Inside the Gobi Desert's Growing Run of Luxury Ger Camps

Mongolia's Gobi Desert covers a stretch of southern Mongolia and northern China roughly the size of several European countries combined, and for most of the year it remains one of the least visited landscapes anywhere within reach of Asia's main travel routes. Over the past decade or so, a small number of seasonal camps have opened across it, built around the ger, the round felt-and-wood tent that Mongolian herding families have used for generations, but fitted out with proper beds, private bathrooms and, in some cases, underfloor heating for the sharp overnight temperature drops the desert is known for.

A tent form built for this landscape

The ger itself is a genuinely practical design rather than a stylised import: a collapsible lattice frame covered in layers of wool felt and canvas, easy for nomadic families to dismantle and move with the seasons, and naturally suited to a climate of scorching summer days, near-freezing nights and near-constant wind. Camps built around the form generally keep the traditional exterior largely intact while upgrading the interior with proper mattresses, wood-burning or electric stoves and, at the more developed sites, attached washrooms.

What a stay usually involves

Most camps operate only between late spring and early autumn, when roads across the open desert are passable and temperatures are more manageable, and are reached by a multi-hour drive or a short domestic flight from Ulaanbaatar followed by a drive. Days are typically built around guided excursions rather than time at the camp itself: visits to the Khongoryn Els singing dunes, among the tallest in Mongolia, the Flaming Cliffs at Bayanzag, where American palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews's expeditions found the first confirmed dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, and encounters with local herding families as part of understanding how the region's nomadic life still functions.

Genuinely remote, by design

What distinguishes a Gobi stay from most other desert-camp trips on offer elsewhere is simply how little infrastructure surrounds it: mobile signal is patchy to absent across large stretches, distances between camps and towns are considerable, and the region's population density remains among the lowest in the world. That isolation is the point for most travellers who make the trip, rather than a drawback to be worked around.

Traveller tips

• The camps operate seasonally, broadly May to September; outside that window most close and roads become far harder to travel.
• Most itineraries fly into Ulaanbaatar and then either drive several hours or take a short domestic flight further south before the final overland leg to camp.
• Desert temperatures swing sharply between day and night even in summer; camps generally provide extra bedding, but layering is worth packing regardless.
• Given the distances involved, most stays are arranged as multi-night, multi-camp itineraries through a Mongolia-based operator rather than booked as a single stand-alone night.