Mongolia

Mongolia has three million people and forty million livestock, and the ratio explains the landscape - an ocean of grass and sky interrupted by the occasional ger, herd, or ridge of mountains turning purple at the edges. Ulaanbaatar is a city of Soviet apartment blocks and traffic and surprising museums, arrived at after long flights and left for the steppe as soon as possible. The Gobi in the south is not one desert but many: saxaul forest, sand dunes, canyon systems, eagle hunters in the west who have been flying golden eagles for generations and who receive visitors now with a grace that has not been worn smooth by repetition.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: ger stay routes, Gobi timing, Naadam festival logistics and the horseback routes across the northern taiga that take long enough to change how you think about distance.