Golden Eagle Festival

Thirteen days built around one event: the Golden Eagle Festival, held every autumn in the far west of Mongolia. We fly to the Altai mountains and stay among the Kazakh people who keep this tradition alive, then explore the lakes, glaciers and ancient sites of the region. An optional extension continues to central Mongolia and the Gobi.

After a short stop in Ulaanbaatar we fly west to the edge of the country, to Bayan-Ölgii: a hard, beautiful land where Kazakh herders still live by the oldest nomad customs. Where possible we spend a day as guests of a local family to hear their story. Then come two full days of festival in Ölgii: riding contests, eagles called down from the hills to their masters, archery and tests of skill between hunters and their golden eagles. It is a rare chance to meet an ancient culture that is still real and far from the usual tourist routes. We sleep in traditional gers and share the daily life of the herders. The festival is not put on for visitors: it is a gathering of the community, a celebration of Kazakh identity, and the way young people learn to work with animals and the land.

The hunters never breed their eagles. They take a young bird from a nest high on the cliffs, and always a female, because females are larger, stronger and fiercer than males. Training starts at once and takes time, patience and closeness: the eagle lives with its hunter, sleeps close by, learns the hunter’s voice, flies on command and comes back. For the Kazakhs the bond is more than practical: the eagle is part of the family, a partner and an extension of the hunter’s own strength. After about ten years, when the bird is fully grown and can breed, it is set free. The parting is never easy. There is a small ceremony, a last meal together, a few quiet words, and then the eagle flies off to its freedom.

After the festival we head into western Mongolia, a remote and powerful region where nature rules and the traces of past peoples are everywhere. Altai Tavan Bogd National Park is an open-air museum: in valleys scattered with nomad gers we find rock carvings, cave paintings, standing stone figures from the Turkic era and intact Kazakh graves. Near Khoton Lake we look for Aral Tolgoi, one of the finest archaeological sites in the area. We follow the shores of Khoton and Khurgan, two linked glacier lakes that mirror the Five Holy Peaks, the highest of the Altai, among them Khüiten, at 4,374 m the top of Mongolia.

A little further east lies Tolbo Lake, wide and ringed by rocky hills. From there we go on to Tsambagarav park and the Namarjin valley, where small groups of Kazakh herders still move with the seasons, and climb towards the glaciers of Tsambagarav, a sacred mountain over 4,200 m high and one of the most storied peaks of the region. Then back to Ölgii for the flight to Ulaanbaatar, where we visit the monasteries and markets of the capital.

The optional extension shows a very different Mongolia of steppe, volcanic craters, canyons and sand. From Ulaanbaatar we cross the central plateau to the sacred mountain of Khognokhan, the old capital Kharkhorin with the walled monastery of Erdene Zuu and its 108 stupas, and the volcanic lake Terkhiin Tsagaan below Khorgo crater. We walk up to the mountain monastery of Tövkhön and go south to Ongi, where monasteries destroyed in the 1930s still stand in ruins. Last comes the Gobi: the fossil beds of Bayanzag, the great dunes of Khongoryn Els and the Yol valley, whose canyon keeps walls of ice even in summer.