Lonely Planet Mongolia 6th Ed.: 6th Edition [Paperback]

I recently had a week long trip to Mongolia in late August, and this was the book (2011 edition) I carried with. In short, I found the book very useful and was constantly referring to it during the whole trip.

The book is nicely sized, about half the letter-size paper and fairly light weight with decent paper quality. The cover is soft and a bit torn after the trip and what not, but all the pages are intact. The page layout and typography are decent. The map design could be better. The icons were too large on the map for precise locating. The maps lacked page number reference to the description of the relevant places in them (only the few "highlights" have the page number reference). Also, I wish at least the map for Ulaanbaatar was full-colored for easier reading.

The book was accurate on both objective and subjective information for the most part. All the places (restaurants, accommodations, tourist sights) we visited and the book recommended were indeed satisfying and the places the book didn't particularly recommend were sometimes disappointing. The description for each place could be a little longer, although understandably that would make the book much thicker.

There is no photo other than for the first few pages. I wish at certain point the book included even small, gray-scale photos to make locating certain sights easier or to order a meal from all-Mongolian menu. Given the general dearth of English in the country, informative photos would have served well.

Lastly, while the book was tremendously helpful during the trip, it didn't help planning for the trip beforehand. In particular, I hoped for more information on guesthouse tours. Given how popular those tours are, I feel they deserve their own section in the book.

Despite these complaints, the book provides thorough and accurate information and given the lack of other options, the book is more or less essential for anyone planning to travel Mongolia not as a part of organized tour. It will make the travelling significantly easier and more enjoyable.

Mongolia (Country Travel Guide) Lonely Planet's Mongolia Country Travel Guide served me well during my two week stay in Mongolia in September 2012. I found it easy to navigate and the recommendations were excellent. This guide contains a wealth of information, and I can't imagine traveling this country without it. I recommend it.

Given the paucity of travel destinations and advice, this really should not be a standalone book. At most, it should be part of some Trans-Siberian book, or part of a Northeast Asia guide. As it is, we have a guidebook that is heavily padded, with over 40 pages devoted to Ulaan Baatar (probably the easiest city in the world to get your business listed in LP), a third-rate capital that reasonably deserves perhaps 4 pages of coverage. Coverage of other parts of the country begins on page 79, ending on page 204. Get rid of maps and photos, and that's maybe 100 pages of travel coverage for the entire country (the rest of the book is devoted to the history and culture).

It gets worse: much of the coverage is of little use to the independent traveler. For example, almost all of the sights listed in Eastern Mongolia (pages 138-154) are accessible only if you have private transportation. There are no regular tours that go to Eastern Mongolia, and unless you are going to hire a private vehicle you are out of luck. Another example might be that the top three highlighted attractions in the Gobi region (pages 155-179) are all found on the same page, which gives you some idea of just how detailed and descriptive their write-up is.

Furthermore, the sample itineraries and regional highlights supplied by the author are also highly misleading: in order for most of them to be accomplished in the time frames sugggested, you would need to have private transportation and/or a tour arranged before arriving in the country. But you wouldn't know this from reading the book, and would instead have the impression that it would be possible to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short time. The reality is that Mongolia is a large country with little infrastructure, and even during the high season you can't count on being able to book a tour in UB that will leave within a few days, let alone count on being able to take public transportation/buses on any given day. On the other hand, it is no coincidence that many of the sample itineraries listed in LP seem to be copied directly from tours offered by agencies in UB, making the book only slightly more useful than arriving in UB without any plans and booking a tour as soon as you arrive.

The bottom line is that this isn't as useful a book as you might imagine. If you want to see things outside of UB, you have to either: a) book a tour, in which case you will likely follow one of the sample LP itineraries; b) travel independently and give yourself a lot more time than the book suggests, especially since you will need to keep backtracking to the transport hub of UB and/or be flexible enough to wait around as you hitchhike to smaller locations; or c) arrive with your own transportation or be willing to hire a jeep. For the most part the information you get from LP will be inferior to that you can get from whatever guesthouse you are staying at in UB, and actually trying to plan ahead using this guidebook will only end in frustration as things are extremely unlikely to go as planned.

Finally, much of the information is woefully out of date. I thought things were bad when I was there in 2012, and it can only be that much worse now.

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For those considering visiting Mongolia, here are my recommendations:
-The big two cultural attractions of Kharkhorin/Erdene Zuu Khiid and Amarbayasgalint Khiid are both worth visiting, and also quite different. Kharkhorin is obviously much easier to visit as it is serviced by daily public bus (if someone in Kharkhorin greets your bus and asks if you want to stay in her yurt camp, say yes!). LP's instructions on how to get to Amarbayasgalint are ridiculously bad and will probably set you off in the wrong direction, but it's worth it to go there (imagine a monastery in a valley pasture surrounded by nomadic herders, horses, cows, goats, and sheep), and I would suggest spending at least one night to give you time to explore.
- Try to spend as little time in UB as possible. You will likely have to spend a few days there anyway, just waiting to go to other places, but other than Naadam there's no real reason to actually want to stay there.
- Sainshand is fairly easy to visit (it's on the railway line to China) and the nearby sites of Khamariin Khiid and Bayanzurkh are both worth visiting. If you arrive in Sainshand on the weekend you have a good chance of either hitchhiking to the above two sites or sharing a taxi with Mongolian tourists who also take the train there.
- Many other activities and sights available in Mongolia are perhaps better (or at least more easily) seen in other places. For example, Ger/Yurt stays, horseback riding, trekking, and other outdoor activities are also available in Kyrgyzstan, easier to arrange and at less cost. You can also get a taste of the desert in China, with places like Dunhuang offering easily-accessible dunes. Yes, the main dunes in Dunhuang are quite touristy, but you can get away from the crowds and other places in Inner Mongolia, Gansu & Xinjiang offer dune experiences as well.
- You can save a lot of money if you take local trains to/from China instead of the Trans-Mongolian. The only catch is that you have to cross the border by jeep/bus, which is a major pain in the ass, and buying tickets from the border to Ulaan Baatar can be very difficult (especially on the weekend).