In the summer of 2025 I went to Mongolia, and styled a work trip for a two-day conference into 10 days getting to know a country I had always hoped to make it to.
One day a local driver took me a hundred kilometres west of Ulaanbaatar to Hustai National Park – one of the very few places on earth where Przewalksi’s horses still live in the wild.
Przewalski’s horse, which Mongolians call the takhi, is the world’s only remaining wild horse. Native to the steppes of Eurasia, they went extinct in the wild in the 1960s, but conservation programmes such as the one at Hustai have seen their numbers grow in the last few decades.
There are now around 2,000 takhis around the world, and about 800 of them live in Mongolia. Kazakhstan and China are also involved in conservation efforts.
At the conference in Ulaanbaatar I met fellow Central Asian journalist Joanna Lillis, who visited Hustai National Park herself during her stay in Mongolia. She wrote an excellent article about Hustai’s Przewalski’s horses for Eurasianet, which includes interviews with the park’s director and one of its botanists.
Hiking across Hustai’s grassland to photograph the horses was one of many special moments in Mongolia.
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Jonathan Campion is a writer, journalist, editor and linguist, working in the Eurasia region. Read about his work here, and contact him here.
LIFE IN CENTRAL ASIA 