Mongolia covers 1.56 million square kilometres. Its population is 3.3 million. The remaining 1.8 million are distributed across the rest of the country — across an area the size of Western Europe.
The Rara Avis Team
The numbers tell the story of what makes Mongolia exceptional. The country covers 1.56 million square kilometres. Its population is 3.3 million, of whom 1.5 million live in Ulaanbaatar. The remaining 1.8 million people are distributed across the rest of the country. The population density outside the capital is roughly one person per square kilometre. There are places in Mongolia where the nearest human settlement is a full day's horse ride away.
In an age where the entire world has been photographed and mapped and written about, where almost anywhere on earth can be reached within twenty-four hours of flight, where digital connectivity has created a flattening of global experience into recognisable similarity, there remain places on earth where you can travel for a day across a landscape and not see a single human being. Mongolia is perhaps the greatest concentration of genuine remaining wilderness on earth that is simultaneously accessible to ordinary tourists.
But the statistics alone do not explain the actual appeal. The real story is cultural. Mongolian nomadic culture has developed, over more than three thousand years, a system of hospitality that is built into social obligation at a level that is difficult to overstate. It arose from necessity: in a landscape where distances are vast and winters are fatal, a traveller approaching a settlement had to be confident they would receive shelter and food. A system of mutual obligation emerged. You provide tea and food and warmth and possibly a place to sleep, and when they depart in the morning, the obligation is complete. It is not a commercial transaction; it is a cultural exchange embedded in the fabric of how people relate to one another.
The landscape diversity of Mongolia is extraordinary. The Gobi Desert in the south. The Altai Mountains in the west, reaching toward 4,400 metres, home to the last remaining population of snow leopards in Mongolia. The Kazakh eagle hunters maintaining a tradition using golden eagles that stretches back centuries. Khövsgöl in the far north, Mongolia's largest freshwater lake. The Tsaatan reindeer herders in the northern reaches, maintaining a pastoral culture that exists nowhere else in the world with such completeness. The eastern steppe gazelle migration: hundreds of thousands of animals moving twice yearly in one of the last great terrestrial wildlife migrations on earth.
What makes Mongolia distinct is that the landscape exists not as something preserved in a national park, separated from human activity, but as something woven together with nomadic culture. The gers you see on the steppe are not museum exhibits; they are homes. The herds you see are not wildlife documentaries; they are working animals. The people you encounter are not performing ethnicity; they are living their lives and allowing visitors brief access to those lives.
What makes this moment particular is that Mongolia exists now in a window of opportunity that is slowly closing. The country is changing. Tourism infrastructure is improving. New airports are under construction. The vast distances that meant a journey to Mongolia required time and genuine commitment are being bridged. This particular Mongolia, the one that exists now, will change. In ten years, in twenty years, it will not be the same.
Rara Avis has spent years building the relationships and knowledge that make Mongolia genuinely accessible without flattening its edges. The guides are Mongolian and carry deep knowledge of the places they visit. The itineraries are designed with sufficient time in each location that the place actually settles into experience. The commitment is to let Mongolia be what it actually is rather than reshaping it into what tourists expect.