Mongolian Ways

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Mongolian Ways Tours & Travels throughout Mongolia. We are one of the best tour operators (travel companies)! You. We know you'll never again travel Mongolia any other way.

When you travel Mongolia with us, we will allocate private guides and drivers to accompany you from arrival to departure, to share with you their unique local knowledge and experience, and be at your disposal day and night. We shall book your accommodation, transportation, and all the logistics required to make your trip as smooth as it could be.
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The private tours we offer are tours we've already built for someone, we know they are great, but let us make a special tour for a special person.

Somewhere under the same range of mountains rising behind Altai Tavan Bogd, the ground has been quietly keeping a two an...
17/09/2026

Somewhere under the same range of mountains rising behind Altai Tavan Bogd, the ground has been quietly keeping a two and a half thousand year old secret. Scythian era burial mounds, known as kurgans, scattered across the wider Altai region of Mongolia, Russia, China, and Kazakhstan, were sealed in a way nobody planned for. Rain seeped into the stone covering after burial and froze solid, turning each tomb into a block of ice that has held its contents essentially unchanged since roughly the fifth century BCE.

What comes out of them is startling. Bodies preserved well enough that tattoos are still visible on the skin. Horses buried alongside their owners. Grave goods in wood, felt, leather, and fur, materials that should have disintegrated within a few centuries anywhere else, sitting intact after two and a half millennia. It is one of the most complete windows archaeology has into how the nomadic peoples of this exact region actually lived, not through what was written about them, but through what they buried and how carefully the mountain kept it.

None of it is safe indefinitely. The permafrost responsible for that preservation is thawing as the climate warms, and the record that outlasted empires, invasions, and the collapse of the cultures that made it may not outlast this. What the ice protected for 2,500 years, it may only take a few decades of a warmer Altai to undo.

Mongolia has roughly 5.1 million horses, nearly double the number of people, and on any given afternoon a fair number of...
15/09/2026

Mongolia has roughly 5.1 million horses, nearly double the number of people, and on any given afternoon a fair number of them are doing exactly this. It always moves something in you to see them roaming free across such an open, vast landscape.

Two elk grazing on an open hillside look unremarkable enough, but this species, known locally as Maral, nearly disappear...
11/09/2026

Two elk grazing on an open hillside look unremarkable enough, but this species, known locally as Maral, nearly disappeared from Mongolia entirely. After the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s, poaching and the breakdown of Soviet era wildlife management pushed elk populations across the country's north and west toward critically endangered status.

The recovery took real intervention. Mongolia closed elk hunting entirely for years, ran translocation programs to rebuild herds, and stepped up anti-poaching enforcement. The population responded well enough that by 2011 the government issued a small number of hunting permits again, five that year, a sign of recovery, but also a reminder that the margin here is still thin.

Picture Mongolia and grassland comes to mind first, maybe desert second. Forest rarely makes the list, but roughly eleve...
09/09/2026

Picture Mongolia and grassland comes to mind first, maybe desert second. Forest rarely makes the list, but roughly eleven percent of the country is covered in it, mostly Siberian larch, forming the southern edge of the taiga, the same forest biome that stretches across the whole of Siberia to the north.

This band of trees runs through the Khentii mountains, the country around Lake Khuvsgul, and a few other pockets in the north, a transition zone between true boreal forest and the open steppe that still makes up most of the country.

As an outsider, this photo of a child asleep alone in the grass beside a ger might read as wrong. But remember that when...
07/09/2026

As an outsider, this photo of a child asleep alone in the grass beside a ger might read as wrong. But remember that when traveling, you can run into the most peculiar of sights, and it's all about context, culture, and environment. Also, grandmother is always nearby.

Mongolian herding families rarely operate as a single household. Camps known as khot ail typically bring together two to seven families, grandparents, parents, and cousins, sharing the work of raising children and running a herd across the same stretch of ground. Grandparents often take on a large share of that childcare, partly so parents can keep working the animals, and partly because it is how values and skills get passed down in the first place. Kids here tend to learn to ride around the same age they learn to walk, and start helping herd sheep and goats by five or six.

