There are few places where the desert becomes as cinematic as at Khongoryn Els. After hours of driving across the brown steppe of the Gobi, a wall of golden sand hundreds of kilometres long suddenly appears at the foot of a mountain range: these are the 'singing dunes', the largest sand sea in Mongolia. Climbing to the highest ridge takes some doing (your feet sink and slide with every step), but from the top opens up one of the most impressive panoramas in Central Asia: the sea of dunes on one side, the endless steppe on the other, and below, tiny, the herds of Bactrian camels and the herders' yurts.
The name 'singing dunes' isn't just poetic: when the wind drags the sand down the slopes, the friction of millions of grains creates a deep hum, almost a roar, which gave rise to the local nickname Duut Mankhan. But Khongoryn Els is much more than the dunes: at their foot runs a meltwater river that forms a green oasis, nomadic families have been raising camels here for generations, and the contrast between the sand, the water and the snowy mountains in the background makes this corner of the Gobi hard to forget.
This guide tells you how Khongoryn Els fits into a Gobi circuit, when to climb the dunes so you don't melt or miss the sunset, what it's like to sleep in a ger camp in the middle of nowhere, how much a camel ride costs and what you need to know before heading into a desert with no ATMs, no signal and no transport other than a 4x4. Getting here takes time and stamina for the dirt tracks, but it rewards you with one of those travel days you remember forever.
The dunes of Khongoryn Els are geologically young compared with the mountains around them: they are sand piled up by the wind over millennia against the foothills of the Sevrei and Zöölön mountains, in the heart of the Gobi. But the human history of this corner is the history of the desert itself: that of the nomadic steppe peoples who, for thousands of years, crossed the Gobi with their herds, and that of the two-humped Bactrian camel, domesticated in Central Asia some 4.500 years ago, which made life and trade possible in one of the harshest environments on the planet. The caravans linking China with Central Asia passed along these southern routes, and the families who raise camels at the foot of the dunes today are direct heirs of that herding culture. In the 20th century the area was protected within Gobi-Gurvansaikhan National Park, created to preserve a unique desert ecosystem, with wildlife adapted to the extremes (from the wild camel to the snow leopard in the mountains) and landscapes ranging from dunes to the icy canyon. Our history page tells the epic story of the Gobi, its caravans and its wildlife in more detail.
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.
Long before any empire set its sights on the Gobi, the wind had already been at work for thousands of years. Khongoryn Els is neither a mountain nor a human creation: it is sand, millions of tonnes of sand carried by the wind over millennia and piled up against the flanks of the Sevrei and Zöölön mountains, in the heart of the desert of southern Mongolia. The result is the largest dune field in the country, a golden strip more than a hundred kilometres long whose highest crests reach around 200 to 300 metres. Mongolians call them Duut Mankhan, 'the sounding dunes', which is where the tourist nickname 'singing dunes' comes from.
The 'singing' is no legend. When the wind drives sand down a steep slope, or when an avalanche of grains slides downhill, the mass of dry, evenly sized sand starts to vibrate and produces a low, deep hum that can be heard from some distance away and is sometimes compared to the far-off roar of an aeroplane. The phenomenon, which scientists have studied in only a few dozen deserts around the world, depends on the size and dryness of the grains and on the shape of the dune. At Khongoryn Els it is strong on windy days, and it is one of the reasons this sea of sand holds a special place among the landscapes of the Gobi.
But reducing Khongoryn Els to its dunes would be unfair. At the foot of the sands runs the Khongoryn Gol river, fed by meltwater from the mountains, which creates a strip of pasture, reeds and wetlands: a linear oasis that makes life possible in the middle of the desert. That contrast — sand, water and snow-capped mountains in the background — is what makes the place a symbol of the Gobi. And where there is water and pasture, there are herds; and where there are herds, there are herders. The human history of these dunes is, above all, the history of the desert nomads and of an extraordinary animal: the camel.
You can't understand the Gobi without the Bactrian camel, the two-humped one, and at Khongoryn Els it is part of everyday life. Unlike the one-humped dromedary, which is adapted to hot deserts, the Bactrian is an animal of the cold deserts of Central Asia: it copes with scorching summers and also with winters of thirty or forty degrees below zero, thanks to a thick coat that it sheds with the seasons, fat reserves stored in its two humps and a physiology able to withstand long periods without water. It can drink huge amounts in one go when it finds water and then go for days without it.
