Golden Eagle Festival (Mongolia)

Fourteen nights from Ulaanbaatar to Olgii, guided, one way across Mongolia on a Suzuki DR-Z400, timed for the Golden Eagle Festival.

The festival is the reason the dates are fixed. Kazakh hunters in the far west of the country still hunt with golden eagles from horseback, and once a year they compete at Olgii on speed, accuracy and the bird’s obedience, which is not a reconstruction put on for visitors.

Ulaanbaatar opens it with a monastery visit and the Genghis Khan statue complex at Tsonjin Boldog, a forty-metre stainless steel horseman on the steppe. Hustai National Park follows, where Przewalski’s horses have been reintroduced after being lost in the wild everywhere else, though nothing can be promised on a given day. The route then crosses the Trans-Altai desert and the Altai mountains, which is hilly, remote and largely trackless country, with a rest day at the Tsenger hot springs, before Olgii and the festival at the end. The bikes stay in Olgii and an internal flight returns the group to the capital.

The bike hire is included; the full inclusions are not itemised on the operator’s page and are worth confirming at booking. Fifteen days on an enduro bike across western Mongolia asks for real dirt experience. The festival falls in autumn, which sets the departure, and the weather out there by then can turn sharply, so warm kit matters. This is the one tour in the range built round an event, and a well-chosen one: the festival is the point of the trip rather than a stop on it, and the two weeks of riding to reach it across the Altai are what separate this from flying in for the weekend.