The Gobi is not the desert you're picturing

People arrive expecting the Sahara and find something stranger. The Mongolian Gobi is a mix of low hills and wide steppe, large dunes, high mountain ranges and rivers — and it is one of the most mysterious places on earth precisely because it refuses to be one thing.

A cold desert

The Gobi gets frost and occasionally snow on its dunes. It lies far north for a desert and sits on a plateau roughly 910 to 1,520 metres above sea level, which keeps temperatures down. Around 194mm of rain falls in an average year, with extra moisture arriving in winter as snow blown in from Siberia. Those same winds swing the range from −40°C in winter to 45°C in summer — and in some gorges you will still find ice in the middle of summer.

What you stop for

Tsagaan Suvarga, a scarp in Ulziit soum of Dundgovi province, is 30 metres high and 100 metres wide; the sheer east-facing slope looks from a distance like the ruins of an ancient city. Ongi monastery, on the bank of the Ongiin river, is the ruin of 28 temples that once held about a thousand lamas before the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

Then there are the cliffs where the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews found the world's first dinosaur eggs and nest. The Gobi holds some of the major palaeontological discoveries of the twentieth century, and they were not found in a museum — they were found in this ground.

How long it takes

It takes about six days to cover the highlights of the Gobi properly. Shorter is possible, but you will spend most of it driving. Our group departures pair the Gobi with Terelj, Orkhon Valley or Kharakhorum for anything from six to fifteen days.