notes from zack

One Month in Mongolia

IMG_9290 view from a drag show at UB's C.U.M Bar

I just spent a month travelling around Mongolia and I’d like to share my experience for those who are curious.

Overall, it's a beautifully vast country that is deeply connected to the land (and to its own history). It’s a sparsely populated country, (I think the least dense in the world), offering plenty of escapes into nature and more rugged forms of travelling.

Introduction to traveling Mongolia

I travelled to Mongolia in May 2026 as part of a 5 month trip in Europe and Asia. I travelled the country with my partner while meeting some other travellers and locals along the way. As a Canadian, I can visit Mongolia visa-free for one month, so I stayed for the entire month (minus a day).

Most people arrive in Mongolia by plane, landing in the capital, Ulaanbaatar (UB). I saw there are direct flights to UB from Seoul, Frankfurt, Istanbul, and Beijing , so most travellers take this route through those cities to arrive. You can also arrive by bus or train, which is what I chose to do, coming from Beijing by train. I share my thoughts on that experience here.

It’s generally advisable to travel to Mongolia in June-August due to cold temperatures during the rest of the year and less tourism businesses being open, but we chose May because it just happened to work best for our schedules (and it would still be warm enough to do most activities while being less busy). During our month, it did happen to snow on us a few times while we were in the central and northern parts of the country, but thankfully I had brought my winter gear (toque, gloves, scarf, puffer jacket, etc) so this wasn’t too bad (still cold though!).

Organized tour or DIY for Mongolia?

For Mongolia, I thought travelling around would be cheap but it prove to be pricey in some ways. It seems that a lot of tourists, even those at backpacker hostels, tend to explore the great steppes, deserts, and mountains of this country by organized tours, which seem ghastly overpriced.

Most tours I saw were around $165 CDN a day. While these tours usually include all of your costs (food, accommodation, transit/driver, a guide), I think these prices don’t really reflect the quality of what you receive. I honestly think tour groups just make up prices and see what sticks. For example, in UB, to eat out you are likely to spend around $8-10 CDN on a meal, which gets you a good meal. A hostel bed is around $20 CDN a day. The local bus costs less than 50 cents CDN and regional bus trips are around $15-20 CDN to cross the country.

Costs get even cheaper as you leave the city, so you are essentially paying a massive premium for someone else to just plan your trip for you. This is totally fine - as this is what travel agents are for - but I guess I was just surprised at the amount of backpackers that instantly decided for organized tours when on the rest of their travels they would scoff at the idea of using a travel agent. Knowing all of this, I am very happy that my partner encouraged us to travel Mongolia by doing work exchanges and trying to plan our trip in a DIY style.

IMG_9302 A very Soviet-feeling building in downtown UB

I will say that I understand why some people choose organised tours when they come to Mongolia. For Canadians, as I imagine most Europeans, you can enter visa-free for only a month (although you can extend), which could be a good chunk of time to self-organize a trip in smaller or more developed countries, but it honestly isn’t enough time for a country as vast and offline as Mongolia. This country is one of the least dense places in the world, making travelling between attractions a 1-2 day process; their long-distance transit system is still slightly undeveloped, with no formal buses or trains between smaller cities (e.g. only shared taxis/minivans between Edernet and Moron, both large regional cities); there is not a lot of english spoken, even in touristy areas; and a lot of stuff (rentals, bookings, excursions) is usually best sorted out on the phone, rather than online, and usually the day or week of.

In addition, there are just comical things about travelling Mongolia that can make it tiring as a DIY traveller... For example, when going to their main international airport, Google Maps will take you to the wrong airport (they built a new airport and named it after the old airport); when taking a bus out of UB, you will notice that they have two main bus terminals both called "Dragon Bus Terminal" and both are just a 1-2km apart and your bus ticket will just say "Dragon bus terminal; and when paying for any tourist related stuff (hostels, excursions, rentals), most places will be cash only but Mongolia's largest bill ($20k Mongolian Tugriks) is only abut $8 CAD (perhaps due to inflation?), which means you will need to carry a THICK wad of cash sometimes.

Thus, while you can piece together your own trip, it will involve lots of planning once you arrive, along with a lot of commuting (think 8-12 hour bus rides), lots of waiting (some buses only go every other day), lots of confusion, lots of cash in your hands, and lots and lots of google translate, which doesn’t work well for Mongolian (it won't let you hear the translations and I found it just gave very strange responses sometimes).

