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Travel and Tourism in Mongolia
Travel alerts, currency, climate, transit, health, and safety information for visitors to Mongolia.
Practical Information
Travel alert status, currency, climate, and transit details.
- Travel Alert Status
- Level 1: Exercise Normal Precautions
- Time Difference
- UTC+8 (13 hours ahead of Washington, DC, during Standard Time) time zone note: Mongolia has two time zones - Ulaanbaatar Time (8 hours in advance of UTC) and Hovd Time (7 hours in advance of UTC)
- Currency
- togrog/tugrik (MNT)
- Climate
- Because of the elevation and distance from any ocean or sea, Mongolia has a harsh continental climate. Marked seasonal, even daily, changes in temperature, numerous high-pressure systems, and severe cold occur most of the year. A remarkably sunny country, Mongolia enjoys 250 sunny days a year, often with clear cloudless skies, making even the coldest temperatures more tolerable.
- Ethnic Groups
- Mongol (predominantly Khalkha) 85%, Turkic (of which Kazakh is the largest group) 7%, Tungusic 4.6%, other (including Chinese and Russian) 3.4%
- National Holiday
- Naadam (games) holiday (commemorates independence from China in the 1921 Revolution), 11-15 July; Constitution Day (marks the date that the Mongolian People's Republic was created under a new constitution), 26 November (1924)
- Geographic Coordinates
- 46 00 N, 105 00 E
- Location
- Northern Asia, between China and Russia
- Airports
- 36
Destinations
Regions and cities, top sights, national parks, UNESCO sites, and festivals for visitors.
Khustain Nuruu National Park
The story of Przewalski's horse, known in Mongolian as the takhi, is one of the most remarkable conservation stories of the twentieth century, a narrative of extinction and rebirth that is still unfolding in the grasslands of central Mongolia. This small, stocky horse with its dun-colored coat and upright dark mane is the last truly wild horse species on earth, the genetic ancestor of all domestic horses but never itself domesticated, and it was declared extinct in the wild in the 1960s when the last known wild individuals disappeared from the Dzungarian Gobi in China. The entire world population of Przewalski's horses survived only in zoos, a remnant of perhaps a dozen bloodlines preserved in captivity.
Beginning in the 1990s, a collaborative program involving Mongolian conservationists and European zoos began reintroducing captive-bred takhi to their native Mongolian steppe in carefully selected locations. Khustain Nuruu National Park, established in 1993 specifically to support the reintroduction program, has become the most successful of these sites. The park now supports a free-ranging population of more than 300 Przewalski's horses living entirely wild in their native ecosystem, the largest self-sustaining wild population on earth.
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Health and Safety
Medical facilities, vaccinations, disease risk, and sanitation conditions.
Medical facilities in Mongolia are very limited and do not meet most Western standards, especially for emergency health care. Many brand-name Western medicines are unavailable. The majority of medical facilities are located in Ulaanbaatar and are extremely limited or non-existent outside of Ulaanbaatar. Specialized emergency care for infants and the elderly is not available. Doctors and hospitals usually expect immediate payment in cash for health services. Sanitation in some restaurants, particularly outside of Ulaanbaatar, is inadequate. Stomach illnesses are frequent.
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