MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN Mongolia

Crossing the Gobi Desert by motorcycle is the trip that comes to mind first for any motorcycle traveler thinking about Mongolia, and that is no coincidence: it is the country's most repeated image in video, photo and travel writing.

The Khongoryn Els dunes, nicknamed "the singing dunes" for the sound the wind makes as it slides the sand, rise up to 300 meters above the steppe.

A few hours away, the red cliffs of Bayanzag, known as the Flaming Cliffs, are where American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews unearthed, in the 1920s, the first fossilized dinosaur eggs ever documented by science, a discovery that changed paleontology worldwide.

Between dunes and cliffs, the track forces you to alternate hard gravel with deep sand where the bike sinks in and demands constant traction and forward weight.

Riding the western shore of Lake Khövsgöl by motorcycle has a reputation as one of the toughest roads in Asia: just 170 km between Khatgal and Khankh, but scattered with logs, loose rock, mud and river fords deep enough to reach the seat.

The lake holds close to 70% of all of Mongolia's freshwater across 136 km of length, which is why Mongolians themselves call it the Blue Pearl.

Beyond the taiga that lines the northern shore live the Tsaatan, a nomadic reindeer-herding people who rarely cross paths with foreign motorcycle travelers.

Summer or not, some of the high passes hold ice even in the middle of the season, which demands extra caution on the final stretches before Khankh.

Reaching the Orkhon Valley by motorcycle means entering the historical heart of Mongolia: this is where Genghis Khan founded Karakorum in 1220, the capital of the Mongol Empire, which his son Ögedei walled in 1236 and which ruled over much of Asia until 1260.

Almost nothing of the original city still stands, but meters from the ruins rises Erdene Zuu Monastery, built in 1585 by Avtai Khan reusing stones from Karakorum itself, today the country's oldest Buddhist complex.

The whole valley, with its steppe landscapes, rivers and monasteries, is recognized by UNESCO as the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape.

On a motorcycle, the route mixes pavement near the towns with long stretches of open dirt where the only real speed limit is the terrain itself.

Reaching Altai Tavan Bogd National Park by motorcycle means riding to Mongolia's westernmost corner, where the Altai mountains come close to touching the borders of Russia, China and Kazakhstan almost at once.

There stands Khüiten Peak, the country's highest point at 4,374 meters, feeding Mongolia's largest glacier and a basin of three glacial lakes (Khoton, Khurgan and Dayan) where the track ends.

Along the way, more than 200 Kazakh families in Bayan-Ölgii province still hunt with trained golden eagles, a tradition passed down through generations that coexists with petroglyphs up to 12,000 years old, recognized by UNESCO.

Beyond Ölgii there is no pavement: just 27 km sealed to Sagsai, then gravel, washboard and river crossings all the way to the foot of the mountains.

Reaching the White Lake by motorcycle, Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur, means riding into a landscape born from a geological catastrophe: about 8,000 years ago, an eruption of Khorgo volcano dammed a river's course with its own lava flow, forming the lake that today stretches at 2,060 meters of altitude among the Khangai mountains.

Inside Khorgo's extinct crater, you can still see the "basalt yurts", bubbles of solidified lava with that unmistakable shape that gives the place its popular name.

The lake's cold, clear water, ringed by larch forests and fields of black lava, contrasts almost unreally with the green steppe surrounding it in summer.

Riding out to Gorkhi-Terelj by motorcycle is the getaway every motorcycle traveler, local or foreign, takes when passing through Ulaanbaatar, because the park starts just 70 km from the capital.

The main natural attraction is Turtle Rock (Melkhii Khad), a granite formation about 24 meters tall that genuinely looks like a giant turtle poking out of the steppe.

On the access road you pass by the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue Complex, a 40-meter stainless-steel statue unveiled in 2008, the tallest equestrian statue in the world.

Gorkhi-Terelj was declared a national park in 1993 and today is the most accessible gateway to the mountain, river and forest landscapes that repeat, much rawer, across the rest of the country.

Riding a motorcycle into Khustain Nuruu means entering one of the great success stories of global conservation: the takhi, or Przewalski horse, the only truly wild horse species never to be domesticated, had gone extinct in the wild by the 1960s.

In 1992, a partnership between Mongolia and the Netherlands reintroduced the first specimens bred in European zoos into these mountains, and in 1993 the Mongolian government declared the reserve's 506 km² protected.

Today the herd has grown enough to repopulate the landscape: watching them gallop free across the Khustai hills, just 100 km from the capital, is watching up close a conservation success that almost did not happen.

Crossing the Great Lakes Depression by motorcycle, between Khovd and Ulaangom, means riding through Central Asia's northernmost enclosed basin, a mosaic of steppe, semi-desert and taiga that UNESCO recognized in 2003 as the Uvs Nuur Biosphere Reserve.

Lake Uvs, which gives the reserve its name, is large, shallow and highly saline, a key stopover for millions of migratory birds crossing Asia every year.

It is one of the least-ridden regions by foreign motorcycle travelers, which means genuinely empty steppe, without the ready-made logistics that the Gobi or Khövsgöl already have.

Riding the eastern steppe by motorcycle, centered on Dariganga, means entering the region of Mongolia with the least motorcycle traffic in the entire country; it does not even appear in most commercial itineraries.

Dariganga Natural Park, created in 2004, protects the Moltsog Els sand dunes and the extinct Shiliin Bogd volcano, one of the region's sacred volcanic cones.

Farther north, near the border with China, the Khalkhin Gol river was the site in 1939 of a decisive battle between Soviet-Mongolian forces, commanded by a young general Georgy Zhukov, and the Japanese army, the clash that marked Zhukov's first major military triumph and halted Japanese expansion northward before World War II.

Riding a motorcycle to Baga Gazriin Chuluu is the perfect introduction to the Gobi for anyone starting out from Ulaanbaatar: a granite massif that rises alone over the flat steppe, its formations carved by erosion over millions of years.

Its name literally means "the stone of the small place", but the site holds petroglyphs, ancient burial sites and the ruins of Sangiin Kherem Monastery, destroyed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s along with the vast majority of the country's Buddhist monasteries.

It is a miniature preview of what waits farther south, in the deep Gobi: stone, silence and an endless horizon.