The Gobi Desert is one of those names that sounds like legend, and being there doesn't disappoint. This is Mongolia at its most extreme and most cinematic, a vast, almost empty land where the horizon never ends. But it's worth busting the myth: the Gobi is not the Sahara. Most of it is a semi-arid gravel steppe dotted with mountains, canyons and oases, and only a few areas (the most spectacular ones) are true seas of dunes. That variety is its great surprise. In a few days by 4x4 you go from a canyon where the ice holds into summer to 300-metre dunes that roar in the wind, and from there to red cliffs where the first dinosaur eggs in history were found.
Travelling through the Gobi means travelling slowly and far. You cover hundreds of kilometres on dirt tracks and sleep in ger camps under an unrivalled starry sky. You share the road with herds of two-humped Bactrian camels and with the nomadic herders who, against all logic, live and thrive in this desert. It's a destination of adventure, patience and immensity. What matters here isn't ticking sights off a list. It's letting yourself soak up the enormous scale of the landscape and the absolute silence of the nights.
This guide sets out the essentials of the southern Gobi: its three big highlights (the Yolyn Am canyon, the Khongoryn Els dunes and the Bayanzag cliffs), how to get there and get around on its tracks, how many days you need, when to go and what to pack for a desert of brutal contrasts. It also explains how Dalanzadgad, with its airport, is the logistics base for the whole south. The Gobi isn't an easy or comfortable destination, but it's one of those places that resets your sense of scale and stays with you forever.
The Gobi is an ancient desert that has played a huge role in science and history. Beneath its sands and cliffs lies one of the world's largest dinosaur fossil beds. In the 1920s, American Museum of Natural History expeditions led by Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones, discovered at the Bayanzag cliffs (the 'Flaming Cliffs') the first fossilised dinosaur egg nests known to science. They also found skeletons of species such as Velociraptor and Protoceratops. The Gobi remains a palaeontological paradise today. For centuries, though, the desert was also a feared stretch of the caravan routes linking China with Central Asia and Mongolia. Camels loaded with tea, silk and goods crossed its tracks between wells and oases, on one of the branches of the Silk Road. And it has always been home to nomadic herders able to survive with their herds of camels, goats and sheep in one of the harshest environments on the planet, making the most of every oasis and every seasonal pasture. The natural and human history of the Gobi is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great desert of the south, and much more than dunes: steppe, mountains and icy canyons, dinosaur graveyards and the singing dunes of Khongoryn Els, explored by 4x4 and on the back of a Bactrian camel from the town of Dalanzadgad.
Read the history of The Gobi (south) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Some 70 or 80 million years ago, the place where the Gobi Desert stretches today was not a wasteland of gravel and sand, but a warm, humid landscape of lakes, rivers, dunes and plains covered in vegetation. Dinosaurs walked across it: herds of beaked herbivores like Protoceratops, agile predators like Velociraptor, giants from the Tyrannosaurus family like Tarbosaurus, and strange creatures like Oviraptor, caught forever by death while brooding its eggs. When these animals died, their bodies were sometimes buried by sandstorms or mud, and so they were preserved for tens of millions of years, until they became some of the best-preserved fossils on the planet.
The climate changed, the green world dried out, and the desert spread over that graveyard of giants. But the bones stayed there, waiting beneath the red sandstone. Today the Gobi holds one of the greatest palaeontological treasures on Earth, an archive of Cretaceous life so rich that it has rewritten much of what we know about dinosaurs. Every eroded cliff, every desert ravine, is potentially a page of that archive.
That depth of time is the first thing to understand about the Gobi. It is not just a desert: it is a geological time machine, a place where scale is measured not in centuries or millennia, but in tens of millions of years. Walking along the cliffs of Bayanzag knowing that beneath your feet lie nests of dinosaur eggs from 80 million years ago completely changes the way you look at the landscape.
The Gobi's palaeontological fame was born in the 1920s, with a series of legendary expeditions. The American Museum of Natural History in New York organised several campaigns into the heart of the Mongolian desert, led by a charismatic explorer named Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews — adventurer, hunter, brilliant storyteller and man of action — is considered one of the real-life inspirations for the character of Indiana Jones, and his expeditions to the Gobi, with caravans of cars and camels, had all the feel of an adventure film.
The big breakthrough came in 1923, at the red cliffs of Bayanzag, which Andrews named the Flaming Cliffs for the colour they take on at sunset. There, his team found something never seen before: complete nests of fossilised dinosaur eggs. Until then, nobody had direct proof that dinosaurs laid eggs; the find proved it in one stroke and caused a sensation around the world. Alongside the nests appeared skeletons of Protoceratops, Velociraptor and other species new to science.
Andrews' expeditions put the Gobi on the map of world palaeontology and opened a century of discoveries. Decades later, Polish, Russian and Mongolian teams kept digging at sites like Nemegt and Tugrikin Shireh, unearthing spectacular fossils, among them the famous 'eternal fight': a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops fossilised mid-duel, trapped together by a sandstorm 80 million years ago. The Gobi became established as one of the great dinosaur graveyards on the planet, and its fossils keep turning up today.
