Curated Itinerary
Uvs Nuur Basin: the Closed Steppe Sea
Two stops in Asia’s closed basin: shallow, saline Uvs Lake on the Mongolian side and Russia’s Ubsunur Hollow reserve, from sand dunes to glaciers on one transect.
This itinerary reaches the Uvs Nuur Basin, the closed inland sea Mongolia and Russia have shared on the World Heritage List since 2003. Two stops represent the property’s dozen clusters: Uvs Lake itself — vast, shallow, saline, with no river out — and the Ubsunur Hollow reserve on the Tuvan rim, where the same basin runs from sand dunes to glaciers.
The listing’s logic is compression: every major Eurasian biome — desert, steppe, taiga, tundra — stacked around one terminal lake, with thousands of burial mounds and petroglyphs recording the herding cultures that have worked the transect since Scythian times.
Plan it as an expedition: internal flight to Ulaangom, then 4×4 and ger camps, June to September; the Russian clusters are a separate trip via Kyzyl with permits arranged ahead. The reward is the emptiest horizon on this entire site.
Before you go
A word from your host
This is the wildest itinerary we publish — the kind where the itinerary is really a direction. Give it ten days, expect none of the comforts, and watch the light on the salt lake at dusk do things you will not photograph well. Some horizons are for keeping.
Getting around
Fly Ulaanbaatar–Ulaangom, then 4x4 with driver and ger-camp stays, June–September. The Tuvan clusters are reached separately via Kyzyl with reserve permits; the border between the halves is not a tourist crossing.
Step by step
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