A MONGOLIAN woman, Goyotsetseg ‘Goyo’ Radnaabazar, has won the global silver award for travel guides instituted by Britain’s Wanderlust magazine. The winners of the second Paul Morrison Guide Award were announced at a ceremony at the Royal Geographical Society in London on October 4.
The judging panel was led by Bill Bryson and included Lyn Hughes of Wanderlust, top naturalist Mark Carwardine, and Mark Ellingham, founder of Rough Guides.

 THIS was something different for tourists. The 60 or so people from various countries who were there at Aygiin Am in Bayandelger soum, Tuv aimag for the Nomads’ Day Festival on September 17 and 18, would wholeheartedly agree. The organizer of the two- day event was Selena Travel Company and this was the third year that it was being held.    
The first day saw several non-competitive events where nomadic people presented their traditional culture and music. It was fitting that the day was very windy as the tourists got to realize how harsh the weather conditions usually are for nomadic herders.

�IT was Agvaan-chultemjamts, the Great Lama of Nomgon, writing in Tibetan in the 1920s who declared that Lake Shiree Tsagaan in Arkhangai aimag was the central point of the country, the navel of Mongolia as it were. Some fifty years later geographer and People�s Teacher Sh.Shagdar led a team to more scientifically determine the exact spot to qualify for that honor.
They found that the Lama had not been very much off the mark. Their calculations put the navel of the country at Ovor Khoshoot, Burd soum, in Ovorhangai aimag and only 29 km from the lake. A stone was put there. Then, in 1994 local people under the leadership of Bazarsuren arranged for a stupa to be built on the spot.

WITH the beginning of July, the gap year students � those between school and university � start to arrive in slightly larger numbers in Ulaanbaatar. We�re talking maybe two hundred or so here at the most, rather than five hundred or even a thousand, but the numbers are steadily growing. Ulaanbaatar is inaccessible, but not so different from Western countries such as the UK, USA or Australia, at least in the city proper. In short, it seems the perfect destination � remote, beautiful, but also pretty civilised with a developing economy.
But does the gap year student really ever make much of an impact? Those who work in orphanages or children�s summer camps come here with the intention of helping out, providing something that the children would otherwise lack. How much is this really true and does the philanthropic gap year benefit the student more than those they�re meant to be helping?

By Alex Plumb
ON the face of it, this seems like a daft question. Non-Asian-faces have proliferated since the cold months have receded into the past while a multitude of decidedly non-Mongolian dialects and accents drift along the main thoroughfares of the capital. But while the streets bustle, the guesthouses lie empty, exposing the illusion. Many a tale I�ve heard of tour companies despairing of the lack of foreigners. Sandwiched between the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the Great Mongolian State in 2006 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, for 2007 the tourist cupboard is metaphorically bare.
The Beijing Olympics has been signposted in tourist agencies and western minds since 2001, when the city received the endorsement of the International Olympic Committee. Many who might have planned to visit Mongolia in 2007 may just have pushed such ideas back one year to incorporate it as an addendum to an all-round excursion to the XXVI Olympiad and the Chinese capital�s environs in 2008. Certainly, the Olympic Games returning to East Asia for the first time since 1988 will provide a positive ripple effect that extends into Mongolia and its economy; but it rather sucks out the tourist trade from 2007 and indeed 2009.