ipernity: Mongolia, on the tracks of Genghis Khan by Wolfgang

Many of my relatives, acquaintances and friends asked me why I choose Mongolia for an holiday destination. The hard weather condition, the endless width of the steppe, the extremely bad dirt roads, the anomalous cuisine, all of this speaks against a visit in this giant country.
I like to learn about the Mongolian people, about its ancient culture and to experience the hard life style and the ancient tradition of Mongolian hospitality - and I learned a lot.
People who live under such hard conditions seem to stay in good mood and maintain a good neighbourhood for all of their life. The livestock are the herds of hundreds or thousands of sheep, goats and of course horses and bactrian camels as their means of transportation.
Mongolia has only 2,671,000 inhabitants, one million of them live in Ulaanbaatar, the rest in a country which is three times bigger than Germany, Switzerland and Austria (1,564,115.75 km2). This means that Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country in the world. Now, after the large and strenuous tour to Mongolia I ask myself again if I would return to this country and do such a trip again. I have wonderful memories of the Mongolian people, I learned so much about an old, forgotten culture and I enjoyed the perpetual good spirit we had. Yes I would like to see Mongolia again in spite of its nasty towns and villages and the endless steppe and inconsolable plains called Mongolian Siberia.

Here is my album of pictures I captured on my tour through East Mongolia between August 26th and September 13th, 2009.