From Yolyn Am Canyon to the South Gobi desert

September 01, 2015

From Yolyn Am Canyon to the South Gobi desert

One of the best part of our stay in Mongolia was when my parents came to visit. We didn’t have much time so we had to chose carefully where to go. The country is huge, after all, and it would take months to cover everything.

The area we knew we wanted to see was the Gobi desert. Here too, it is huge, so we focused on the South Gobi province. We started with the Yolyn Am canyon about 2 hours drive from Dalanzadgad, the capital of the province. I had imagined red sand dunes so imagine my shock when I saw lush green vegetation all around. The canyon hasn’t been that green in years thanks to the excellent rains this summer. There was a stream running through it. We trekked for a few kilometres inside the canyon, feeling very small.

We spotted some ibex high up on the cliffs. Locals described them as 'some kind of goat' which made them seem terribly unexciting. When we did see them, however, they looked rather cool.

three rounds around the shrine

free horses looking rather orderly -anticipating to be ridden?

Flaming Cliffs

The Flaming Cliffs turned out to be much closer to what I had imagined the desert would look like. Intensely red canyons and rocks as far as the eye could see. The Flaming Cliffs are famous for the dinosaur bones that were discovered there in the 1920s by Roy Chapman Andrews. There are so many dinosaur bones that the government has asked people to stop unearthing them. They have run out of place to store them. We decided to ignore that and go ahead looking for bones. Apparently, to find out whether a stone is indeed a stone or a bone you need to lick it. If your tongue sticks to it, it means it’s a bone. Otherwise it’s a stone. To make the whole experience more exciting, we were told there was a lot of dinosaur poo (and goat poo) that looked like fossilised bones. That put a quick end to our budding careers as archeologists.

Dinosaur bones apart, what we saw of the Gobi desert has to be one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The colours were stunning and the sensation of infinite space, with not one living being for kilometres around is magical.