Mongolian Adventure

Intrepid traveller Josie Stanford takes an unforgettable trip by horseback into a remote region of Mongolia

- Josie Stanford

At what point do you know you’re on an adventure holiday? Is it when you’ve driven for five hours without there being a signpost, or a single stretch of road? When your horse has raced through a rocky pass, its muscular frame pulsing with pure power and speed? Or is it when the guide looks decidedly stressed about getting the group over a mountain pass in a rainstorm?

Okay, I admit it. We have a guide, cook, drivers, wranglers and a translator. Our adventure is meticulously planned, but as we are literally in outer Mongolia, three day’s drive away from the capital with just a satellite phone and flighty horses, there is a distinct feeling that anything, can, may and probably will happen. Our toilet is a hole in the ground with a canvas screen around it, like a windbreak at the beach. This single feature makes it the closest I’ve been to wilderness camping.

As it happens the ‘bathroom’ was a cinch. I should have focused my trepidation on the half-wild horses like normal people. Day one saw three of us hit the floor!

A country made for horses

One thing our holiday comes blissfully without is other holiday makers. Zavkhan Trekking specialises in taking travellers to remote corners of remote countries. We are in Mongolia’s Zavkhan Province, one of the least visited areas of the country and the best terrain for riding in a country made for horses. There are no fences, no private land, no major roads.

If you’ve ever wanted to taste freedom on the back of a horse, come to Mongolia. Wide flat grasslands are just begging to be galloped across. But when you actually look at the ground, it’s not flat. It’s rutted by the wheels of trucks, pockmarked with holes made by ground squirrels and marmot, and made humpy by tufts of rough grass and mounds of soil.