Most people choose to spend their winter vacations on a warm sandy beach.
Hoping to escape Millenium fever, I spent mine in western Mongolia among the Kazakh eagle hunters with four like-minded companions. Having been to a different area of Mongolia previously, I enjoyed the country and people enough to return a second time. Kazakhs have been hunting with eagles for over one thousand years, a skill inherited from their Turkic ancestors and passed from father to son. A small group of Kazakhs settled in Bayan-Olgiy in far western Mongolia in the late 1600s, fleeing tribal warfare in the Soviet Union. It is isolated from the rest of Mongolia by the Hovd River and from China by the Altay Mountains.