An organized tour is therefore like this plug-and-play system, which is good if you want to SEE Mongolia and not worry about the logistics. To me, DIY travelling is more for those who want to TRAVEL in Mongolia (e.g. thinking about which bus to take, getting a little lost, spending time translating and still being confused). I don’t mean to sound condescending and act like “ohhhh travelling DIY is real travelling” and is better than “seeing”, as I think they both just depend on what your desires are for your trip. However, I do personally prefer to sort things out myself and take the longer route through local buses and trains and boats and to try to stay with locals as much as I can. I (usually) find enjoyment in the chaos in slow travel and I did really enjoy in Mongolia to be a place that actually challenges you as a travel instead of a where it just feels the same as back home. I feel like travelling used to be a hard thing to do (imagine with no smart phones in the past? No translation apps, no online maps, no reviews - just maybe a guidebook and good intentions).

IMG_9413 Views of the vast steppes of Orkhon Valley during a work exchange

However, I do want to counter a sentiment that I feel sometimes while travelling (and what I catch myself thinking too). It’s that those who backpack across a country are somehow getting a very local experience. I say this because I think a good chunk of Mongolians don't actually travel around their country that often. A person we met in UB said how they only visited the north of the country once in their life, and I think they likely drove with their family in their car. It’s a huge country and most people simply live in their communities, which I think is actually normal in most countries. Most people don’t travel their entire country by public transit, nor travel it often - instead they work, live, and sleep in their communities - so if you are zigzagging through a country, whether it is inside an SUV on a organized tour or through a patchwork of local buses, you are still experiencing the country in a different way, as a foreigner. This is all about how you want to be a tourist - neither option will somehow make you a "local" in one month.

Plus, for me, regardless of how I plan my trips, I am realizing I am now a bo-bo (bourgeois bohemian) princess who does enjoys clean sanitation after a week of not showering, does enjoy a soft-ish bed to sleep on, and does enjoy good coffee and chill places to read my book, even if that isn't the local thing to do in that space.

Anywhoooo, yeah, so I spent my time between hanging in hostels in UB, doing two work exchanges, and then DIY travelling up to the north and taking a mini tour.

1 Month Itinerary

Ulaanbaatar/UB - the city you shouldn't skip

I really enjoyed Ulaanbaatar and would encourage all travellers to spend some time properly getting to know this city. It is a massive, modern city that is buzzing with energy, and is home to almost half of the population of Mongolia. I don’t think I’ve been to a city before that houses so much of a population and, as a city-lover, this was an exciting experience for me.

Some people say you should skip UB and instead focus on exploring the more rural or traditional parts of the country. Yet, to me, if half of the population is urban and based in UB, then you should be taking time to explore and learn about this side of their culture too (if learning about Mongolian culture is your goal). I think it would be strange for someone to visit Canada and not spend some time in Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver for example, if their goal was to learn about Canadian life/culture.

UB has everything that a millennial-hipster traveler like myself enjoys, having restaurants, shops, and markets showcasing traditional Mongolian life alongside newer, more younger spots serving up sourdough bread, flat-whites, and negronis. During my time in UB, I got to enjoy a drag show at a queer bar (called C.U.M haha), hang out in chill cafes to do some writing (my fav was Donnie's Cafe), visit some museums (Chingiss Khan and National Musuem), and just hang with other travellers and some locals at no-frills bars and restaurants.

IMG_9499 The vibe inside Donnie's Cafe in UB

In UB, I ate a lot of Mongolian food, getting to taste Monglian milk tea, buuz (Mongolian dumplings), and many hushuurs (large deep fried patty with minced meat). I frequented this a spot called Zochin mongol zoog-4 lot - the ratings were not great online but I enjoyed the vibes. It also seems that locals love ice cream cones (I mean, who wouldn't?), so you will see tiny ice cream stands dotted all cross town.

There is also a huge Korean influence in UB, with Korean restaurants being quite delicious and being much cheaper than back home in Toronto (where we also have a sizable Korean food scene). I thought I would feel a bigger Chinese or Russian influence in UB, given its proximity to each country, but it was Korean influence that I noticed the most. As you walk the streets in UB, you will see Korean convenience stores, Korean restaurants and Karaoke bars, and Korean products everywhere. I generally don’t frequent convenience stores, but I have to say that I ate a bunch at the CU and GS25 convenience stores for their hushuurs. Outside the major city, you will still find kimbap and ddukbokki everywhere as a local snack, as well Korean skincare products on the selves in small towns. The globalized world is interesting.

