Robert Michael Poole has written for a wide variety of magazines, newspaper and new media sources such as: AP, CNN, MTV, Interview, the Wall Street Journal, and global inflight travel magazines.
Every year in the Gobi desert, nomads from hundreds of miles gather for their traditional festival of Naadam, which has been on Unesco’s intangible cultural heritage list since 2010.
In few countries is the national festival so deeply associated with its past, and so relevant to its present, as in Mongolia. The Naadam Festival celebrated in the capital Ulaanbaatar each July, is a UNESCO-inscribed Intangible Cultural Heritage. Some suggest its origins date back to sports played by the army of Genghis Khan, as a way of testing strength and skill and the oldest surviving Mongolian language book, The Secret History of the Mongols mentions all three main sports of the festival – horse racing, archery and wrestling.