Long after the dinosaurs and long before the palaeontologists, the Gobi was, for human beings, above all an obstacle to be crossed. For centuries, this desert was a feared stretch of the trade routes linking China with Central Asia, Mongolia and beyond: one of the great corridors travelled by the caravans of the Silk Road and the Tea Road. Crossing the Gobi was a hard and dangerous test, between the scorching summer heat, the icy winter cold, the sandstorms and the scarcity of water, hopping from well to well and from oasis to oasis.
The great ally of those travellers was the Bactrian camel, the two-humped camel native to Central Asia, an animal astonishingly well adapted to the desert: able to withstand extreme temperatures in both directions, to go for days without drinking and to carry goods across impossible terrain. Camel caravans loaded with pressed tea, silk, spices and other goods crossed the Gobi in long stages, guided by drivers who knew the wells and routes by heart. The desert was, in a way, a sea of land navigated with those 'ships of the desert'.
Marco Polo, in the 13th century, crossed the Lop Desert, on the edge of the Gobi, and left a famous account of the spirits and deceptive voices that were said to lead astray travellers lost in the vastness — an echo, perhaps, of the 'singing dunes' and the mirages of the desert. So for centuries the Gobi was not a destination but a road: at once a barrier and a bridge between the great civilisations of Asia.
That there is permanent human life in the Gobi at all is a feat in itself. And yet, since time immemorial, nomadic herders have made this desert their home, developing one of the most remarkable cultural adaptations on the planet. Gobi families raise herds of Bactrian camels, goats (including those that give the prized cashmere wool), sheep and a few horses, moving between seasonal pastures and wells, making the most of every blade of vegetation the desert offers after its scarce rains.
Their life is a constant exercise in knowing the land: knowing where there is water, when and where to move the livestock, how to protect themselves from sandstorms and deadly winters. The ger, the felt tent, is here more than ever the perfect shelter: cool in the heat, warm in the cold, wind-resistant, easy to move. The diet is based on livestock products — camel and goat milk and dairy, meat — and hospitality towards travellers is sacred, perhaps because in such a hostile environment mutual help can be a matter of life or death.
This age-old way of life is not free from modern threats. Climate change is worsening drought and desertification; catastrophic winters (the dzud) periodically kill millions of animals; mining — the Gobi holds huge deposits of copper, gold and coal, such as the gigantic Oyu Tolgoi mine — transforms the landscape and competes for scarce water. The herders of the Gobi, heirs to a tradition thousands of years old, now live in the tension between that ancestral way of life and the pressures of the 21st century.
At first glance, the Gobi looks like a barren void. But it is a fragile and surprisingly rich ecosystem, adapted to extremes, home to some of the rarest and most fascinating species in Asia. The most incredible is perhaps the mazaalai, the Gobi bear: the only bear in the world that lives in a desert, a relative of the brown bear of which only a few dozen individuals survive in the most remote areas of the Mongolian Gobi. It is one of the most endangered mammals on the planet, and its fight for survival has become a symbol of conservation in Mongolia.
The desert is also home to the last truly wild camel, the wild Bactrian camel (khavtgai), distinct from the domestic one and critically endangered; to herds of gazelles and wild asses (khulan) that race across the steppe; to the majestic argali (the largest wild sheep in the world) and ibex in the mountains; and, on the most inaccessible heights, to the elusive snow leopard, the ghost of Central Asia's mountains. In the air glide vultures and lammergeiers, like the ones that give their name to the Yolyn Am canyon.
Protecting all this life is the mission of the Gobi's great parks, above all Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park, the largest in Mongolia, and the protected areas of the Great Gobi. Their existence has allowed the desert to keep a unique biodiversity, despite the harshness of the environment and human pressures. For travellers, knowing that bears, wild camels and snow leopards live in those empty mountains and valleys gives the Gobi a secret, wild dimension that multiplies its fascination.
The 21st-century Gobi is many things at once. It is one of Asia's great adventure destinations: every summer, travellers from all over the world head out in 4x4s along its tracks to climb the singing dunes of Khongoryn Els, walk on the ice of Yolyn Am, watch the sunset over the cliffs of Bayanzag and sleep in gers under one of the starriest skies on the planet. It is still an emerging, low-impact kind of tourism, offering an experience of vastness and silence that is hard to find anywhere else.
At the same time, it is a scientific laboratory: palaeontologists keep unearthing dinosaurs from its sands, and Mongolia wages a constant battle against the illegal fossil trade, even managing to repatriate skeletons smuggled out of the country and exhibited or auctioned abroad. The Dinosaur Museum in Ulaanbaatar is the showcase for that recovered heritage. And it is, more and more, an economic and environmental crossroads: beneath the desert lie colossal mineral riches, and their extraction — with projects like Oyu Tolgoi — brings jobs and foreign currency, but also tensions over water, the landscape and the nomadic way of life.
For those who visit, the Gobi offers a lesson in scale and time. It is a place that was a green sea of dinosaurs, a road for silk caravans, home to herders able to live where it seems impossible, and a refuge for bears and leopards that almost nobody will ever see. Travelling through it slowly, accepting its distances, its dust and its harshness, means letting yourself be rearranged by a vastness that puts human beings in their place. Few landscapes in the world convey so powerfully the smallness of the human and the grandeur of geological time. You don't visit the Gobi: you cross it, and you don't forget it.
