You shouldn't think so, but Mongolia is a great place to experience Tibetan Buddhism. This monastery was Mongolia's first and built in 1586 with stones from the once mighty capitol, Karakorum, of the Mongolian kingdom. Destroyed and abandoned several times, latest under the power of the Stalinist dictator Choibalsan in the 1930's, today the temples are again buzzing with the monk's prayers. A mandatory stop on every Mongolian trip.

In the middle of the Gobi desert, where dust and stones rules, the flat plateau breaks off to a lower level. During sunrise and sunset the exposed cliffs give off an orange hue which gives the place its name. It was here in the 1920's the American archaeologist Roy Chapman Andrews made the amazing discovery that dinosaurs were egg laying - and made some wrong assumptions that the new found dinosaur specimen, Velociraptor, was an egg thief. You can still to this day walk around and find dinosaur bones and eggs shells at the bottom of the cliffs. Close by (in Gobi terms) grow the rare Saxual trees. These wooden creatures are so dense that they can not float in water... well, if there was any.

These sand dunes are some of the very little sand that actually is in this giant desert, but they are still pretty big. More than hundred kilometres long, twelve kilometres wide, and several hundred meters high. They are sometimes called the the singing sand due to the whistling sound the blowing sand makes. This can turn into a roaring that breaks the silence of the desert, when the tall dunes avalanche.