Context is important. What is hanging here is likely borts, one of the oldest food preservation methods still practiced ...
03/09/2026

Context is important.
What is hanging here is likely borts, one of the oldest food preservation methods still practiced in Mongolia. The technique dates back to the campaigns of Chinggis Khan, when soldiers carried strips of dried meat that could be pounded into powder for the road, a single small bag holding the nutritional weight of an entire animal. The method has not really changed since. Meat is cut into long strips and hung in a shaded, well ventilated spot, sometimes right under the eaves of a ger, and left for weeks while the cold, dry air quietly does the work no refrigerator here ever will.

The drum a Mongolian shaman carries is not simply an instrument. In this tradition it is treated as a spirit horse, the ...
01/09/2026

The drum a Mongolian shaman carries is not simply an instrument. In this tradition it is treated as a spirit horse, the vehicle that carries the shaman between worlds while it sounds, its rhythm read as the hoofbeats of that journey rather than mere music. What looks, from the outside, like a wide leather frame is understood, from within the practice, as something closer to a mount.

Painted across its face is a sun, and beside it the pale outline of an animal, part of a visual language shamans have used for generations to map the world their trance carries them into. Ribbons and strips of colored cloth trail from its edges, tied at the crown and sides, marking the drum as ceremonial rather than plain.

Deep dive: the nomadic family unitA nomadic household in Mongolia isn't just a family in the usual sense, it's the basic...
28/08/2026

Deep dive: the nomadic family unit

A nomadic household in Mongolia isn't just a family in the usual sense, it's the basic economic unit that keeps a herd fed, moved, and protected across a landscape too big and too unpredictable for one household to manage alone. Several gers standing within sight of each other, like the ones behind this family, usually means several related households sharing exactly that load.

The pattern of who stays and who moves is fairly consistent. When a daughter marries, she traditionally moves to her husband's family and their grazing land. When a son marries, it typically goes the other direction: he pitches his own ger close to his parents and keeps his herd near theirs. It's usually the youngest son, not the oldest, who stays permanently, caring for the parents into old age and eventually inheriting the homestead and whatever livestock remains. Older sons branch off earlier with their own share of the herd, but often stay close enough to keep helping.

The actual work splits along fairly set lines too. Men and older boys handle horses, camels, and the wider herd, riding out with a lasso pole called an uurga to bring back anything that's wandered off. Women handle milking, churning butter, making dairy products like airag, and are traditionally the ones who put up and take down the ger, which also makes them the ones leading the household when it's time to move to new pasture. Cooking tends to be shared. None of it is rigid. When hands are short, whoever's around fills in.

Age carries real weight in these households. The oldest generation directs decisions, and kids are folded into the actual work early, learning gender specific tasks well before their teens rather than being kept in some separate childhood bubble. That said, decisions of any real weight are rarely made by the husband alone. Wives are consulted as a matter of course, an arrangement historians studying the region have pointed to as unusually equal compared to neighboring cultures at the time.

Look at the photo again with that in mind. It isn't just a family portrait. It's three generations, each doing a different job, that only function as a single working unit.

One caveat worth keeping in the back pocket: this describes the traditional pattern. Plenty of families today are more nuclear, especially as younger generations move to Ulaanbaatar for work or school

26/08/2026

Oh, don't mind us, just a drone playing peekaboo with a very adorable Mongolian girl.

Address

Chingeltei Duureg, 5th Khoroo, 6th Khoroolol, Building #17, Door #39
Ulaanbaatar
211238

Opening Hours

Monday 08:00 - 20:00
Tuesday 08:00 - 20:00
Wednesday 08:00 - 20:00
Thursday 08:00 - 20:00
Friday 08:00 - 20:00

Telephone

+97611330351

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