July 15. We got up very early and drove to the Ulaan Baatar airport for our flight to Dalanzadgad, a small town but one of the largest in the Gobi Desert. We then drove in a small bus for a couple of hours to the Gobi Tour Camp where we would spend the next three days.
Click on the photos to enlarge them.
Two demoiselle cranes fly across the desert. This is what most of the Gobi looks like: pebbly ground with sparse clumps of grass and scrub bushes. Dry and flat, not many sand dunes except in a few places.
This passes for a major road in the Gobi. Once you get out of Dalanzadgad, it's all cross-country driving.
The welcoming entry to our ger camp.
A toad-headed lizard, one of the links in the chain of life in this desert.
Camels grazing on the scrub grass near our camp.
The Flaming Cliffs, where Roy Chapman Andrews made a spectacular dinosaur fossil find, including the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered.
I played around a lot in this landscape with the Dramatic Tone art setting on my Olympus OM-D E-M5. It tends to overdo things, but does particularly interesting things to the dramatic skies. More examples later.
