Steve Babbs
John Dixon
Steph Elliott
Dave Jones
Houtri Khuderchuluun (Soaring Expeditions Guide)
Also appearing:
UB Lady Drivers 1 and 2; Oddjob; Small 4WD Driver; Burly 4WD Driver; Dozy Driver; Yumchin (Soaring Expeditions proprietor)
I really feel guilty about not learning these people’s names as they looked after us magnificently throughout the trip and even the smaller 4WD driver got the hang of my name. I have no real excuse but will plead that the language barrier was considerable particularly as the alphabet is different and the actual vowel/consonant sounds differ as well.
Summary
Four people using Soaring Expeditions on a mammal-watching trip to Mongolia with birds thrown in.
Flights UK-Frankfurt-Ulan Bataar self-organised; internal Mongolia flights organised by Soaring within the tour price.
Tight luggage weight limits caused by the internal flights (15kg hold bag, 5kg cabin bag) though MIAT (Frankfurt-Ulan Bataar and return) also require a limit of 8kg on cabin bags.
2 cars (Lexus-badged Landcruisers) with drivers, for 4 people and guide provided adequate room and just enough redundancy.
Accommodation etc: Hotel Mongolica just outside Ulan Bataar, comfortable and away from the pollution and gridlock of the city (but beware the nearby river’s scent of ordure). In the West, gers (yurts) in the two Soaring Expedition camps and the Takhi Ecolodge. Beds not always comfortable, personal hygiene and clothes hand-washing facilities adequate: food a little bland and samey but nutritious and plenty of it: it was only by a little self-discipline that I managed to lose three pounds during the trip. We did get through quite a bit of sweet chili sauce to spice up the food though.
Prologue: Murphy’s Law applies to travelling
20 July 2025 – Sunday 1
I decided to take the train I wanted from Farnborough to Waterloo rather than get the one an hour earlier and have to hang around for ages at London City Airport. I then forgot the time and only just caught it in a bit of a panic.
Things got even better at Woking where a second train was supposed to be joined to the one I was on. After two connection failures the guard suggested passengers might want to join the fast train at Platform 2 and everyone grabbed their things (a lot in my case heading for an international wildlife watching trip) left the train and ran for the stairs. Weaving between people I ran up the stairs and across to descend to Platform 2. I was halfway down when the station announcer instructed everyone to “stand away from the doors as the train is ready to depart”. Everyone else stopped. I didn’t. The passengers crowded in the doorway area were considerably surprised and not a few impacted by me or suitcase as I took a flying leap into their midst. I did apologise for the rough handling while privately thinking if they’d moved down the aisles to give others room to get on, there would have been no problem.
Obviously I didn’t get a seat but at least I was again on track (literally) to meet Steve on time at the airport, which I reached without further incident. Once having exchanged carrier bags (cross-packing emergency clothing is the result of a series of bad experiences with airline baggage mishaps for each of us: I think most families do it these days but how many think of swapping with a friend?) we had plenty of time for a coffee and catch-up before passing through the laborious process of leaving the UK to join our British Airways flight to Frankfurt. I’m just going to mention here that we pretty much conducted the entire trip by phone with no need for paper documents apart from passports and Steve tells me there are plans to make those a phone app as well. Just don’t lose your phone or charger! The aircraft went mildly tech and had to be fixed, then a wind change led to a delay while the airport adjusted to take-offs and landings going the other way.
Once airborne, up at cruising altitude and having just been issued with a settling drink, we flew into a thunderstorm that chucked the small Embraer E190 commuterliner about really quite scarily – I ended up hanging onto the back of the seat in front and Steve ended up wearing a substantial portion of his red wine. A purple flash that ran the length of the port windows suggested to me that we’d actually had a lightning strike as well. Once we got through that Steve suggested to the cabin crew that as most of his wine was now soaking through his trousers perhaps he could have another one. They supplied it without question.
We got bounced about a bit more during the descent and the woman in the seat behind us was crying her eyes out when we landed in teeming rain that persisted as we took the shuttle bus to our airport hotel.
