← All articles ·

Gorkhi-Terelj National Park

A day trip east of Ulaanbaatar into Gorkhi-Terelj National Park: Turtle Rock looming over the ger camps, a swaying footbridge and rows of prayer wheels.

An hour or two east of Ulaanbaatar the city gives way to granite. In May 2024 we spent a day in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, where enormous rock formations rise straight out of the meadows and ger camps pitch themselves at their feet.

Inga and Dileep in front of Turtle Rock in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, a huge granite formation shaped like a turtle with white gers on the meadow below
Turtle Rock, and yes, from this angle it genuinely is a turtle. Note the gers at its base for scale.

From Turtle Rock a track leads up the valley to the Aryabal meditation temple, and the approach is an attraction in itself: a long wooden footbridge slung across a ravine, with a painted gate waiting at the far end.

Inga in white walking across a long wooden suspension footbridge towards a painted gate on the path to the Aryabal meditation temple in Gorkhi-Terelj
Inga on the footbridge to the meditation temple. It sways exactly as much as you hope it will not.
A long row of red, blue and gold prayer wheels mounted along a crimson rail at the Aryabal meditation temple in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park
Prayer wheels at the temple, painted in red, blue and gold. You spin each one as you pass, so the walk takes a while.

Terelj was our last taste of the Mongolian outdoors before flying on, and it earned its spot. If Kharkhorin is the history and the ger camp is the life, this is the landscape at full volume.