our flat tyre. We had been having problems with the air pressure in this tyre ever since we went off road to get to the Stupa. The driver even had to disconnect the tyre pressure sensor since the onboard computer cuts the throttle when the sensor reaches fever pitch. No sensor, no throttle loss but the tyre got its revenge this morning. No worries. Rolling just after 730am and after 20-30km we were off-road again driving a very noisy (ridged) dirt road across a vast open plain surrounded by distant craggy ridges. While driving at around 60km/h, three wild goats appeared alongside us and actually crossed in front of the van. I had no idea goats could run so fast !!! Too fast for even me to film. These Mongolian goats must be half-goat and half-cheetah !!! Many nomads lived in this open plain with Gers every so often. Slowly a long skinny stretch of yellow sand started emerging and an hour later we had fully fledged dunes against a backdrop of craggy ridges. We arrived at our Ger Guesthouse in front of the Khongor Sand Dunes at around noon. The Ger Camp was equipped with power, hot showers and even a freezer into which I promptly placed my wine !!! The camp is only 150km from the Chinese border !!! Even at 1446m above sea level, this was easily the hottest place to date in Mongolia – 40C. So hot that you can only visit and climb the dunes before sunset since the sand is too hot to walk on, even with shoes !!! So, I decided to have a nap – even that was hard in the heat. Woke at 330pm and hot-spotted with driver’s phone to continue booking Caribbean since my provider signal was too weak. At around 530pm I set off on a camel to see the surrounding grasslands and get a little closer to the dunes. These are two-hump camels and were adolescents. Well behaved and quite placid creatures. The young boys of the nomad family led the camels on foot. 

 

After an hour on my camel, it was time to jump into the van and head 11km to the main dune of these Khongor Sand Dunes for climbing to the top !!! 

 

The Khongor Sand Dunes, also known as the Duut Mankhan or Singing Dunes, stretch over 180 kilometres (112 miles) along the northern side of the Sevrei and Zuulun mountain ranges in the Gobi Desert. These expansive dunes are 180km long and 27km at their widest covering 965 square kilometres, making them the largest and most impressive in Mongolia. Most reach heights of 15-30 meters, with the tallest dunes reaching 200 to 800 metres. As the sand is moved by wind a strong sound is made giving it the name "Singing Sands. How ? This is due to a thin surface coating of slate  over the sand grains which causes the sand to make a resonant sound. The sound is also attributed to heat and to the avalanche effect caused by the sand particles moving harmoniously. Amazing but I heard nothing due to the absence of both !!!

 

The day had clouded over but the sun still managed to break through. The climb up was hard. A 160m rise from 1348m to 1508m over a distance of 560m making it an average incline of almost 30 degrees. The last 500m was at an incline of 40-50 degrees. The view from the top was worth every sliding step up !!! I wore my lightweight waterproof spikey trekking shoes which helped heaps. So glad I brought them. I got to the top in 22min and in time to shoot the last of the sun’s disk before it was engulfed by cloud. Summitted at around 8pm. Sunset was due close to 9pm but would not be visible thanks to the thick cloud so after 15min I made my way down – super easy – super fast thanks to my spikes. The drive home was especially revealing. There are no roads out here and in most of the Gobi – just tracks – hundreds of them criss-crossing each other and in no digital map on earth !!! My driver Loya just knew which one to take – even in the dark. He switched from one to the other until we got back. How ? Just shear experience and familiarity with this land. Grew up in it. Lived it. Impressive. It was 10pm when I took my first sip of wine, fully showered with a simple dinner in front of me prepared by my guide Baikal. I was due to run the next morning but given the hard climb and late night I decided to invest in rest.

GENGHIS (CHINGGIS) KHAN IN A NUTSHELL:

 

Genghis Khan (1162–1227), also known as Chinggis Khan, was the founder and first khan (king) of the Mongol Empire. After spending most of his life uniting the Mongol tribes, he launched a series of military campaigns, conquering large parts of China and Central Asia. Genghis was called Temüjin at birth and his dad died when he was just eight and his family was abandoned by its tribe. Many say this is what made him the tough, unforgiving warrior that he became in 1206 when he adopted the name Genghis. Carrying out reforms designed to ensure long-term stability, he transformed the Mongols' tribal structure into an integrated meritocracy dedicated to the service of the ruling family. He led a number of conquests across the silk road reaching Georgia where he died in battle in 1227. Genghis Khan remains a controversial figure. He was generous and intensely loyal to his followers, but ruthless towards his enemies. The Mongol army under Genghis killed millions of people, yet his conquests also facilitated unprecedented commercial and cultural exchange over a vast geographical area. He is remembered as a backwards, savage tyrant in Russia and the Arab world, while recent Western scholarship has begun to reassess its previous view of him as a barbarian warlord. He was posthumously deified in Mongolia; modern Mongolians recognise him as the founding father of their nation.

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