Mongolia

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 capital, Karakorum, of the Mongolian kingdom. Destroyed and abandoned several times, the 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 rule, 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 that the American archaeologist Roy Chapman Andrews made the amazing discovery that dinosaurs were egg laying - and made some wrong assumptions that the newly found dinosaur specimen, the velociraptor, was an egg thief. You can still to this day walk around and find dinosaur bones and egg 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 cannot float in water... well, if there were any.

The Mongolian countryside is famously vast and equally flat. Add to that the fact that it is also the world's least densely populated country and it becomes easy to understand how far it is possible to travel without interruption. All of a sudden, over the horizon will emerge a huge statue of Mongolia's greatest historical figure, Genghis Khan. At 50 metres high and covered in the shiniest stainless steel, there is no way you can miss it. Take the elevator to the top and spend some time on Khan's horseback, gazing across the Mongolian steppes. If you want proof of the vastness of Mongolia, that's where you'll find it.

These sand dunes are some of the very little sand there actually is in this giant desert, but they are still pretty big. More than a hundred kilometres long, twelve kilometres wide, and several hundred metres 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.