Three Camel Lodge

In 1923 a team from the American Museum of Natural History, led by Roy Chapman Andrews, lifted the first dinosaur eggs recognised by science out of the red sandstone at Bayanzag, the place Andrews called the Flaming Cliffs. Three Camel Lodge stands in the same stretch of the southern Gobi, in Mongolia's Ömnögovi province: a camp of white felt gers grouped below a rocky outcrop, with gravel plain on every side and the ridges of the Gobi Altai on the horizon.

History

The lodge was founded by Jalsa Urubshurow, a Mongolian-American who set up the travel company Nomadic Expeditions in the years after Mongolia opened to Western visitors. It opened in 2002, at a time when the South Gobi offered travellers little beyond basic tourist camps. From the start it was run as much as a conservation project as a place to sleep. The company has supported work on the region's wildlife, among them the snow leopard and the wild Bactrian camel, and employs people from the herding families of the district.

The lodge belongs to National Geographic's Unique Lodges of the World, a collection that admits properties for the strength of their setting and their care for it.

Architecture and design

The main lodge building takes its form from Mongolian Buddhist temple architecture, with a timber frame, carved and painted beams and a broad, upswept roof. It was built by local craftsmen using traditional joinery. Inside are the dining room and the Thirsty Camel bar, whose terrace faces the plain and the sunset.

The rooms are gers, the round felt tents that Mongolian herders have lived in for centuries. Each has a lattice wall, roof poles painted in the orange and blue of the tradition, a thick felt cover and a wood-burning stove at the centre, which staff light on cold nights. Power for the camp comes largely from solar panels, and water is used with care in a place where it is scarce.

Rooms and suites

The ger is the only form of room, so the difference between categories lies in size and plumbing rather than in view or floor. The larger gers have their own bathrooms; guests in the simpler ones use a shared bath house. All of them face open desert. Nights here are dark and very quiet, and on a clear night the stars run down to the horizon. Temperatures swing hard: summer afternoons are hot, while spring and autumn nights can fall below freezing, which is why the stove matters.

Dining

Meals are served in the main lodge. The kitchen cooks Mongolian dishes alongside Western ones, with mutton, beef and dairy from the region. Guests who visit nearby herding families are usually offered airag, the fermented mare's milk of the steppe, and the salted milk tea drunk across the country.

Location

The camp lies within driving distance of Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park. The park takes in Yolyn Am, a narrow gorge in the mountains where ice can linger into early summer, and Khongoryn Els, a band of sand dunes more than 100 kilometres long that rise to around 300 metres. The Flaming Cliffs are close enough for an evening visit, when the low sun turns the rock a deep orange, and fossil fragments still surface in the eroding slopes.

Most guests fly from Ulaanbaatar to Dalanzadgad, the provincial capital, a flight of about an hour and a half, and are driven on to the camp. Days are spent on camel rides on the two-humped Bactrian camel, visits to nomadic families and their herds, walks among the fossil beds and birdwatching in the gorges. The summer months bring the Naadam festival, with wrestling, archery and horse racing held in towns across the province.

Three Camel Lodge suits travellers who want a base in the southern Gobi with good food, a warm bed and guides who know the desert. As a luxury lodge in the Gobi, it trades marble and room service for felt, woodsmoke and silence, and most guests consider that the point.