UK Edition
Nomads, hunters and shamans: the surreal world of five-star travel in remote Mongolia
It may be one of the most remote areas in the world, but now you can enjoy luxury travel in Mongolia. Reindeer milk is optional. High up in a marquee in Mongolia’s Darkhad Valley, a place which is considered inaccessible even by hardy Mongolians, a waiter was offering me a choice of white wine with my lunch.
My fellow guests and I were enjoying a meal of salmon, chicken, beef, asparagus and fresh salad. It was a feast, by any standard, but up here, in this remote corner of a vast, rugged country, it also represented a mind-boggling feat of logistics. Beyond the marquee stood other, rather different tents.
They were the teepee-like dwellings of the Darkhad people, a tribe of nomads who have lived in this region since prehistory, following the migratory route of the reindeer they depend on.
A European anthropologist called Bjorn had been living with them throughout the spring, studying their traditions of animal husbandry. He had been subsisting on reindeer milk and bread baked in the embers of wood fires, but today he would be joining us for lunch.
When he saw our buffet, he looked tearful and heaped his plate. As he was about to take a forkful, a shout went up. A family of herders was arriving from their winter camp.
Mounted on reindeer, they thundered in across the valley, driving the remainder of their 50-strong herd, some loaded with the group’s possessions. Other herders surrounded the new arrivals, helping them erect the larch poles of their portable homes.
Once the poles were up, they wound canvas strips around the structure to make weatherproof dwellings and began to set up their wood-burning stoves. As I watched, I had the sense that I was looking at a scene from our distant shared past. And then I went back to the marquee for coffee and brownies.
This is the surreal world of luxury travel in Mongolia. When I think of the word luxury, I picture fluffy bathrobes, infinity pools, ingratiating maîtres d’ and venerable burgundies from the pricier end of the wine list.
But it’s possible – I imagine – those pleasures eventually pall. The cruise company Silversea certainly seems to think so. It has launched a range of travel experiences it calls the Couture Collection: expensive encounters with ‘the most remote, untouched and hardly accessible destinations’.
The company, which is famous for its upmarket cruises, is branching out into these land-based tours in order to attract a new kind of traveller – younger and more daring. The idea is that you top or tail a cruise holiday with a more intrepid experience from the Couture Collection, like this seven-day tour of Mongolia.
Silversea’s customers experience extreme luxury at sea, including butler service and gourmet food, but they’ll inevitably have to forgo some of these comforts to explore remoter locations.
To get to the Darkhad Valley, we’d flown part of the way in a Russian-made military helicopter. It was a magic carpet that turned a distant location into a feasible day trip – but its interior stank of aviation fuel and the noise of the rotors made conversation impossible.
The trade-off is privileged access to people, places and experiences that are ordinarily encountered only by people like Bjorn, who are willing to wear the same clothes for two months and eat reindeer cheese for weeks at a time.
Commissioned to take pictures of the Couture Collection destinations, the celebrated travel photographer Steve McCurry was one of my fellow guests. His most famous image is the Afghan Girl portrait, cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic.
"You have to be a special kind of person to want to spend four hours on a Russian helicopter," McCurry told me afterwards, when we both admitted to some trepidation about its airworthiness. "It’s not about comfort, it’s about experiencing different cultures and the different ways people live."
Our journey had begun two days earlier, in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, where we’d been guests at its fanciest hotel, the Shangri-La. The capital had given us a foretaste of the contrasts we could expect from the trip. Across the road, at the brand-new Shangri-La mall, we could go shopping for iPads and Portmeirion porcelain.
Ten minutes away by cab, we found Narantuul open-air market, which sells everything you need to be a practising nomad: yurts – known as gers in Mongolia – saddles, bridles, huge cooking pots and beautiful handmade deels – the sheepskin-lined robes that make it possible to work outdoors in winter at minus 30°C.
We left Ulaanbaatar at the crack of dawn the following day, flying 400 miles by commercial plane to Murun in the north of the country.
From the air, what is most astonishing about Mongolia is its emptiness. The country has roughly three million people–five per square mile – and about half of them now live in the capital.
Away from Ulaanbaatar, the occasional signs of human habitation are strikingly tentative: the tiny dumpling shape of a nomad’s tent showing white against the brown earth, or a faint circle like the mark left by a coffee cup, where one has moved on.
You might see a single plume of dust rise up where a lone motorcyclist is crossing a huge trackless expanse of arid land. As the world grows increasingly connected and globalisation eats away at the specific character of places, Mongolia still feels remote and sui generis. The landscape is huge and elemental: vast steppes, immense desert, snow-capped mountains.
From Murun, we drove cross country to beautiful Lake Hovsgol, where we spent the night at a comfortable ger camp by the shore. Eighty miles long, Hovsgol is famous for its depth and eerie clarity – and the power of its shamans, who still practise their ancient art in the surrounding villages.
