Road to Gobi

In August 2017, Nomadic Road ran one of its earliest Road to Gobi expeditions, a 13-day, 2,000-kilometre overland journey across Mongolia's southern desert. The route stuck mostly to dirt tracks, working south out of Ulaanbaatar into the Gobi proper. The Gobi is Asia's largest desert, and August sits at the height of the brief summer driving window, with hot days, cool nights, and the country at its busiest with nomadic families on summer pasture. The 2017 edition built the template that later Nomadic Road Mongolia expeditions would refine. The convoy crossed open gravel plains, climbed onto low passes, and worked through the kind of open landscape where you can drive for an hour and see no signs of human presence beyond the occasional ger on a distant ridge. Several days included off-track navigation, with the lead vehicle picking lines across valley floors and the rest of the convoy following at distance. Cultural stops were central to this earlier edition. The group spent time with several nomadic families, sharing tea, dried curd and the slow conversation that defines Mongolian hospitality. Camp sites were private, often set up near small rivers, with evenings around shared meals and the kind of star fields that only deep desert and high steppe deliver. The August 2017 Road to Gobi expedition was one of the foundational trips in Nomadic Road's catalogue. It established the format, the pace and the emphasis on real driving that the company's Mongolia expeditions have been refining ever since. The 2017 route, with its 13 days and 2,000 kilometres of mostly dirt-track driving, remains one of the longer Gobi editions Nomadic Road has run, and is part of why the Mongolia catalogue is built the way it is today.