June 4-5 trip to Gobi Desert

Two days is not nearly enough time to fully appreciate the Gobi desert. Nevertheless, Nancy was going back home on Tuesday and I only had the weekend off. We booked a tour through Nomad Adventures, which owns and operates an eco-lodge named Three Camels Lodge.

If we had time, there are a number of hikes, both to mountain tops, through ravines, and across 1000 feet tall sand dunes that I would have liked to have done.  Still, we did have an opportunity to experience the desert, even though most of the time was spent being driven on four-wheel-drive tracks, or simply through the desert, from the various attractions.

We flew down to a provincial capital named Dalanzadgad, where we met our driver  Bagi, a 26-year-old university graduate (with a degree in tourism management) who had driven his vehicle down from Ulan Baatar to serve as our guide and driver. He would do the 21 hour drive back to Ulan Baatar after leaving us at the airport on Sunday afternoon.

We first went to the lodge (about an hour and a half to cover the 66 km across the desert), where we briefly relaxed in the deluxe ger that would be our home for the night. From there, our first stop was to climb a small hill, about 500 feet tall, to see petroglyphs on the top. After lunch, we visited a nomad's ger (the family was very used to tourists) and rode camels for an hour, before heading to the Flaming Cliffs, the site of major discoveries of dinosaur bones and eggs by a 1925 expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews, later head of the American Museum of Natural History. 

Sunday, I went for an early morning run over the top of a volcano located right behind the lodge. After breakfast, we headed towards Gurvan Saikhan National Park, which is the home of an ice canyon, as well as several mountain ridges, and a wide variety of wildlife. On the way, our vehicle kept dying (the diesel fuel line kept jamming and the car stalled). Nancy and I had an anxious hour, watching our driver continually trying to get the vehicle restarted, wondering if we could walk to some point of civilization and what you do when your car dies in the middle of the desert. 

However, Bagi  was convinced he could get the car moving and ultimately got us to the National Park where we did the standard tourist hike, approximately 4 km trip down the ice canyon.