Gobi

© 2024 Tofisch & Partner We started our trip in the homeland of Chinggis Khan with a hard drive through the land but the landscape in the Otgon Tenger Uul Nature Reserve could not have a bigger nature variety: 40m high sand dunes, endless steppe, big lakes and swamp areas, Siberian forests and breathtaking mountain highlands. So we are lucky to reach our base camp at 2800m. Finally we can do that for what we came her: Making long and pretentious treks and discover untouched landscapes, which perhaps no human being has reached before.

An adventure in a land which is four times bigger than Germany and has a statistic from one and a half inhabitants per km². That the history of Mongolia was going around the world was taking care the well known Khan Dschinggis. He could establish with his feared “golden hordes” the biggest existing empire of the world. He govern with a dangerous mix of politic impudence and brutal cruelty, but it was also Dschinggis Khan to invent the first functional post system.

© 2024 Tofisch & Partner Also today “Gers” (Mongolian tends) and horses are the characteristics of the Mongolian steppe. In the poor landscape the nomads can just take out of it only the mostly necessary for food of their sheep, goats, yaks and horses. Often we were invited from the very friendly nomads for “tsaa” milk tea or “airag” fermented horse milk. Sometimes they offer us a Mongolian speciality: “the goat in the milk pot”. Astonished and deeply impressed we learn slowly about the culture and the local art of living.

© 2024 Tofisch & Partner All that is turning around in our hats, during we are sitting on the top up here on 3800m on a nameless mountain. Our thoughts and views are flying over the deep under us lying steppe on which the hordes of Dschinggis Khan were riding in the past, and on the horizon we are looking out our tends in the base camp. It is time to pack the rest of our lunch, the jackets, and the thermo bottles, in our rucksacks and leave the summit in direction base camp. No one from us wants to be remembered that we are sitting already in one week in a plane, that bring us and our impressions back in the “narrow” Europe.