Most people land in Ulaanbaatar and immediately try to get out of it. The city feels wrong to them, too Soviet, too modern, too much traffic. They expected steppe and got a capital with a Gucci store and an air quality problem. So they rush through it, one or two nights maximum, then into a jeep heading for the landscape.
And they miss something important before they’ve even started.
I know because I did the same tour last summer. Five hours of driving in silence with a guide who didn’t speak English. Gas station lunch included in the package. I asked the guide for coffee at the stop instead of included tea. “That’s extra. $1.” Come on. We got to Karakorum, the ancient capital of the Mongol Empire, and the guide knew nothing about its history. Rushed us through. Then the “Gobi Desert” was two sand dunes and a family with camels waiting for a tip.
I paid real money for that. And I wasn’t the only one standing there feeling like I’d missed the whole point.
That experience is why Khiimori Journeys exists. And the itinerary below is the answer to everything that was wrong with it
Day 1: You arrive. That’s it.
No orientation session. No group activity. No itinerary briefing.
We meet you at the airport and help You to check in. You rest. In the evening you eat dinner together for the first time. That’s it.
This is intentional. You’re still running on the frequency of wherever you came from. Your khiimori, the wind horse, the vital force inside you, is at its lowest point right now. You’re in transit mode. Still managing. Still performing. You cannot begin anything until you’ve actually arrived.
Day 1 is not wasted. It’s the landing that makes everything else possible.
Days 2: UB. The story they didn’t teach you
Here’s the thing about Ulaanbaatar that most tours get completely wrong: they treat it like a transfer point. Rush through, tick the box, move on to the steppe. They do this because nobody on the tour knows what they’re looking at. So they skip it.
We don’t skip it. Because you need to understand what was taken before you can understand what survived.
The Chinggis Khan National Museum tells you the version they didn’t teach in Western schools. The Mongol Empire was not just a war machine, that’s the lazy western version, and they needed you to believe it for a reason. There we will show you physical evidence to prove then wrong.
Then the Ming Dynasty came. Then the Soviets. The script was banned. Hundreds of monasteries destroyed. History rewritten so that “nomad” became the polite word for primitive.
They needed you to believe Mongolia was primitive. Right? Think about why.
That evening at the welcome dinner, we talk about khiimori for the first time. Not as a travel concept. As the force that survived all of that erasure. As the thing we’re actually here to wake up.
You need to understand what was taken before you can understand why what survived matters so much.
Day 3: Khustai. The horses that came back.
Most tours take the road. The road is paved, it’s faster, all you do is sleep to pass the time, and you arrive. But when you take the road, Mongolia looks like a country you’re passing through. When you go off-road, and we choose off-road for most of the trip, it looks like another world. The landscape changes every twenty minutes, there are no other cars, you’re actually in it, and something in your nervous system shifts because your body understands this is real terrain and you are genuinely moving through it. The adventure is off-road. The scenery is off-road. The road is just faster.
The first time I went to see the wild horses in Khustai, we drove up in a jeep, parked on a hill, and stand outside there squinting into the distance. No binoculars. A herd of Przewalski’s horses maybe 400 meters away and we had no way of getting closer. It felt like a car zoo, honestly. Everyone took a photo and we drove back.
I remember thinking, okay, so that’s that.
So for you, I decided to put us on horseback with trained horses. At Khustai, you’ll experience the park at the level of the animals, no watching from a parked jeep.
My great-grandfather used to play the morin khuur, the horsehead fiddle, until a mother horse would cry and accept her foal back. It’s a coaxing ritual. That’s not folklore. It’s a technique passed down through generations.
When you’re on horseback moving through that landscape with that in your head, it’s a completely different thing from a windshield.
Twenty minutes of nature immersion begins to quiet the default mode network, the loop in your brain that replays worries and to-do lists. But this is more than nature. This is nature plus meaning. The encoding is deeper.
Days 4: The drive to Kharkhorin. The music that rewires you.
Four hours of steppe road to Kharkhorin, the old empire capital. Picnic lunch on the side somewhere, not at a gas station, because that’s the one thing I swore I’d never do after my own experience. The drive is not dead time. Off-road it never is.
That evening: a traditional music concert. Urtiin duu, the long song, where a single note lasts longer than you think a human breath can last. Morin khuur, the horsehead fiddle. Khoomei throat singing, where one voice produces two tones simultaneously
Here’s what nobody tells you about Mongolic music: it’s not entertainment. In this culture, music is khiimori technology, the original method for moving the force inside you. You feel it even if you can’t explain what you felt. Like, your chest knows before your brain does.
Day 5: Erdene Zuu. Tamir’s workshop. Pay attention to this day.
I went back to Erdene Zuu alone after that rushed tour, with research I’d done beforehand, and spent two hours going through everything slowly.
The Soyombo symbol on Erdene Zuu’s gates is also on Mongolia’s national flag. It was created by Zanabazar at Tövkhön Monastery in 1686. The 108 stupas around the perimeter aren’t decorative, 108 is sacred in Buddhist practice. The monastery was built from the rubble of Karakorum, the old Mongol capital. The Soviet purges of 1937 destroyed most of what existed in Mongolia. This place survived.
When I walked through knowing all of that, I got goosebumps at the smallest details. That’s what I want people to feel the first time, not the second. So we don’t rush through it. And before we go, you know what you’re looking at.
After, we have a private session with Tamir. Tamir writes in traditional Mongolian vertical script, the script the Soviets banned. His grandmother worked in Soviet censoring offices and instead of destroying the manuscripts she was ordered to destroy, she hid them. He learned from those manuscripts. The line is unbroken because she refused to break it.
