Mongolia Naadam Festival Trek

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia · Mongolia

Easy5 daysAsia~£1,200 est.

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Overview

Naadam is Mongolia at full volume: every 11-13 July the three games — wrestling, archery and horse racing — take over the country, and Ulaanbaatar's National Stadium hosts the biggest of it, opening with a pageant of cavalry, standard-bearers and throat singers. The wrestling brackets run for two days of eagle-dance entrances and sudden falls; the horse races happen out at Khui Doloon Khudag on the open steppe, where half-wild horses run 20-30 km cross-country under child jockeys and the finish line is a dust cloud full of galloping families. Pair the festival with two days at Hustai National Park, 100 km west, where takhi — Przewalski's horses, extinct in the wild by the late 1960s — graze free again after one of conservation's great reintroductions. A ger stay with kumis, fermented mare's milk, completes the education. The catch is capacity: Ulaanbaatar's beds and internal flights sell out months before Naadam, so book by March. Days are hot, nights genuinely cold, and the steppe UV is fierce. Around £1,200 for five days with festival tickets and Hustai transfers.