The Gobi

The Gobi is a desert that is not made of sand: a thousand kilometres of gravel plain, salt pan and thin grass across the south of Mongolia, three hundred days of sun a year and minus thirty in January, where the sand, when it comes, comes all at once — the Khongoryn Els, a hundred kilometres of dunes three hundred metres high that hum when the wind moves them —, where a wall of red sandstone that an American expedition named the Flaming Cliffs gave up, in 1923, the first dinosaur eggs anyone had seen, and where a gorge in the mountains called the Vulture's Mouth keeps ice on its floor into July. Between them, the gers of herders who will feed you, the two-humped camels who will carry you, and, at Dalanzadgad, an airstrip and a road that is mostly a direction.

The traveller flies to Dalanzadgad or drives the two days from Ulaanbaatar; sleeps in a ger camp and then, if it can be arranged, in a family's ger; walks the Vulture Valley in the morning cold between walls of rock, watching for ibex; climbs the Flaming Cliffs at sunset when they burn; rides a camel to the foot of the great dunes and then climbs them, an hour of two steps up and one down, for the whole desert from the ridge and the sound of the sand; and, at night, lies on the ground far from anything and lets the Milky Way explain itself.

The Guide's honesty: the Gobi is enormous and empty and the distances are the point — a day's drive between the sights, on tracks, in a Russian van or a jeep with a driver who knows the way, because there is no way; the camps range from tourist gers with showers to a family's felt and a bucket, and both are the real thing; the sun is fierce and the shade is nowhere: hats and litres of water; the nights are cold in any month; the airag — fermented mare's milk — is offered as hospitality and accepted with the right hand; and Mongolia's hospitality is not a service — it is a law of the steppe, and it is returned by not hurrying, and by leaving the ger as you found it.