Everybody who books Mongolia is picturing the Gobi. The best riding is two thousand kilometres away in the opposite corner, in a province where the language is Kazakh, the mountains are glaciated and men still hunt with eagles.
The Mongolia nobody sells you
Say Mongolia to most riders and they picture sand. Camels, dunes, the Gobi, a landscape the colour of a manila envelope. That trip exists, it is a fine trip, and it is what most operators sell because the Gobi is what people have heard of.
Our Mongolia ride goes somewhere else entirely. It goes to Bayan-Ölgii, the far western province, tucked into the corner where Mongolia meets Russia and China, and it is a different country in almost every way that matters. Instead of desert there are glaciated four-thousand-metre peaks. Instead of Mongolian you hear Kazakh. Instead of Buddhist prayer wheels there are mosques. And instead of camels there are golden eagles sitting on men’s arms.
It is the least visited province in a country that already has almost no visitors, and getting there involves a flight from Ulaanbaatar that takes three hours, which tells you something about the size of the place.
Why the province is Kazakh
Bayan-Ölgii is roughly ninety percent ethnic Kazakh, and it is the only province in Mongolia with a Muslim majority. The Kazakhs of the Altai have been on the Mongolian side of these mountains for a very long time, moving with their herds across a border that only became a hard line relatively recently in the history of the region.
The practical effects on a visiting rider are immediate and constant. The signage is in Kazakh as well as Mongolian. The food is different, with more bread and more mutton and the milk tea served salted. The gers you sleep in are decorated differently, with elaborate embroidered wall hangings rather than the painted furniture of the eastern provinces. And the greeting is different, which is worth learning before you arrive, because arriving in somebody’s home is a big part of what this trip involves.
It also means that the thing everybody comes for, the eagle hunting, is a Kazakh tradition rather than a Mongolian one. Get that wrong out loud in Ölgii and you will be corrected politely and firmly.
The eagles, and what is actually true about them
There is a lot of nonsense written about this, most of it by people who spent an afternoon at a festival, so here is the sober version.
The practice is called berkutchi. The bird is a female golden eagle, always female because they are around a third larger than the males, and she is taken as a juvenile from a nest or trapped in her first year. The training takes months and is built on food and on the hood, and the bond that results is real without being sentimental: this is a working relationship between a hunter and a predator, not a pet.
They hunt fox and hare, mostly in the winter, from horseback, with the hunter riding a ridge and releasing the bird when quarry is spotted below. The fur matters, because in a place where winter goes to forty below, a fox pelt is not a trophy, it is a hat that keeps a man’s head attached to his body.
Traditionally the bird is released back to the wild after a set number of years, to breed. Some hunters still do this and hold a ceremony for it. There are around four hundred registered hunters in the province through the Mongolian Eagle Hunters’ Association, which sounds like a lot until you remember it is spread across an area the size of Belgium.
The big Golden Eagle Festival takes place in Ölgii in October, and if your dates fall near it, go. It is the one time of year when the hunters come in from everywhere and compete, and it is a genuine event rather than a performance for tourists, although tourism has certainly noticed it.
The honest bit about visiting a hunter
You will meet a hunter on this trip, at his home, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what that is.
It is a real family in a real ger with a real working bird, and it is also, unavoidably, a transaction. The hunter is paid, the visit is arranged, and he has done it before. That does not make it fake; it makes it a livelihood, in a province with very few of them. The Kazakh families who host riders are doing so because tourism pays better than mutton, and the money stays in Bayan-Ölgii rather than going to an agency in the capital.
What makes the difference between an awkward hour and a memorable one is how you behave. Take the tea. Sit where you are put, which is a specific place in a ger and not wherever you like. Do not photograph anybody before you have talked to them. Ask about the bird rather than about the poverty. And be genuinely interested, because a man who has spent twenty years learning to work with a bird of prey has a great deal to say and is used to foreigners who only want the photograph.
Bring something useful rather than sweets for the children, which is a habit that does more harm than good everywhere it happens. Batteries, decent gloves, good torches. Ask the guide what is actually wanted.
The riding, which is the other reason to come
None of this would matter if the roads were dull. They are not roads.
The Altai in western Mongolia is high, broken and almost entirely untracked. What passes for a road is a braid of dirt lines running roughly parallel across a valley floor, each one made by a vehicle that decided the previous one was too rutted. You pick a braid and commit to it and hope it does not end in a bog. The surface changes from gravel to sand to washboard to river-worn cobble inside a kilometre, and then you cross the river.
