Ulaanbaatar

Ulaanbaatar is the world's coldest capital and its most temporary-feeling permanent city: a Soviet-planned center ringed by districts of gers — the white felt tents a third of the city still calls home — as if the steppe had agreed to pause here but signed nothing. Genghis rides in bronze over the main square, monks murmur at Gandan monastery above the traffic, and the eternal blue sky the Mongols worship does, in fact, show up for work some 250 days a year.

The sensible traveller takes the city as a two-day gate: Gandan's morning prayers among pigeons and murmured sutras, the National Museum for the empire that redrew the world's map on horseback, the cashmere factories' seconds-shops, and Zaisan hill at dusk for the whole valley — then does what everyone in Ulaanbaatar is secretly planning, and leaves for the steppe: a ger stay, a horse with its own opinions, and the kind of silence cities forget exists.

The Guide's honesty: come in July for Naadam and book everything early — the horses, the wrestling and the archery empty the city into the countryside —; winter is a serious negotiation: minus thirty is the average, not the warning; the food is mutton at every hour, and the correct response to fermented mare's milk is a small polite sip and enormous respect; and UB traffic is the steppe's revenge — walk the center, it is smaller than it acts.