Naadam Festival Tour
This spectacular event includes competitions based on speed, agility, and accuracy of these magnificent Golden Eagles and some great Kazakh traditional games such as Bushkashi, Tiyn Ter, archery and traditional camel racing etc are also organized on the festival days.
This fantastic festival celebrating the Kazakhs' honoured Eagle is also a celebration of Kazakh traditional heritage. In order to maintain the event as a festival for the Kazakhs themselves, attendance is limited. The highlight of this fantastic trip is interacting with the Kazakhs and other ethnic groups and living with them for a couple of days to take part in the eagle training and get to know about the unique Kazakh culture. Landscape and cultural sightseeing blend easily in Mongolia – you will have the chance to visit families of nomads, remote Buddhist monasteries and traditional events, and to take part in horse-riding or guided walking if you wish – there are also endless opportunities for photography.
- 4WD Land Cruiser
- 1-12 Guests
- 8-Day, 7-Night
- Full-Time English-Speaking Guide
- Fixed Departure — July (Naadam July 11-13)
INCLUTIONS & EXCLUSIONS
Inclusions:
- All ground transport in a private 4WD vehicle
- Professional English-speaking guide throughout
- 7 nights accommodation (hotel in UB, ger camps, nomadic family stay)
- Naadam opening ceremony and stadium tickets
- Countryside Naadam access with local families
- Horse riding in Terelj and Hustai
- All meals as listed in the itinerary
- All national park and site entrance fees
- Drinking water throughout
- Airport pick-up and drop-off in Ulaanbaatar
Exclusions:
- International flights to/from Ulaanbaatar
- Travel insurance (required)
- Visa fees
- Personal spending and souvenirs
- Alcoholic beverages
- Optional activities not listed in the itinerary
- Tips for guide and driver (appreciated)
from our gallery
Your guide meets you at Chinggis Khaan International Airport and transfers you into the city. Ulaanbaatar in the days before Naadam has a particular electricity to it — the streets fill with people arriving from every aimag, the blue deels come out, and the National Stadium begins to hum. Over dinner, your guide walks you through the festival and the days ahead: what you will see, where you will be standing, and why Naadam matters the way it does to the people who grew up watching it.
This is the day everything has been building toward. Hundreds of horsemen in full ceremonial armour and dress parade into the National Stadium to the sound of traditional instruments and the roar of a full crowd. The ceremony is one of the most visually extraordinary events in Asia — unhurried, deeply traditional, and performed with obvious pride by everyone involved. After the procession, the first rounds of Mongolian wrestling begin: enormous men in tiny leather shorts and open-chested jackets, circling each other with surprising patience before an explosive throw. Your guide explains the rules, the ranks, and the history of every wrestler worth watching.
The second day of Naadam spreads across the city. The archery takes place at a separate ground near the stadium — men and women shoot composite bows at small wicker targets, calling out hits with a traditional chant that sounds like a song. The horse race runs across open countryside: 25 to 35 kilometres depending on the age class, ridden by children aged five to thirteen who know the steppe better than most adults. The atmosphere at the finish line, where the fastest horses arrive lathered and the crowd presses forward, is unlike anything in organised sport.
The city Naadam is spectacular — but the countryside version is where you feel the festival in its original form. A short drive from Ulaanbaatar, a local community holds their own games on the open steppe: wrestlers who arrived on horseback, archers who have been practising since childhood, and a crowd of herding families who have come in from a wide radius of countryside. There are no grandstands and no PA system. In the afternoon, you drive east into the mountains of Terelj, where the river runs clear and the granite formations cast long shadows across the valley floor.
A full day in Terelj moves at the pace the mountains suggest: unhurried. The morning ride takes you up into the valley on horses that know the terrain, past stands of larch and over ridgelines that look out across the park. The Ariyabal Temple is a Buddhist meditation centre carved into the cliff face — 108 stone steps to climb, views over the river valley at the top. In the evening, a nomadic family welcomes you into their working ger: the stove is lit, the aaruul is on the table, and the conversation, with your guide translating, goes wherever it goes.
A morning with the family gives you a sense of how the nomadic day is structured: animals to check before breakfast, milking if the season calls for it, the unhurried rhythm of a life organised around the land and the herd rather than a clock. Your guide makes the work comprehensible and the conversation possible. The drive west in the afternoon cuts across open steppe — the kind of landscape that makes you understand why Mongolian poetry keeps returning to the same images: the horizon, the grass, the moving herd.
Hustai National Park protects the last truly wild horse species on earth — Przewalski’s horse, the takhi, which was extinct in the wild by the 1960s and brought back through a Dutch-Mongolian programme that began in 1992. There are now over 400 in the park, living in family groups on the mountain steppe. You ride out in the late afternoon with a local ranger to find them — the horses are wild enough to keep their distance, but not so habituated to people that they disappear at the sight of you. Watching a herd move across the ridgeline, on horseback yourself, closes the week in the right way.
The drive back from Hustai takes less than two hours, but the eight days since your arrival have covered a great deal of ground — the stadium, the steppe, the mountain valley, the working ger, the wild herd. There is time in the afternoon for a final walk through the city: the Narantuul market for felt and cashmere, or simply the streets around Sukhbaatar Square, which have a different quality now that you know the country a little better. A farewell dinner, and then the airport. Naadam only happens once a year. You were there.