I found that people have a feeling of resentment towards Chinese influence on Mongolia, with folks talking negatively about “cheap” Chinese products flooding the country and how resources are being taken out of the country to China, whereas I never really heard anything negative about Korea’s influence. I even heard someone say they don’t like Chinese people because of their role in the fall of the Mongolian empire. While that is indeed hundreds of years ago, it is interesting to note that there are more Mongolians living in China (in Inner or Southern Mongolia) rather than in Mongolia today, so I can see how past tensions can still live on to today. Russia and the Soviet past also seemed like a distant memory too, with not much Russian being spoken on the streets and most architecture today feeling more like modern commercial and condo buildings rather than any soviet-styles.

Speaking of design, while walking around downtown, you will notice there definitely isn’t a uniform urban design guidelines in UB, with each block (and sometimes even each front yard) feeling like it chooses its own adventure for its type of sidewalk and streetscape. I love cities like this as it gives each street something to explore and it really feels like they are testing 100s of designs in the city to see which one is the best.

IMG_9502 One of the many ice cream stands in UB

However, UB isn’t all roses. Like many major cities, the worst part of UB is the traffic, especially for getting in and out of city’s boundaries. They don’t have major highways, so you must take local roads to enter and exit the city and UB’s roads are essentially gridlocked from 6am to midnight. Coming back from Orkhon Valley, my bus was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic just 500 metres from the bus station but it took us another 1.5 hours.

As the city is dominated by cars, pedestrians do not have the right away. Keep this in mind when crossing any streets as cars will not slow down (we even had some cars speed up as we crossed). You are bound to have a close call here and there, so be careful unless you wish to die from a Toyota Prius (as it seems that EVERYONE here drives one). There are cross walks and it seems most drivers respect these downtown (although scooters don’t).

There is no metro in UB, although it’s apparently being planned out, so most people rely on taxi and buses. Buses are only 1000 Mongol Turgriks, which is like 40 cents CDN, and they just take cash or a local bus card. Apparently they do take credit card on some buses, but each time we tried this payment method the driver just told us to skip the payment and waved us on instead. Each bus felt different, which made me think that they just buy whatever buses they can and incorporate them into their fleet.

IMG_9510 A row of Toyota Priuses is seen in UB

To get around in a rush, we used the Mongolian rideshare app called “UBCab” to hail taxis. The app is nice as you can see who the driver is and you can rate them (providing a level of security), but you cannot pay with a foreign credit card (so exact cash is needed) and you will need a local phone number to create an account. The app also doesn’t show the driver where you are going or where you are exactly for pick-up for some odd reason, so expect the driver to call you every time before pick up to see where you are and then expect to coordinate with the driver in the car on where you are going. We also had drivers ask us to cancel the ride a few times so they could avoid paying UB cab any fees - usually this was OK but we did have one driver agree to one price at beginning and then change the price at the end. We just gave him the original amount and then left - thankfully it was during the day and in a busy area.

A positive story was that on our 2nd time using the app, we managed to get a driver who pretty good English (and Korean), offering a pleasant ride through the city’s gridlock. Thanks to my partner's openness to meeting strangers, we decided to invite the driver out for Korean food and got to learn more about local life in UB. This person told us that they can make more money using UB cab then they can as a police officer, which was quite surprising to hear.

Tsagaannuur & Khövsgöl

IMG_9652 Catching a sunset in Tsagaannuur with some travellers from France I met

Based on reviews of previous travellers, many people raved about seeing the north of Mongolia, especially around Tsagaannuur & Khövsgöl lake. This area of Mongolia is a different ecosystem, changing from the open and vast (and more dry) steppes of the centre of the country to a mountainous, boreal (taiga) rich forest area that sprawls up into Siberia. It's quite the experience to see the steppes contort themselves into pine-filled, snow covered mountains.

Coming from Canada, it seems a bit funny to travel to all the way to Mongolia to visit an area with a very similar forest (as we are part of the same boreal forest zone), but the Tsagaannuur area is very unique for being home to nomadic families that herd reindeer (and is also just beautiful in ways I haven't seen back home - although I still need to visit the northern territories in Canada to compare).

So yeah, the Tsaatan peoples, or the Dukha, are this VERY small community of semi-nomadic reindeer herders living in the deep north. When I say small, it is very small, with only around 60-70 families left living this lifestyle. The area we visited, which was in the East Taiga, only had around 20 families left.

