Almost half of Mongolia's inhabitants live in Ulaanbaatar, an overcrowded, polluted capital inundated by drab, cookie-cooker, concrete buildings from the Soviet era when Mongolia was a satellite country of the USSR.
But outside of the the capital it's easy to understand why for most of its 800-year history the majority of its people were nomads ...
wandering the expansive, wide-open plains.
Mongolia is the world's least densely populated country – three million occupying 600,000 square miles.
You'll find few fences here. The government owns most of the land in the countryside, allowing nomads to roam at will and set up gers/yurts
wherever their livestock graze.
There's a whole lot of emptiness and a whole lot of delightful nothingness in the land known as blue sky country.
Still, Mongolia has an impressive past. The Mongolian Empire, first unified by Genghis Khan in the 1200s, eventually stretched across most of Eurasia.
During our first full day in Mongolia, we visited Karakorum, the former capital of the empire, stopping to tour Erdene Zuu, the oldest Buddhist monastery complex in Mongolia dating back to the 1500s.
Along the way, we met a friend of our guide Ganzo. The friend lives in a ger, and as tradition dictates, the hostess offered us food – yogurt, tea, and dried goat milk. Mongolians mostly breed five kind of animals, including horses, cows/yaks, goats, sheep, and camels, so most of the diet consists of food products related to these animals. With a nomadic history, the people weren't able to grow crops, meaning you'll still find little vegetables and fruit.
Tonight, Alexandra and I stayed in our first ger, a mobile, canvas structure supported by a collapsible wooden frame. A ger can be broken down in less than an hour,which certainly fits the nomadic lifestyle still practiced by 30% of the population.
A ger is usually quite cozy and quite comfortable.
Tomorrow, we begin traveling south toward the Gobi desert.
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