The eagle festival,
then the Orkhon
Two days among four hundred registered eagle hunters and their birds, then west into the valley the Mongol empire was run from.
A festival you can reach without a domestic flight
This one is held at Chingisiin Khuree, twenty kilometres out of the capital, so you see the hunters, the birds and the Kazakh horseback games without the two flights and four days of driving that Bayan-Ulgii costs. The other six days are the best of central Mongolia — Terelj, the mini Gobi, the Orkhon waterfall, a day on horseback and Kharakhorum.
Day by day
Out to the park in the morning — protected since 1965, with brown bears, grey wolves, foxes and over two hundred bird species — for Turtle Rock and the walk up to Ariyapala. We finish at the forty-metre Chinggis Khaan statue at Tsonjin Boldog, facing east towards his birthplace.
