Dear Friends,

I’ve recently returned from a two-week adventure in western Mongolia. It was my second time visiting the country (I wrote about my first visit here and here), and I know it won’t be my last. There’s something about Mongolia that keeps drawing me back.

But why Mongolia? The best answer I can give is that it’s unlike anywhere else.

So many countries I’ve traveled to feel similar. You can get Starbucks or a strawberry matcha latte anywhere these days. If you’re hungry you can find sushi, Indian, Italian, BBQ, or Thai anywhere. More people speak English. When you land somewhere new, you can just turn on your phone, open Google Maps to easily find a restaurant with good reviews, and pay with Apple Pay without ever changing currency.

But Mongolia is different.

Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar is a modern city, but most travelers venture into the countryside, where a good portion of the population still lives as they have for thousands of years - as nomadic herders, living in gers (Mongolian yurts), in complete harmony with the earth.

Spending time in the countryside feels like a complete 180 degrees away from my modern life. It makes me wonder: how would I survive without grocery stores? Without central heating or a fully stocked kitchen? Without showers and toilets? Without bedrooms and closets? Without cars?

There’s something about just being in Mongolia that brings me a deep sense of calm. Maybe it’s an ancestral memory; I am after all half Mongolian. But even if you’re not, perhaps you’ll feel it too. A yearning for a simple life, to appreciate nature’s beauty, a reconnection to what it means to be a spiritual human. Or, if you believe that old myth about how many people share Genghis Khan’s DNA, maybe you’ll also feel at home standing on Mongolian soil.

Anyway, in this post I wanted to share a few travel notes and pictures from my two weeks in the Altai. Hope you enjoy!

Note: If you’re reading this via my syndicated Paragraph publication, you may only see the first photo from each gallery. To view the full set of photos, head to the original Substack post

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Western Mongolia is where Russia, China and Mongolia meet and is the most remote place I’ve ever visited.

In the spirit of a picture is worth a thousand words, just look at the photos. Notice the sheer vastness of the landscape. For miles and miles in every single direction there is nothing to see but earth and sky. No roads. No houses. No stores. No restaurants. No electric wires. No airplanes in the sky.

Just earth and sky.

A lot of our “activity” was getting out of our land cruisers just to marvel at the view. At one point, one of our guides Carroll Dunham stood next to me and remarked how looking at the horizon makes her feel calm and I told her about how panaromic viewing has been proven to lower stress.

Speaking of land cruisers, in a land with no roads or bridges, we were lucky to have cars that could handle river crossings!

We visited an ancient site of petroglyphs, protected by Unesco World Heritage. Petroglyphs are pictures carved into rock, as opposed to being painted. The carvings we saw are thousands of years old and showed images of reindeer, snow leopards, hunters and more.

The Kazakh people in western Mongolia have a similar diet to Mongols based on their lifestyle as herders. It’s heavy with dairy and meat. While I joke that no one goes to Mongolia for the food, there’s still no better way to get to know a people and culture than through sharing their food. We visited Kazakhs in their gers, and they immediately and warmly served us yak tea (hot yak milk with water and salt) and assorted cheese and butters and yogurts. As special guests in one of our guide’s brother’s homes, we were served a sheep’s head, a traditional meal reserved for VIPs. It was delicious and probably the best quality meat you can imagine - organic and fresh.

Shamanism is older than any formal or organized religion. This ancient spiritual practice is still alive throughout Mongolia, but unlike traditional religions, there’s no single doctrine or standard ritual. Each shaman’s practice is personal and unique. Shamans often channel their ancestors, who speak through them in old, forgotten tongues. The shaman who visited us performed a ritual with fire and drums to summon his 13th ancestor, who then spoke to us. People go to shamans for spiritual guidance. Shamans become shamans not by choice but by a calling.

You can’t visit Mongolia without getting on a horse. We did a two-day trek, riding about 18 kilometers each day, mostly at a walk, though those of us with some experience got the chance to break away and bring our horses into a trot, canter, or gallop. It’s a completely different experience from the nose-to-tail trail rides typical of vacation spots. It’s exhilarating. It’s freeing. It’s fun. And I wish I could have done it for more days.

Several local Kazakh women showed us how they make felt.

Yak hair + water + a lot of labor.

They spread out layers of yak hair, roll it tightly, and then roll on it themselves to compress the fibers. The high lanolin content in the hair helps it bind together. Once finished, the felt is used to wrap and insulate their gers.

If you’ve heard of the Kazakh Mongols or the Altai Mountains, chances are it’s because of eagle hunting.

Thousands of years ago, the Kazakhs learned to train golden eagles as hunting companions. Young eagles are captured when they’re just a few months old—old enough to survive on their own, but before they can fly. They’re trained to return when called, using meat as a lure. Eagle hunters ride with their birds perched on a gloved arm (you don’t want those talons piercing your skin!), the arm supported by a wooden crutch attached to the saddle. When a fox is spotted, the eagle is released to strike, and afterward the hunter claims the pelt while the eagle is rewarded with the meat. After five to seven years, the eagles are released back into the wild.

The Kazakhs take deep pride in this practice and in keeping it alive after thousands of years.

We had the chance to join an actual eagle hunt with a group of about ten hunters—they on horseback, we following in cars—and to attend the two-day Altai Eagle Hunting Festival, where eagle hunters competed in a variety of contests and cultural demonstrations.

As you can only imagine, I took hundreds more photos but could only choose some to share. If you’re interested in seeing more, let me know.

• Kazakh Tour if you want to book your own trip to Mongolia. The amount of logistics that had to happen to make the trip smooth is beyond my comprehension, but Dosjan made it look easy. Can’t recommend his company enough. He’s an excellent operator and tour guide.

• Tom & Carroll, long time Nat Geo guides with deep expertise and love for Mongolia. If you get a chance to travel with them, take it. Carroll is an anthropologist and it’s like having a walking encyclopedia around, Thomas is a photographer who gladly shares his craft with novices.

• The Eagle Huntress film -if you haven’t seen it yet, a must watch!

• Jeweled Horse Foundation - a non profit supporting Mongolia that I joined the board of

• Around the World in 80 Fabrics - Carroll’s latest work

I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.

I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.

Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.

Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️