The valleys are enormous. There are days on this route where you can see thirty kilometres ahead of you and count the vehicles in that distance on no fingers. Herds move across the middle distance. Golden eagles, actual wild ones, sit on fence posts and outcrops and watch you go past.
Altai Tavan Bogd, the national park at the far end, holds Mongolia’s highest ground. The Five Saints give the park its name and Khüiten, the tallest, tops out above four thousand three hundred metres. The Potanin Glacier is the longest in the country. You do not ride onto the glacier, but the road that gets you within sight of it is one of the more remote pieces of track any of us have taken a group of motorcycles down.
The lakes and the rock art
Two things on this route consistently surprise people who came for the mountains.
The first is the water. Khoton and Khurgan are big freshwater lakes sitting at over two thousand metres, ringed by peaks, absurdly clear and absurdly cold. Tolbo Lake, further east and on the way back to Ölgii, sits in a bare bowl and turns an unlikely blue in the afternoon. In a landscape this dry the lakes read as impossible, and camping beside one of them with the temperature dropping and the sky doing what an unpolluted sky at altitude does is one of the memories people take home.
The second is the petroglyphs. The Oigor valley, which the route runs up, is part of the Petroglyphic Complexes of the Mongolian Altai, a UNESCO World Heritage site. What that means on the ground is rock faces covered in carvings that span something like twelve thousand years, from hunting scenes with wild animals through to the arrival of horses and wheeled vehicles and finally to mounted warriors. It is a continuous record of the same valley being used by people for the entire span of human history in the region.
There is no visitor centre, no fence and no ticket. You park the bikes on the grass and walk up to the rocks. Whether that stays true is another question, and there is a decent argument that it should not, but for now the Oigor valley is one of the last great archaeological sites on earth that you can ride to and touch.
What to expect from the accommodation
Manage this expectation now and the trip is a joy. Get it wrong and you will spend a week grumbling.
Western Mongolia has almost no tourism infrastructure. Ölgii has hotels of a sort. Outside it you are in ger camps and family accommodation, and that means a felt tent with beds in it, a stove in the middle, and a long-drop somewhere over there. Showers are not a nightly event. The electricity, where it exists, comes from a solar panel and a car battery and runs the light and nothing else.
In exchange you sleep in a round felt room heated by a dung stove with the wind doing its work outside, and you wake up at five thousand feet with nothing but grassland in every direction and a herd of yaks going past the door. Riders who arrive expecting a hotel are disappointed. Riders who arrive expecting a ger are enchanted. It is entirely a matter of what you were told before you booked, which is why we tell people twice.
The season, which is short and non-negotiable
Bayan-Ölgii is rideable from roughly June to September and that is the whole list. Outside that window the passes hold snow, the tracks turn to mud, and the temperature does things that are dangerous on a motorcycle.
Even inside the season, this is high country and the weather is not stable. It can snow in July. Afternoon storms build fast over the Altai and a river crossing that was knee-deep at ten in the morning can be a different proposition at four in the afternoon after rain in the hills you cannot see. Long days help; at that latitude midsummer gives you light until very late, which buys a lot of margin when something goes wrong.
Bring proper layers, including something warm for the evenings. The daily range in the Altai in August routinely runs from twenty-five degrees at midday to near freezing at dawn.
Eating in Kazakh Mongolia
Nobody comes to western Mongolia for the cuisine and everybody comes back with opinions about it, so here is an honest briefing.
The staples are mutton, flour and dairy, in roughly that order, and they are combined in a limited number of ways because that is what a pastoral economy at two thousand metres produces. Beshbarmak, the Kazakh national dish, is boiled mutton served over wide flat noodles with onion, eaten communally from a single platter and traditionally with the hands, which is what the name refers to. Kuurdak is fried offal and potato and is better than it sounds. There is bread with everything, and it is good.
Then there is the dairy, which is where visitors divide. Fermented mare’s milk, airag, is a acquired taste with a low alcohol content and a sourness that arrives late. Dried curd, aaruul, sits on a board on top of every ger and has the density of a roof tile. Milk tea comes salted rather than sweet, with butter in it, and after four days in cold wind you will start to understand why.
Vegetarians should know before booking that this is one of the hardest countries on earth for them. It is manageable with warning, and the office needs that warning in advance rather than at the first ger, because the answer involves carrying food rather than requesting it.
