Introduction

I grew up in the countryside. Horses, livestock, open land — that was just life. Nothing unusual about it.

When I was older, I started traveling across Mongolia on my own — and later with my family. Not for work, not for tourism. Just because it was there, and I wanted to know it. Between 2012 and 2019, I covered most of the country. The Altai in the west, the taiga in the north, the Gobi in the south, the eastern steppe. Seasons, routes, weather I hadn't seen before. The same landscapes in different years, looking different every time. 

I wasn't building toward anything. I was just going.

Then, in 2019, a friend introduced me to three foreign travelers who wanted to see Mongolia — not the organized tour version, something more direct. I took them out.

They later described me as temperamental. They still came back.

Not once. They returned, and brought others. At some point it became clear that something was happening that was worth taking seriously. Baaska Mongolia came from that — not from a plan, but from people showing up and wanting to go.

What Seven Years of Traveling Taught Me

Between 2012 and 2019, I learned one thing above everything else: Mongolia is not the same place twice.

The steppe looks different in June than it does in August. The Altai looks different in a dry year than in a wet one. Routes I rode confidently in one season were impassable the next. Families I had visited had moved. Rivers had shifted.

This is more true now than it was then. The climate is changing faster than most people realize. Each year I notice things that weren't there the year before, and things that used to be there that aren't anymore. Weather patterns that were reliable aren't. The land I grew up around is not static — it is moving, and not slowly. 

This is part of why I guide the way I do. Not to show people a fixed picture of Mongolia, but to show them what it actually is right now, in this season, this year. Because next year it will be different.

What a Korean Traveler Left Behind

One thing stays with me from the early years of guiding.

A Korean traveler who came to Tavan Bogd — Mongolia's highest peak — wrote this afterward:

"We pitched a tent and spent one night. It was too cold to sleep. We stayed awake until dawn, watching the blue starlight over the mountain until we had seen enough of it."

That is what I want people to find. Not comfort. Not a schedule. Just enough space and enough silence to actually see where they are.

I can't promise it will be warm.

Every journey I lead, I lead personally. My name is Baaska. This is Mongolia. That is the whole idea.