Mongol Dinosaurs and Abundance in Desolation

When you think about Mongolia, you think about desolation—the steppes, the vast expanse where nothing goes on for miles and miles on end. The land of Genghis Khan and Mongol warlords, where horses are still the main mode of transportation.

My friend Bryan and I went on a week-long trip to Mongolia to see those steppes and the Gobi Desert. He actually has a Behiiv newsletter that gives his perspective on travels, and I thought it would make sense to write this companion piece for Backyard Izakaya. This will be a bit different from my usual cinematic finds and culinary adventures—we're now entering that Anthony Bourdain territory that's launched a thousand similar YouTube day-in-the-life vlogs: travel.

This blue dot on Google Maps was where I found myself in the Gobi Desert. There in the provincial town of Dalanzadgad, where Bryan and I were staying in a small ger (traditional yurt) and taking day tours to learn about the archaeological miracle that is the Flaming Cliffs. These red sandstone formations have perfectly preserved multiple dinosaur bones and eggs, and standing there, "desolation" was not the word that came to mind.

In fact, those cliffs in the middle of nowhere had a lot inside them. In the 1920s, an American expedition found a treasure trove of perfectly preserved fossils in these hillsides, and even today, they're still finding new bones. Ross Geller would have had a field day.

Here's what gets me: I try to imagine being part of the American Museum of Natural History at that time, trying to pitch this expedition to my paleontology friends and investors. "Hey guys, want to fund this multi-year dig in a country where we don't speak the language, don't know the terrain, and we'll bring our new Dodge trucks through the desert, hire a bunch of local people, and maybe—just maybe—find fossils? You know, for science."

Men had balls back then.

But they came and they dug, and they were right. They DID find what they were looking for—cleaned it, packed it in boxes, and shipped it all back to New York. These pieces are apparently priceless, the crown jewels of American paleontology.

But take it from the Mongolian perspective. These were the only other people crazy enough to go into the desert and start digging for things that might or might not be there. You have to wonder if they feel gypped. They've lived on this land for hundreds of years and somehow never thought to dig in their own backyard for these bones that turned out to be incredibly valuable for understanding Velociraptor and a Protoceratops interactions, preserved in the midst of combat.

To them, these cliffs were probably just a good place for camping, a viewpoint for watching their sheep herds.

It often takes someone else to see what you don't normally see, to reveal the abundance that's actually all around you. Had the Americans not come, had that pitch guy at the American Geographical Society not been successful, all this abundance might never have been recognized. Those cliffs would still be just a viewpoint for herders and their sheep.

It's all really a matter of perspective, and because I am me, I always bring it back to my favorite topic: food.

I watched this Camel Festival video from Dalanzadgad on Artger (great channel for authentic Mongolian culture and customs), and somewhere in the middle, one merchant caught my attention. As all merchants do, he was showing the camera his inventory—sweetbrier tea, wild chives, sea buckthorn berries, Gobi roots from the desert floor, spices I'd never heard of. "All of this? From the desert I just came from?" I thought.

What type of knowledge would you need to know that this particular weed, which only grows when the sun is at a certain angle in the sky, has medicinal properties to cure indigestion? That type of knowledge always impresses me. Not Traditional Chinese Medicine, but Traditional Mongolian Desert Medicine.

This innate understanding of how to use the flora and fauna around you to make something delicious—or healing—probably only comes from being in one place for a very, very long time. I'm intellectually curious about how this know-how, this methodology, came into existence. In places like Mongolia, China, or Hong Kong, you get a sense that these people have been here for generations on end. The value of that is they see something that we don't—we meaning digital nomads, not actual nomads.

The great irony? While Mongolian culture figured out what to do with the scrubs growing ON TOP of the Red Cliffs, it took Westerners to think about digging IN the cliffs, not just harvesting what's on them.

Two sides of the same coin: you really need multiple perspectives to see what you wouldn't think to look for otherwise.

It seemed appropriate that we ended our trip in Ulaanbaatar, the capital. Cities with concrete and steel infrastructure—not very nomadic at all. When we got off the airport bus at the main town square in front of the Genghis Khan statue, we stumbled into the middle of a Sunday book fair.

Tents of book sellers and resellers offering both native Mongolian texts and translated works, interspersed with kids giddy as if at a Scholastic book fair. I even found a copy of "The Daily Stoic" translated into Mongolian.

I enjoyed this book fair quite a bit because it was a window into what Mongolians are like today, in 2025. These people aren't riding horses across the plains, planning to invade Japan, or demanding tribute for their Khanate. These are people just enjoying a day off before going back to work on Monday, and they choose to spend it at a book fair. Perhaps they find in books what I found in my week in their country—a perspective on looking at things in front of you that you would never have considered if you hadn't picked up that Daily Stoic at the book fair.

Traveling is fun, and taking silly pictures in Genghis Khan costumes is an incredible way to use up your Mongolian currency. But without really reflecting on what you're looking at, the recounting of the experience always seems a bit flat.

It's "Tell me about YOUR travels," not "THE travels"—what is it that you saw when you got there? What did the people who lived there notice after having lived there for so long? What was your perspective?

Maybe that's the real treasure in any desert—not just the dinosaur bones waiting to be discovered or the medicinal herbs growing in plain sight, but the reminder that abundance exists everywhere. It just takes the right eyes to see it. Sometimes those eyes belong to paleontologists with Dodge trucks. Sometimes they belong to herders who've walked the same paths for generations. Sometimes they belong to kids at a book fair, discovering new worlds in translation.

The Gobi taught me that desolation is just abundance waiting for the right perspective.

What unexpected abundance have you discovered in a place others might call empty? And which perspective revealed it to you—the outsider's fresh eyes or the local's deep knowledge?

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L