Mongolia nomad horse riding vacation

Planet

We work closely with local individuals and their families in Mongolia to design journeys in an optimal way to limit our impact on the environment.

We stay with local families and in locally owned hotels in the cities, and travel with local guides to learn about the local traditions and culture along the way. This adventure involves a lot of hiking and riding through pristine environments and we work with the policy of ‘Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints’. This means that we do not leave any foreign materials or waste in these environments from our camps, nor do we take any objects from the environment nor disturb its equilibrium by our presence or actions.

Throughout the trips, we will stay with local families in their felt gers, all of which use solar power for lighting at night. These are summer gers and are packed down for the winter.

Finally, we are very proud to have partnered with Water-To-Go, specialists in personal and expedition water purification, instantly, and on-demand. Their unique, 350L water bottles incorporate advanced filtration technology to convert even the dirtiest water to drinking water as you fill up.

Being able to produce safe drinking water from sources off the beaten track, of sometimes dubious quality, offers incredible benefits to our adventure travelers and eliminates the need for single-use plastic bottles. We subsidise this product to make it more accessible to you.

People

This is a very interactive trip and we use local guides on this who help to explain the cultural necessities and customs. Some examples of this include not passing close to a ger without loudly informing the occupants first; failure to do this means the group or a client can be attacked by the guard dogs and will cause great discomfort and embarrassment to the occupants and possible injury to the dogs which then have to be forcibly restrained when they were only doing their job.

Similarly in Mongolia if you were to throw a piece of plastic into the fire in the middle of a ger you would be seen to disrespect the god of the fire and therefore the hospitality of the family you were staying with.

We actively encourage the giving of tips for meaningful services an the purchasing of locally sourced goods/souvenirs to support families and communities. We believe that partnering with local families not only enriches the overall experience of this trip but it also allows our clients to understand local traditions in Mongolia.

When staying with local families our travelers will learn many local traditions and techniques from the families making their many varied dairy products including khmyes which is a slightly fermented milk drink, customarily used to welcome new comers into a Ger, as well as yogurt, butter, cheese and even .... vodka!
Travelers also can learn how to milk the yaks and cows with the women of the families, every sunrise!

Both we and our local partners love and care deeply about horses and this is reflected in the way horses are used in our adventures. All horses live outside all of the time, they are not stabled and in Central Asia when they aren’t being ridden they are returned to their herds. All horses in Central Asia have a 5 month ‘vacation’ where they do not work and are turned out on large areas of land living as a herd. Their diet consists of local sourced grass, hay and hard feed only. Horses are not ridden when they have any sores or injuries. When used as pack horses they are rotated with the other horses for riding and have ‘days off’ during the adventure to rest and recuperate energy whenever needed. Tack is minimal and comfortable – it’s professionally fitted to each horse individually. The local communities that own these horses have generations of experience in making sure they are kept safe, happy and healthy and we encourage this knowledge to be shared with our clients so they too can learn to ride in harmony with these beautiful animals.