Related Hovd Aymag Favorites Tips

Favorite thing: During a trip to Mongolia in October 2008 I was looking for ideas of places to visit while getting my bearings in Ulaanbaatar. The guesthouse I was staying in had a poster that mentioned a website called www.gohovd.com , written about Hovd aimag in western Mongolia. After visiting the site, I decided to put together a trip out west (I also visited Bayan Ulgii and Uvs aimags), and used the information on the website to decide where to stay in Hovd (they had current pictures of what the inside of the hotel rooms in Hovd look like), and also used the website's list of translators and guides to find an experienced guide that was able to take me where I wanted to go within the aimag, and helped me arrange my ride to Bayan Ulgii when I decided to move on. I found it to be a very useful resource, and thought I would share it with you here. If you decide you're interested in visiting western Mongolia, check out www.gohovd.com first.

Fondest memory: One of my favorite things about Hovd aimag was the diversity of the population. As I traveled with my guide from one soum (think of a soum as like a county) to another within Hovd aimag, it seemed that each new soum was home to a different Mongolian ethnic group. Before visiting Mongolia I'd thought of Mongolians as a fairly homogenous group. But while I was there, and with the help of my guide I was able to start noticing the differences between the groups as we went from soum to soum. They dress differently, their own customs, each group even makes their own style of the salty milktea (that is actually quite good once you get used to it). My translator also assured me that their Mongolian dialects were a little different from each other, though I had to take her word for it. It was fascinating to get out of Ulaanbaatar, and get into the countryside of this western aimag with its colorful mixture of different Mongolian cultures.