Add Mongolia to the list of exotic locales! A 17-day trip coincided with the annual Naadam Festival -- something of a Nomad Olympics and the biggest and most colorful celebration of the year in that Central Asian country. It was thrilling to be on hand for festive opening ceremonies plus wrestling, archery and horseracing events. Mongols love to be photographed, especially in their traditional ethnic dress, so there are portraits aplenty of these proud and profoundly photogenic people.

Staying in ger (yurt) camps, we also visited remote and pristine Lake Hovsgol, hard by the border with Siberian Russia, and the great Gobi Desert which is home to the world's northernmost sand dunes.

Among the first photographers to have fixed our lenses on the new Three Camel Lodge, a 5-star Gobi Desert ger camp that has been internationally heralded as a model eco-resort. The remote camp operates exclusively and quite luxuriously on wind and solar power.

In Mongolia for MEN’S FOLIO, this adventure with photographer Dave G. Houser, takes us into the land of the awesome Gobi desert, valley of the world’s largest dinosaur digs, and home to the proud nomadic decedents of Genghis Khan.