Thankfully the weather cleared before we set out to find a restaurant for dinner: it turned out the one on Steve’s search was actually in another airport hotel but pizza and beers provided a satisfactory end to the day, with the return walk including an unidentifiable large bat insect-hunting and a serenade from European Tree Frogs that we didn’t try to find.
Sleep was erratic with no air con in a warm and muggy night.
21 July – Monday 1
The bag drop queue at Frankfurt Airport for the MIAT flight to Ulan Bataar was long and included people with titanic amounts of luggage to check in. It took so long that an official marched up and down the line exhorting us to make immediately for passport control once we’d handed over our suitcases. We complied and then queued for ages there as well before also queuing for some time to have our cabin bags security checked. For reasons that will ever be opaque to me my zoom lens was swabbed and tested for who knows what before we were allowed through.
At the gate we met our other two team members, though only briefly as they had used some frequent flyer points to blag business class and weren’t going to travel with us oiks in cattle class. Having said that my first experience of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner even in “Class Y” was highly favourable with more leg room, elbow room and a much better entertainment suite than on recent international flights. Even the food wasn’t bad.
Once on the aircraft we sat for thirty minutes going nowhere before taking off late. There was hardly a bump as we climbed to 37000 feet and headed North East up the Baltic on a great circle route that went past the Russian Kaliningrad enclave, across Estonia and on into Russia proper with a bit of a dogleg to avoid some mighty thunderclouds near St Petersburg. We passed North of Moscow before gradually curving more Easterly, crossing the vastness of Russia before flying across much of the length of Mongolia – which we would subsequently have to reverse on an internal flight to reach our main tour areas. By now it was the early morning of
22 July – Tuesday 1
Good Morning Mongolia!
We were met by two lady drivers from Soaring Expeditions who helpfully guided us through getting some local currency from ATMs (why isn’t there an international industry standard?) and then drove us to the Mongolica Hotel and Resort which is outside the city proper and a good thing too, the traffic and pollution in Ulan Bataar are both awful; the hotel is overshadowed by some smallish fells whose ridges are worth scanning for raptors. This was where we would stay until our flight West to begin the search for our main target wildlife. We had thought that this early in the morning we might have to leave bags in the lobby but the hotel had organised for us to take over our rooms immediately and then have time for a walk around the grounds before our first Mongolian breakfast.
On the drive from Chinggis Khaan International Airport we had already noted Black Kites as well as familiar British birds like Carrion Crows and the inevitable Feral Pigeons. Around the hotel Tree Sparrows abounded, as we found they did in any Mongolian habitat that wasn’t so mountainous and treeless as to give Rock Sparrows a clear advantage. With the species now absent from much of Britain’s intensively farmed landscape it was good to see Tree Sparrows doing very well.
The chestnut-capped sparrows soon lost our attention as we had our first encounter with a top target bird: a flock of Azure Tits came rampaging through the trees and outbuildings in search of insects. Their feeding strategy was clearly a cursory look and move on and we found them very difficult to keep up with as they hurtled round what we hoped was a regular circuit on which they would reappear later. They moved a lot faster than the local Great Tits and soon outdistanced us.
The next surprise was a male Lesser Spotted Woodpecker feeding on thistle stems about a foot from the ground. We had great views of another bird that is in real trouble in our own neck of the woods, albeit with a bit of behaviour we would never have expected. There were plenty of full size trees in the grounds so it did have a choice about where to feed but it seemed quite content to bounce between the meadow plants.
Immature Long-tailed Rosefinches near the front gate of the grounds, found by Steph and Dave, provided another tick for the trip, feeding in long grass margins of the drive and occasionally showing well enough for a pic or two. A flyby from a couple of Gadwall was the only other birdlife of any interest before we headed back indoors for our meal.
Breakfast consisted of hot Sea Buckthorn juice, coffee, then beef and seaweed soup (in a landlocked country and for breakfast, really?) followed by scrambled egg, local sausage of a frankfurter type, and some sliced bread that was saffron yellow and almost crumbly enough to be cake. Very interesting but not all of it likely to catch on in the UK I feel.
John
