Getting to the Golden Eagle Festival Was Half the Adventure

Somewhere along the way while planning this trip, I learned about the Golden Eagle Festival in western Mongolia. I don’t remember exactly how I first stumbled onto it, except that ChatGPT told me about it when I was looking for festivals and other interesting things that might fit into my travels through Central Asia.

Once I read about it, I decided I wanted to go.

That turned out to be the easy part.

The Golden Eagle Festival is held near Ölgii, in Bayan-Ölgii Province in the far western corner of Mongolia. This is the part of Mongolia where most of the population is ethnic Kazakh rather than Mongolian, and where the centuries-old tradition of hunting with golden eagles has survived.

Looking at a map, I made what seemed like a perfectly reasonable assumption. I was going to be in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Ölgii was in western Mongolia. Surely I could just go from Kazakhstan into western Mongolia.

Nope.

Kazakhstan and Mongolia almost touch, but they don’t. There is a small stretch of China and Russia between them. There is no Kazakhstan-Mongolia border to cross.

That was the beginning of what became a rather ridiculous effort just to get myself to a festival.

How Do You Get to Ölgii?

For weeks I looked at possibilities.

Could I fly there? Maybe.

Could I take a bus? Not easily.

Could I somehow travel through China?

At one point I had worked out what I thought was a clever plan involving Altay in western China. I might be able to fly there, take a taxi or shared taxi toward the Mongolian border, cross the border and then find another vehicle on the Mongolian side to take me to Ölgii.

It sounded adventurous.

It also sounded like the kind of plan that could go wrong in about seventeen different places.

Eventually I abandoned it.

The more conventional route was through Ulaanbaatar, but even that wasn’t simple. Mongolia is enormous, and Ölgii is about as far west as you can go while still being in the country. Flights were limited, and by the time I was trying to arrange everything around the festival, getting a seat directly into Ölgii wasn’t easy.

Eventually the solution was Khovd.

I flew into Khovd on September 28, where a driver met me at the airport. From there we drove across western Mongolia toward Ölgii.

And almost immediately I knew that all the aggravation of getting here might have been worth it.

Across Western Mongolia

The drive from Khovd to Ölgii took several hours through a landscape that was stark, enormous and almost empty.

There were mountains, broad valleys, rivers and herds of animals, but very few people.

Western Mongolia has the kind of landscape where distances are difficult to judge. A mountain that looks relatively close can still be a very long drive away. There aren’t many trees to give you perspective, and there isn’t much development to interrupt the view.

After weeks of traveling through cities in China and Central Asia, the emptiness was striking.

Eventually we arrived in Ölgii.

I had a reservation at the Riverwood Guest House on the outskirts of town. I had been communicating with the owner, and he had even written something along the lines of, “See you on the 29th.”

So I arrived.

The gate was locked.

There was nobody there.

And, to make things more interesting, I didn’t have cell service.

We waited. We tried to contact the owner. Nothing.

This was not exactly the welcoming committee I had imagined.

Eventually I gave up and found another place, the Sarya Hotel in Ölgii. I managed to get a room for a couple of nights for $44 a night.

At least I had somewhere warm to sleep.

And “warm” was beginning to become a very important word.

Welcome to Ölgii

Ölgii is not a large town, but during the Golden Eagle Festival it fills up quickly. Tourists arrive from around the world, hotels fill, tour companies become busy and seemingly every available bed becomes valuable.

I was learning this firsthand.

I had also arranged to stay at a ger camp. Then, on the morning I was supposed to move there, I learned that the entire camp had been booked by a Mongolian group about a month earlier.

So that reservation disappeared too.

At this point I was beginning to think that getting to the Golden Eagle Festival might actually be more difficult than attending it.

Eventually things worked out, as they usually do.

And then I left Ölgii and headed into the countryside.

That was when this part of the trip really became special.

Into Kazakh Country

The area around Ölgii is predominantly Kazakh and Muslim. Crossing into the countryside around Sagsai felt different from other parts of Mongolia I had seen.

The valley is enormous — roughly 30 miles long and perhaps 10 miles wide in places — surrounded by mountains. Families are scattered across it with their livestock: sheep, goats, horses and cattle.

There are very few fences.

Animals wander across an immense landscape.

This was where I would spend the days immediately before the Golden Eagle Festival, staying with a Kazakh family and getting a glimpse of a way of life that tourists normally see only briefly.

One of the things I remember most clearly was something that probably wouldn’t make anyone’s list of tourist attractions.

It was the silence.

I was standing near a herd of perhaps 200 goats. There was almost no wind.

Two hundred animals were around me, eating.

And there was virtually no sound.

No traffic. No machinery. No airplanes overhead. No people talking. Even the goats weren’t making noise.

They were simply eating.

I stood there listening to almost nothing.

After two months of traveling, it was one of those unexpected moments that stays with you.

Meeting an Eagle Hunter

The reason I had come into this countryside, of course, was the eagles.

For generations, Kazakh hunters in western Mongolia have trained golden eagles to hunt from horseback. Traditionally the hunters use female golden eagles, which are larger and more powerful than the males.

The eagle hunter I met had obtained his eagle when she was still young. He had raised and trained her and expected to hunt with her for several years before eventually releasing her back into the wild.

The relationship between hunter and eagle was fascinating to watch.

This wasn’t simply someone who owned a bird.

The eagle was an extraordinary animal — large, powerful and completely capable of leaving if she wanted to. Yet she responded to the hunter.

The following morning I got out of bed around 7:30, had breakfast, and at around 10 or 10:30 the eagle hunter’s brother came to get me.

We were going horseback.

I climbed onto a horse and we rode for about an hour, perhaps a little longer, toward a hill in the distance.

This was exactly the sort of experience I had hoped for when I started planning this trip.

No tour bus.

No paved road.

Just horses, mountains and this enormous valley.

Eventually we reached the hill where the eagle training demonstration would take place.

The eagle was taken some distance away and released. From where I was standing, I watched this huge bird come across the landscape toward the hunter.

There is something very different about seeing a golden eagle flying toward you in the open countryside rather than seeing one sitting on someone’s arm.

You suddenly understand the power of the animal.

This wasn’t being staged for hundreds of people at a festival. It was essentially a private demonstration in the landscape where this tradition developed.

The big festival would begin soon enough.

For the moment, though, there were no crowds.

Before the Festival

That may have been the best part about arriving early.

The Golden Eagle Festival was the reason I had gone through all this trouble to reach western Mongolia. Within another day, hundreds of tourists would gather to photograph eagle hunters in traditional clothing and watch competitions that have made this small corner of Mongolia internationally famous.

But before all of that, I had been able to experience something quieter.

I had ridden through the valley on horseback.

I had spent time with a Kazakh family.

I had watched an eagle hunter working with his bird without hundreds of cameras surrounding him.

I had stood among 200 goats and been struck by how extraordinarily quiet the world could be.

And I had learned something else.

Sometimes getting somewhere is half the adventure.

Getting to Ölgii had involved changing plans, investigating routes through countries that don’t actually share a border, limited flights, a drive across western Mongolia, a guest house with a locked gate, disappearing accommodations and more uncertainty than I would normally choose to put into an itinerary.

There were several times when it would have been easier simply to give up on the whole thing.

I’m glad I didn’t.

Tomorrow the Golden Eagle Festival begins.

And after everything it took to get here, I’m finally going to see what I came all this way to see.