Humans domesticated the Bactrian camel around 4,500 years ago somewhere in Central Asia, and that changed the history of the region. With the camel it became possible to cross the desert, carry heavy loads and trade over distances that had once been unthinkable. For centuries, caravans linking China with the world of the steppes and with Central Asia travelled the routes across the south of what is now Mongolia, and the Bactrian camel was the silent engine of that trade in silk, tea, salt and goods. Even today, Gobi families raise camels for wool, milk, transport and carrying loads, and at Khongoryn Els the rides offered to travellers are the tourist face of an age-old relationship between people, animal and desert.
In the remote mountains and plains of the Gobi, the wild relative of all this also survives, in critical condition: the wild camel or khavtgai, a separate species that is critically endangered, with only a few hundred individuals left, split between Mongolia and China. Its presence is a reminder that this desert, which at first glance seems lifeless, is in fact a living and unique ecosystem, with species found nowhere else on the planet.
The Gobi — whose name means something like 'waterless place' or 'desert' in Mongolian — is one of the world's great deserts, but it is not a sea of dunes like the Sahara: most of it is dry steppe, gravel, bare mountains and canyons, with only a few sand fields such as Khongoryn Els. It stretches across southern Mongolia and northern China over more than a million square kilometres, and for millennia it has been a land of passage and grazing for the nomadic peoples of the steppe.
Long before Genghis Khan, tribes of herders and mounted warriors roamed these lands; the Mongol Empire of the 13th century itself, the largest contiguous empire in history, grew out of the nomadic steppe culture that surrounds the Gobi to the north. The desert was a frontier, a trade route and a refuge. Along its edges ran branches of the caravan routes that connected China with Central Asia and, further on, with Persia and Europe: the so-called Silk Road was not a single road but a network of tracks along which goods, ideas and religions travelled, and on which the Bactrian camel was irreplaceable.
The life of Gobi herders is still organised today around seasonal movement in search of pasture and water, around the ger — the round felt dwelling, easy to take down and perfectly adapted to the extreme climate — and around the five traditional animals of the Mongolian nomadic world: horse, cow (or yak), sheep, goat and camel. In such a harsh environment, hospitality is not a luxury but a rule of survival: welcoming travellers and offering them milk tea and a roof is a sacred custom that is still alive in the yurts at the foot of the dunes. Anyone who visits Khongoryn Els and spends some time with a herding family is getting a glimpse of a way of life that has changed surprisingly little over the centuries.
For much of the 20th century, while Mongolia was a socialist state allied with the Soviet Union, the Gobi was a remote, sparsely populated region that was hard to get around. Livestock farming was collectivised, a few mines and operations were opened, and the desert remained, above all, herders' territory. The fall of the socialist regime in the early 1990s and the opening up of the country gradually turned the Gobi into one of Mongolia's great tourist destinations, thanks to landscapes such as the Khongoryn Els dunes, the icy canyon of Yolyn Am and the fossil-rich cliffs of Bayanzag.
To protect that natural heritage, the southern Gobi was placed within Gobi-Gurvansaikhan National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the country, covering more than 27,000 square kilometres. Its name — 'the three beauties of the Gobi' — refers to the three mountain ranges that cross it. The park doesn't protect only the dunes: it covers a mosaic of desert and mountain habitats that support an extraordinary wildlife adapted to the extremes, from ibex and the great argali sheep to the snow leopard in the high country, Pallas's cat, gazelles, vultures and eagles.
Today, Khongoryn Els faces the challenge of every natural destination that becomes popular: welcoming travellers without degrading a fragile ecosystem or disrupting the lives of the herders who live there. Park entrance fees fund its conservation, and much of the tourism relies on the nomads themselves, who run ger camps and camel rides. The balance isn't always easy — rubbish, scarce water and pressure on pastures are real problems — but the model of family-run camps and local guides means that much of the benefit stays in the area. Anyone who climbs to the crest of the dunes at sunset, hears their hum and watches the sand light up while the camels make their way back below understands why this corner of the desert is worth looking after.