The session is called “Breath, Gesture, Trace.” A two-hour private workshop, not a demonstration, not a tourist thing. Mongolian calligraphy uses breath and gesture to create vertical strokes of ink on the page. You work with Mongol bichig, exploring breath control, body awareness, the way you begin a stroke, sustain it, release it. It’s physical and spiritual, grounded entirely in the present moment. By the end of two hours you understand something about presence that a meditation class can describe but can’t quite give you.
Hands-on making creates 40–60% stronger memory traces than watching or reading. You will remember the smell of Tamir’s studio. The weight of the brush. The moment your hand did something you didn’t intend. That’s in your body now.
Day 6, The nomadic family
The questions tourists always ask about gers: where’s the bathroom, do they have a shower, is there a heater. There’s a tone underneath, almost like pity, like they’re looking at something primitive and being polite about it. I had someone comment once that nomads are primitive and don’t teach anything.
Wrong. They carry more knowledge about how to actually live than most of us will ever access.
A ger is not a tent. It’s a cosmological system that also happens to be a home.
When a tourist looks at a ger and thinks “primitive,” they’re looking at the outside of an architecture they don’t have the language to read yet. That’s not the tourist’s fault. Nobody gave them the language. That’s what we’re here for.
We also cook together. Buuz, steamed dumplings, made with the family, eaten with the family. And the cooking itself is a lesson, because nomadic culture wastes nothing. Every part of the animal is used. Preservation techniques that work without refrigeration, across seasons, across thousands of kilometers of steppe. It’s not nostalgia. It’s problem-solving at a level most modern food systems have completely abandoned.
You will learn more about sustainability in that kitchen than from any documentary.
Day 7, Tövkhön
A two-hour climb through forest. By the time you reach the top you’ve left something below that you didn’t realize you were carrying.
There’s a cave passage in the rock that you move through, which the tradition describes as rebirth, passing through and coming out different on the other side. But here’s what nobody usually says about that place. Those walls have been chanted in for centuries. Zanabazar himself meditated and worked there. The monastery sits at 2,600 meters in forest silence, and the stone has been holding that frequency, that level of sustained spiritual practice, for hundreds of years.
When you press your hands against that rock, you’re not doing a tourist activity. You’re making contact with something charged by an unbroken practice across time. I have done that in Dayan Derkh caves and felt reborn, so I dove into details.
Research on resonant spaces shows that environments with histories of sustained vocal practice measurably affect brainwave states. Stone amplifies. Repetition leaves something in the material. Whether you frame it scientifically or spiritually, you feel it. And by the time you get there, after everything that came before, you’re ready to feel it in a way you wouldn’t have been at the start.
Day 8, Ursa Major Lodge
After Tövkhön, I want us to stop for a moment, to process everything you’ve learned and felt.
On previous tours I joined, I often felt exhausted because every day was about rushing, driving, and moving to the next location. With Khiimori, I wanted something different. I wanted us to slow down and stay present with where we are.
Ursa Major Lodge is genuinely beautiful, warm, quiet, and deeply comfortable. After days in the steppe, this is where you sit and digest everything the journey has already placed inside you.
In the evening, near the fire, I share oral stories translated from Mongolic nomads. They will be told in english for the first time.
And then there’s the sky.
Ursa Major brought one of the only large telescopes of its kind into this region, while also helping local children engage with astronomy and research. Out here, far from city light pollution, the Milky Way over Mongolia feels almost unreal. It genuinely deserves a film made about it.
Days 9 and 10, Horse trekking
Two days. No phones. No signal.
Everything we’ve done before this has been preparing us for the final part of the journey, learning how to feel the body and mind together again.
No signal. No phones. Just hours on horseback through landscapes so wild, untouched, and raw that they sometimes make me cry because they remind me of my village in Buryatia.
This part of Mongolia feels deeply familiar to me. It carries the same atmosphere I grew up with during family camping trips in the Siberian taiga, evenings around the fire, silence between the trees, stories about local spirits and the unseen world that people respected rather than questioned.
Out here, food cooked over a fire after a full day of truly moving your body tastes unlike anything else. Not because of the recipe, but because of what your body has done to deserve it.
I could’ve chosen ger camps for us to stay at every night. It would’ve been easier and more typical for a tour. But I wanted to create something more memorable, something different.
In my experience, the moments people miss the most aren’t always the comfortable hotel nights. They’re the nights in the middle of nowhere: sleeping near the forest, hearing the fire crackle, waking up to cold morning air, horses nearby, and feeling completely removed from normal life for a while.
Your nervous system has been resetting for days. The cortisol from screen fatigue and constant decision-making clears through movement and silence and genuine physical tiredness. You think more clearly after this kind of tired. You sleep immediately and wake up actually rested.
Day 11, Back to UB
The last dinner is not a graduation ceremony. It’s the first meal of whoever you’ve become over the last eleven days. I designed it to feel completely different from the first one, because you should.
Day 12, You leave
What you bring back isn’t a collection of experiences. It’s a shift in how you relate to your own energy. You spent nearly two weeks in a place where khiimori is taken seriously, where the question of whether a person is really alive and really aligned is built into the culture at the level of daily practice
That does not wash off. The research on narrative identity, the way immersive cultural experience restructures how you understand your own story, suggests that what changes is not just your memories. It is the framework through which you interpret your life going forward.
You leave with your khiimori up. And that carries you into whatever is already waiting for you next.
How to go
The journey runs in small groups. Dates and availability on the journeys page.
If you want the full itinerary before deciding, request it. I will send it to you directly. Every day, every stop, every reason why.