Eagle festival tour in Mongolia

Planet

We work closely with local individuals and their families in Mongolia to design journeys in an optimal way to limit our impact on the environment.

We stay with local families and in locally owned hotels in the cities, and travel with local guides to learn about the local traditions and culture along the way. This adventures involves a lot of hiking and riding through very natural environments and we work with the policy of ‘Take nothing but memories, Leave nothing but footprints’. This means that we do not leave any foreign materials or waste in these environments from our camps, nor do we take any objects from the environment nor disturb its equilibrium by our presence or actions.

We encourage our clients to bring sustainable 'reusable filtration water bottles' to help reduce unnecessary plastic bottle wastage. As such we have partnered with Pure Hydration to offer all our clients the Aquapure Traveller bottle, designed for those who may find themselves in places where water quality is dubious or even dangerous, at a subsidised cost.

Throughout the trips we will stay with local families in their felt gers, all of which use solar power for lighting at night. These are summer gers and are packed down for the winter.

People

This is a very interactive trip and we use local guides on this who help to explain the cultural necessities and customs. Some examples of this include not passing close to a ger without loudly informing the occupants first; failure to do this means the group or a client can be attacked by the guard dogs and will cause great discomfort and embarrassment to the occupants and possible injury to the dogs which then have to be forcibly restrained when they were only doing their job.

There are a couple of days where we travel several hours to experience both the magnitude of the country and to reach the destination of the gates of Altai Tavan Bogd National Park. Here we will stay with the local families, their eagles, horses and yaks in their gers (although not all together!). We then continue our travels to Sagsai to visit another Kazakh eagle hunter family, so you will enjoy plenty of local interaction!

Similarly in Mongolia if you were to throw a piece of plastic into the fire in the middle of a ger you would be seen to disrespect the god of the fire and therefore the hospitality of the family you were staying with.

We actively encourage the giving of tips for meaningful services an the purchasing of locally sourced goods/souvenirs to support families and communities. We believe that partnering with local families not only enriches the overall experience of this trip but it also allows our clients to understand local traditions in Mongolia.

When staying with local families our travellers will learn many local traditions and techniques from the families making their many varied dairy products including khmyes which is a slightly fermented milk drink, customarily used to welcome new comers into a Ger, as well as yogurt, butter, cheese and even .... vodka!

Travellers also can learn how to milk the yaks and cows with the women of the families, every sunrise!.