Every year, London-based New York Times journalist Lauren Jackson meets with her Philadelphia cousin Cole Paullin to travel somewhere together: This year they traveled to Mongolia, traveling in an SUV with a tent on the roof to stop there to be able to see where they just happened and to be able to visit some of the most famous places in the Central Asian country. During the trip, which she described in an article published in September, Jackson met many other tourists, especially millennials, who, like her, were drawn to the nature, vast spaces and diverse experiences that Mongolia offers: the same things, The Mongolian government is trying to promote the diversification of its economy, apparently with some success.
Mongolia lies between China and Russia and occupies an area of over 1.5 million square kilometers, more than four times the size of Germany, but has only 3.4 million inhabitants. Almost half live in the capital Ulaanbaatar in the north of the country, while about a quarter are nomadic herders who move with their families and herds two, three or four times a year. The country's economy depends primarily on exports related to mining activity, but recently the government has also been focusing on tourism to recover from the global crisis related to the coronavirus pandemic.
The main aspect that seems to attract people to Mongolia is its vast, untouched nature, which includes the Altai Mountains in the northwest of the country, the vast steppes and grasslands in the central part, and the Gobi Desert in the southeast. As you cross it, you will find protected areas and natural parks where the snow leopard and the Przewalski's horse, a rare species of wild horse, live. But you can also learn about the life of nomadic shepherds and stay overnight in one of their traditional yurts, tents with a circular layout supported by wooden frames and covered with animal skins or other materials.
In addition to the annual meeting of hunters with their eagles, there are several events that attract adventurous visitors from abroad every year: It is the Mongol Rally, a race in which people drive through Eastern Europe and Asia in pickup trucks or broken down cars , and the Mongol Derby, the longest horse race in the world, a long-distance race with 25 stages of 40 kilometers each, for a total of one thousand, along the route created in 1224 by the Mongolian Genghis Khan to facilitate communication within his empire.
People dismantle a yurt in Sukhbaatar province, eastern Mongolia, May 15, 2023 (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
Olivia Hankel, a 25-year-old from Oregon who met Jackson at Ulaanbaatar Airport in late July, had traveled to Mongolia to train for the Mongol Derby. Willie Freimuth, a 28-year-old from North Carolina studying paleontology, was there to study fossils. Sangjay Choegyal, a 36-year-old from Bali, was traveling with friends to visit the Orhkon Valley, one of the most impressive and interesting areas in the country from a scenic, archaeological and cultural perspective.
Then, in Karakorum, the ancient capital of the Mongol Empire, Jackson met a group of former university friends from various European countries who didn't want an organized trip, but rather an experience where they could stop wherever they were, a bit like she and her cousin did .
In the past decade, millennials like her, people born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, have increasingly begun to choose places for their vacations far away from mass tourism centers, observes Jackson. Perhaps it is a reaction to “a world that is increasingly condensed into our smartphones, in which the same travel destinations appear again and again in Instagram feeds and travel blogs,” he continues, and in which “what you deserve in terms of accessibility is lost According to Jackson, the Mongolian government is trying to make the most of this trend and address this goal, also because a 2019 survey cited by the local tourism ministry suggests that half of the tourists visiting the country in this year were less than 40 years old.
Most visitors to Mongolia come from Russia, China, South Korea and neighboring Kazakhstan, but between 2021 and 2022 the number of people from Europe and the United States increased by 500 percent, Jackson writes. Therefore, the government of Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene launched an online marketing campaign targeting people between 23 and 40 years old and, since January this year, exempted citizens of 34 new countries, including the United States, from the tourist visa requirement for the United States and Italy to attract even more tourists (the number of countries that do not require a tourist visa to travel to Mongolia is now 61). According to the Ministry of Tourism, the number of foreign tourists arriving in Mongolia since the beginning of this year exceeded 600,000 at the end of October: a record, more than all those who arrived in all of 2019 (577,300).
The goal of Oyun-Erdene, who declared the period between 2023 and 2025 “the years to visit Mongolia,” is to exceed the limit of one million tourists per year.
(Lightscape, Unsplash)
The growth of tourism in Mongolia also seems to be confirmed by some workers in the sector. The travel agency Follow The Tracks had sold out all three trips it organized to Mongolia in the summer of 2023 and was therefore planning further trips, said co-founder Max Münch. Both the car rental company Jackson turned to at Ulaanbaatar Airport and others in the city were almost out of available vehicles. Especially after the pandemic, “people want to experience a feeling of freedom again,” says Münch, and that’s why “they are looking for it in the vast emptiness of Mongolia.”
Tom Morgan, founder of The Adventurists, an English company that organizes extreme and slightly bizarre trips, claims that in Mongolia you can have experiences that are “much more interesting, transformative and captivating than in the Taj Mahal,” pointing out that most famous Indian monument.
Jackson, who traveled 45 hours over the course of a week, said that although Mongolia's territory is vast and the population is very sparse, connections between the capital and most popular tourist destinations are accessible. With a Mongolian SIM card, he could almost always use the internet and slept in one of a herding family's yurts, which are often equipped with solar panels for electricity. When she and her cousin were about to get stuck in a stream – an experience she describes as normal for travelers in Mongolia – they were rescued by people they had communicated with by exchanging messages via Google Translate, which is a allows quick translation of sentences from one language to another.
A woman named Nurmaa, the wife of a shepherd, transports her family's livestock to Sukhbaatar province on May 14, 2023 (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
Improving the country's roads and infrastructure as well as providing more accommodation for tourists is one of the Mongolian government's goals for the development of the sector. The news site Mongolia Weekly also mentions some potential niches that could receive more attention, such as luxury tourism, tourism based on spiritual retreats, or so-called sustainable tourism, i.e. reducing impact on the environment and creating benefits for the local population.
Another government initiative to promote tourism concerns gambling. Parliament is discussing the legalization of casinos, following the example of Macau, the Chinese special administrative region that has developed into the world's most important gambling center over the last twenty years. The idea would be to build a casino near Ulaanbaatar airport to stimulate investment and attract a wider audience, but at the moment residents seem rather skeptical and politicians are cautious, also because there have been some cases of corruption in the past , he writes Mongolia Weekly.
– Also read: We may never know where Genghis Khan is buried