Mongolia
Mongolia: Wind and Silence
I arrived in Ulaanbaatar on a bitterly cold, windy afternoon. Driving into town revealed decaying industry and infrastructure. Plastic bags pressed to wire fences and Soviet-era statues looming over cracked sidewalks and trees that never seemed to grow.
We stayed at the Ulaanbaatar Hotel—a stone monument to another time. Heavy purple curtains, dim lights, the smell of old furniture. The kind of place where even the elevator didn’t want to work.
The next day we headed west, toward the open steppe and snow-dusted hills. Most of the people I met were ethnic Mongols—herders who moved with the seasons with their animals across a vast landscape. They lived in gers warmed by dung fires, their lives were dedicated to livestock—yaks, goats, horses—and shaped by weather and geography.
From a ridge above the plain, I photographed them galloping across the desert, their small, powerful horses moving as if part of the wind. A man rode with a posture that told you he was born to do it. Remarkable people who are living in an uncompromising environment.
Further west, in the Bayan-Ölgii province near the Altai Mountains, we met Kazakh eagle hunters—Muslim nomads with their own language, customs, and a fierce pride in tradition. Their families had lived in this remote region for generations, long before the borders. Men stood with their golden eagles—birds raised from chicks, trained to hunt across frozen terrain in winter.
Back in the city, the noise returned—pollution, traffic, urban life.