The lake was frozen, but when we took off in our Russian helicopter the following day, we could see thawed pockets of sapphire water punctuating the ice.
As we banked west, the vertiginous snowy spine of the Khoridol Saridag mountains rose up in the distance. After an hour’s flying, we descended into the valley where the reindeer herders were setting up their spring encampment.
We were welcomed into the tent of the clan leader, 63-year-old Uvegdorj, for a cup of reindeer milk and a chat. The novelty of the encounter was mutual. There hadn’t been a helicopter in these parts for 11 years, he told us.
That afternoon, McCurry and I went to visit the village shaman, Santsetseg, in her teepee. She showed us her ritual drum, made from the skin of a virgin reindeer, and her shamanic cloak, which even to a sceptic seemed invested with arcane power.
It was trimmed with fur, bear claws, wolf bones, a brass mirror, and long twists of cotton called manjig. These, she told us, were representations of snakes; they ward off the dark forces that try to take up residence in her when she enters a trance and travels into the spirit world.
At 4pm, we were summoned to the helicopter for our return journey to Ulaanbaatar. By 11pm that evening, I was back in the capital, wandering around the shopping mall, where the capital’s gilded youth were wearing Prada and queuing to see the latest Marvel blockbuster.
I felt like I’d spent the day in a shamanic trance of my own – a brief, thrilling excursion into an alternate reality. But there was no time to dwell on the day’s strangeness. We were due to leave before dawn the following morning for the next disorienting phase of our trip.
That day we took a commercial flight to the distant western province of Bayan-Olgii, 800 miles west of Ulaanbaatar. The provincial capital, Olgii, is a sprawling town of ramshackle Soviet buildings; it’s largely Muslim and the dominant language is Kazakh, not Mongolian.
From here, we drove off-road into the foothills of the Altai mountains, a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming landscape of astonishing ochre plains, dusty river valleys and snow-capped peaks looming in the distance.
Our accommodation was a luxurious encampment in the Bakhkaragai Valley. Tents, beds, hot showers, flush toilets and a huge Kazakh yurt where we took our meals had been trucked in to this remote location.
At night,the temperature dropped below freezing, but electric heaters and water bottles kept me warm. I can’t say I underwent any hardship, but dust storms and occasionally erratic hot water might be a surprise to someone accustomed to the white-gloved luxury of a Silversea cruise.
We were there to witness the region’s most astonishing custom. Just after 2pm the next day, a group of hunters on horseback arrived at the designated spot: a low hill rising above a dry plain, about an hour’s drive west of the tiny settlement of Sagsai.
Wearing intricately embroidered fur robes, each of the riders was carrying an enormous golden eagle on his gloved right hand.
The men continue a millennia-old tradition of using golden eagles to hunt animals for their skins, principally foxes and rabbits, but sometimes the odd wolf. The senior hunter was 64-year-old Sailaukhan, who wore an orange fox-fur hat.
The hunters rode up to the brow of the hill and took turns launching their eagles at a rabbit skin that was being towed across the steppe by a horseman. Once the rabbit had been caught, the eagles were called back to the hunter’s gauntlet.
Hunting only takes place in winter, when the pelts are in the best condition and show up against the snow. But Silversea’s local partners had orchestrated this demonstration of the hunters’ skills as horseman and falconers. There’s clearly a trade-off here between spectacle and authenticity: the display was for the benefit of us tourists.
On the other hand, it’s estimated there are fewer than 50 golden-eagle hunters left. The enthusiasm and money of foreign visitors is one of the things that supports them.
The youngest eagle hunter was a 13-year-old boy called Damsbek. I watched in awe as he urged his horse up the steep bank of scree, holding the reins in his left hand while his huge golden eagle perched on his right.
After flying back to Ulaanbaatar, our final night was spent at another yurt camp, in the countryside outside the capital. The highlight of this was a Naadam festival, featuring the three traditional sports of Mongolia: horse riding, archery and wrestling.
Traditionally, Naadam takes place in July, but Silversea had laid on a bespoke version of the games at our yurt camp. Our Naadam was a cornucopia of special moments – we even got to try archery and pose with the victorious wrestlers.
It’s hard to imagine squeezing more of what’s quintessentially Mongolian into a seven-day visit. We’d achieved a breathlessly compressed tour of the country’s most eye-catching sights, but rather than sating my curiosity, the itinerary inflamed it.
I’m not quite ready to follow the example of the anthropologist Bjorn, but I’ve already promised myself I will return to this extraordinary place with several months to spare, to explore and savour it more slowly.
Essentials
The Silversea Mongolia Couture Collection journey will take place after the Seward (Anchorage, Alaska) to Tokyo voyage, which costs from £3,870 per person.
The Couture Collection journey is eight days, from September 27 to October 4, 2019, and costs £18,840 per person. For more information.
Sign up for the Telegraph Luxury newsletter for your weekly dose of exquisite taste and expert opinion.