The important part is the etiquette. Food and drink offered in a ger is not optional in the way it would be at home. Take it with your right hand, or with your right hand supported at the elbow by your left, and at least touch it to your lips even if you cannot face finishing it. Refusing outright is a real insult in a culture where hospitality to travellers is close to a moral obligation. Nobody minds if you do not empty the bowl.
What you actually ride out there
The machinery question comes up on every enquiry and the answer is different here than it is for a Thai motorbike tour.
The Altai rewards light. There is no tarmac, no sustained high-speed running and nothing that a big-bore adventure bike’s extra power can usefully do, and there is a great deal of soft ground, rock and river where forty extra kilos is a genuine liability. A mid-capacity dual-sport with long-travel suspension, proper knobbly rubber, tubed wheels and a seat height you can live with will get you everywhere and leave you fresher.
Spoked wheels are not negotiable. Cast wheels crack on this terrain. Handguards, a bashplate and crash protection all earn their keep on the first day. And the single most useful modification is the least glamorous one: getting the bike’s weight down and its centre of gravity low, which mostly means not carrying luggage on the bike at all.
Which is exactly what a support vehicle achieves. Riding the Altai with a tank bag and nothing else, while your panniers travel in the van with the fuel and the spare tubes, is a fundamentally different experience from riding it fully laden. It is the single biggest factor in how much of the week you enjoy.
Why this and not the Gobi
The Gobi is remarkable and anybody who has crossed it will defend it. But it is a long way from anywhere, it involves enormous distances between anything worth stopping for, and the riding, while demanding, is largely the same demand repeated.
Bayan-Ölgii packs mountains, glaciers, lakes, rock art and a living cultural tradition into an area you can cover in a week, with a flight in and a flight out that saves you two thousand kilometres of transit. On a ten-day motorcycle tour that maths is decisive. It is the difference between spending your time getting there and spending your time there.
It also has something the Gobi does not, which is people. The Altai is inhabited. Every valley has a family in it somewhere, and on a big biking tour through country this empty the human encounters are half the trip.
The flight that makes the trip possible
The single decision that shapes a western Mongolia itinerary is whether you ride to Bayan-Ölgii or fly to it, and it is not a close call.
Ulaanbaatar to Ölgii is roughly seventeen hundred kilometres by road, most of it across country that ranges from indifferent to punishing. Riding it takes the better part of a week each way and it is, with the best will in the world, a slog: long featureless days, few reasons to stop, and a great deal of the same view. Riders who have done it describe it as an achievement rather than a pleasure.
The internal flight takes about three hours and costs less than two nights of the trip it saves. Doing that at both ends converts a three-week expedition into a ten-day guided tour that spends seven of those days in the good country instead of two. On an annual leave budget that is the whole ball game.
The practical caveats are that the flights are small aircraft on a limited schedule, that baggage allowances are real and enforced, and that weather occasionally reshuffles the timetable. Building a spare day into the Ulaanbaatar end is not paranoia, it is planning.
Ulaanbaatar, since you have to pass through it
Almost every visitor treats the capital as an airport with a city attached, which is a waste of a day.
Ulaanbaatar holds close to half of Mongolia’s entire population, which tells you something about how empty the rest of it is. It is a strange place: Soviet apartment blocks, glass towers, a vast central square, and ger districts spreading up the hillsides where families who came in from the countryside live in felt tents with satellite dishes and street addresses.
The Gandan monastery is worth an hour, with its enormous gilded standing Buddha rebuilt after the original was melted down in the purges. The National Museum will explain the Mongol empire better than anything you will read, and it is useful context for a week spent riding through the descendants of it. And the food is a lot better than the countryside is going to be, so eat well while you can.
Riding western Mongolia for real
Our ten-day Mongolia ride starts and ends in Ulaanbaatar with an internal flight to Ölgii at each end, which puts you straight into the Altai instead of burning four days on the road out and back. From there it runs up the Oigor valley to the rock art, across to the Khoton and Khurgan lakes, out toward the sacred peaks of Tavan Bogd, through the waterfall valley to meet a Kazakh eagle hunter and his bird, then back east through Sagsai and Tolbo Lake to Ölgii.
Small group, road captain who knows which braid of track actually goes through, support vehicle carrying fuel and spares because there is nowhere to buy either, and a local Kazakh guide who is the reason the ger visits work at all. Have a look at the 10-day Mongolia Wild West Ride, and check the tour dates, because the season is short and the departures are few. If you want to line your dates up with the Golden Eagle Festival in October, message us on WhatsApp early, because that is the one week of the year when Ölgii runs out of beds.
English 
Deutsch 
Español 
Français 
Italiano
Comments