Colette's Grand Detour

Our Mongolian Airlines flight from Frankfurt landed at 4.40am in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Surprisingly Mongolian Airlines is actually a very nice airline – the place was relatively new with the typical amenities you would expect on a modern flight nowadays – including USB points to charge your devices and decent food. The Entertainment system was a bit limited in what was available – but by no means would you run out of things to watch. All in all – a good airline! Unfortunately the only flight they operate from Europe is Frankfurt at the moment.

Since we were landing so early in the morning, and wouldn’t be able to check into our hotel until mid-afternoon, we had decided to book a tour for the day and agreed with the guide that for an extra $27 he would come all the way out to the airport to pick us up and start the trip at 5.30am. This worked out perfectly and our guide Manduul was brilliant!

Our first proper stop of the tour would be Terenlj National Park. However, we had time to kill before our first activity (horse-riding) and so took a long 2 hour drive on the other side of the mountains from Ulaanbaatar. This was our first taste of the big open sky scenery that Mongolia is famed for. Even at the airport – the scenery is spectacular and doesn’t disappoint. Big open expanses of velvet green with soft rolling hills, leading to bigger mountains in the distance, can be seen in every direction.

About 90 minutes into our drive we visited a gigantic statue that is being built in the middle of nowhere (well, 30km from Ulaanbaatar – but it feels like the middle of nowhere). This is the Maidar Buddha Project – in Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism it is believed that the future Buddha will appear in a future age when the teachings of the historical Buddha have largely disappeared. The project began in 2014 – and still hasn’t been finished in 2026! In fact it looked pretty abandoned to me, with no active construction. The issue seems to have been financing as the original vision wasn’t just to build a giant Buddha statue, but to create an entirely new city for up to 300,000 people surrounding it.

The drive from the airport to Gorkhi-Terelj National Park takes about 3 hours. Sitting just 70km east of Ulaanbaatar, the park is very popular with locals coming from the city for the weekend to enjoy nature, and there are lots of ger camps (both fancy and basic) that can be booked to stay in. However, it’s also common for locals to simply bring a tent and set up camp where they wish. Terelj looks distinctly differently from the surrounding open steppe. With its rounded granite mountains sculpted by millions of years of erosion, dense pine forests and alpine meadows, it actually felt very European.

Our first activity was a bit of surprise, and perhaps I should have read the itinerary more carefully when I booked the day trip. We were going horse-riding! Normally the horse ride would involve crossing a river and having lunch with a local family. Unfortunately due to unseasonably late snow fall a few weeks ago, the snow melt coming from the mountains had flooded the river and made it impossible to cross safely. So instead we did a 1-hour loop through a lightly forested area – which was about as much horse riding that I feel I need to do for the foreseeable future. Fortunately our horse guide quickly guessed we were not particularly experienced and we got led around going at slower than walking pace. A good experience since this is literally the land of the horse, but not something I will be signing up for more of.

Next up was Turtle Rock – a 24-metre granite outcrop naturally-shaped like a giant turtle. And the Aryabal Meditation Temple, just a little further up the valley from Turtle Rock gives amazing views back down the valley (although the temple itself is a reconstruction).

After this we left the National Park to head to the Chinggis Khan Equestrian Statue around 50km east of Ulaanbaatar. This stainless steel statue of Chinggis Khan riding a horse stands at 50m tall and is the largest equestrian statue in the world. It was completed in 2008 to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongol Empire and this location was chosen, as legend says it is the spot where the young Temujin (Chinggis Khan’s original name) found a golden whip. He faces east towards where he was born in the Khentii Mountains and is clad in 250 tonnes of stainless steel. The complex was built by a wealthy business man and within the pedestal you can visit a range of oddities including one of Mongolia’s largest boots. To get up into the horse’s head for photos, there is tiny lift followed by a tight spiralling staircase but the views are worth it.

By this time and having been going since early the day before with an overnight flight and little sleep we were dead on our feet. Our fabulous guide who had spent the entire day sharing the history and culture of his country took us to a road-side restaurant in a ger for big plates of fried noodles and lamp dumplings before we headed to our hotel in Ulaanbaatar. By 4pm I was in bed and falling asleep but it was a great first day in Mongolia!