Gobi Desert
“Above me are millions of bright glittering stars and I can clearly see the Milky Way. It’s cold outside but my eyes are fixated on the dark night sky and I just have to stay out a little bit longer.”
Early morning I wake up in Mongolia after my first night in a yurt. I am at our first campsite in the middle of the Gobi Desert. For five days we drive past Gobi’s wonders. The first stop is a hike through the water canyon, a carved out semi-dry canyon where ice lies all year round. The landscapes we drive through are endlessly stretched. We drive through red deserts and yellow-sanded lowlands always matched with clear blue skies those you can only see in Mongolia. Once in a while we pass shepherds with hundreds of sheep, skulls of large animals or I see a dust cloud in the distance, which probably is another jeep. But mostly its endless space as far as my eyes can reach.
The sun goes down and against the horizon walk dozens of camels, a magical sight. Late at night we arrive at the singing sand dunes, our second highlight. We spend the night in a small yurt camp owned by a Mongolian family. As a welcome we get yak tea and yak milk cookies, a true Mongolian delicacy! The dunes are called the singing dunes because of the whistling sound they make when the wind blows over them. We climb up the steep dunes, quite a workout in loose sand, but the view is all worth it.
Our last and my favorite stop in the Gobi Desert are the Red Flaming Cliffs (Bajanzag). It is a large formation of deep red colored cliffs in the middle of the rather flat desert landscape. The first dinosaur eggs where found right here. The complete silence, the absolute stunning beauty of the rocky red desert and the sky turning purple and pink of the setting sun is a breathtaking scenery.