These folks are the last reindeer herders in Mongolia, and I think are the most southern reindeers herders in the world. They live in teepees, which are called orts, and must move their camps to stay within the coldest areas for their reindeer, changing places around 6-8 times a year (which is much more than other nomadic families in Mongolia). However, I think climate change and the warming of Mongolia will start to pose some issues for this, as they only have so many cold areas to take the reindeer for grazing and the border of Russia blocks them from going more north (there are other reindeer herders in Russia). Knowing this, it felt really strange to be with a culture that may not continue to properly exist in my lifetime.

The Tsaatan people speak a different language from Mongolians, with their language (Dukhan) being closer to Turkish. They are also ethnically a Turkic people, being closer to Central Asians like the Krygz then Mongolians. To say hello in Dukhan, you say "Ekii" or "Eh-kee". I don't think I have ever met people that spoke such an endangered language before so it was a bit emotional to think that maybe this language too may soon cease to exist.

IMG_9596

We spent 2 nights with the Tsaatan familes in East Taiga as part of a tour we arranged with a tour guide/guesthouse operator in Tsagaannuur named Ollzii. My partner had gotten Ollzii's contact info from contacting a French couple who had left this rave review in a guestbook at our first work exchange (the guestbook had asked for visitors to provide advice to other travellers and this couple had recommended to work with Ollzii). After many messages and calls on Whatsapp to our future guide, Ollzii, we set off to meet him in Tsagaannuur.

The trip from UB to Tsagaannuur is not short. It first involves a 13 hour bus ride from UB to Moron, which we did during the day and honestly wasn't too bad given the amount of stops it makes. We then stayed a night in Moron (just to sleep, eat, and shower) and then began 10-11 hour, very bumpy off-road trip to Tsagaannuur. This ride from Moron was organized by Ollzii and was part of a 6-day trip we booked with him, along with 3 other travellers we had dragged with us from UB (to help lower our costs and because they seemed cool!). After arriving in Tsagaannuur, we spent the night there and the next day set off again for another 1.5 hour drive to a nomadic family's house in the northern steppes. After a night there, we then began our trip through the mountain forests, taking about 2-3 hours before we met the Tsaatan families.

We were lucky because Ollzii was from the Tsaatan tribe, with his father having been born and raised in the teepees. His dad became a doctor, working with the Tribes, but raised Ollzzii in Tsagaannuur. Ollzzii then went to university in UB and later lived in UB, where he learned English and started working in tourism. All of this resulted in Ollzzii being fluent in English, which was such a joy for us, as well as being able to speak with the Tsaatan tribe, with many of those in East Taiga still being his cousins and relatives. It felt like a very local experience for us, but with the added comfort of being with someone who we could joke with and have long conversations with in English.

IMG_9605

We ended up staying 2 nights in the teepees with the Tsaatan people, spending our time helping them change camp locations and helping them herd their reindeer (which we got to do on horseback and I loved). We also got to ride reindeer, which felt very slippery, as well as try to milk reindeer (as this is how they get their dairy). The area was outstandingly beautiful, with snow-capped mountains hugging the horizon, shrubs, lichen, and artic-rivers lining the grounds, and deep green boreal forests rising up on the edges of the community. On our first night, we got hit with snow, which allowed me to wake up the next morning to the sights of wild reindeer, dozens of teepees, and all of those shrubs, trees, and mountains covered in beautiful white snow. It felt like a fantasy of what "the north" would like to a child being able to see reindeer roam freely around me with their massive antlers.

We then left back to Tsagaannuur, staying for another night and being able to explore the town a little bit. It's located on a lake (Tsagaan = white in Mongolian, nuur = lake) and it was such a quiet and peaceful town. From there, we drove somewhat over the mountains (for another 11 hours off road) to get to Khatgal, which is at the base of the famous Khövsgöl lake. I honestly preferred the lake at Tsagaannuur, but Khatgal does act as a good base for tours and has more urban options (restaurants, cafes, and plenty of guesthouses). We stayed at MS Guesthouse in Khatgal for 2 nights and enjoyed the luxuries of hot water, heated rooms, and a diversity of food again. After that, we went back to Moron (getting a ride from some friends who were passing through in their van) and then took our 13 hour bus back to UB.

IMG_9551 Our van for 11 hours from Moron to Tsagaannuur