I can’t say I’ve ever thought about visiting Mongolia. But now with Google’s latest Street View journey, I can at least make a virtual visit.
In October 2014, the Google Street View team journeyed to Mongolia, an Asian country sandwiched between China and Russia. Equipped with a Street View camera attached to a four-wheel pickup truck, the intrepid adventurers took to the countryside of Mongolia to provide us with an array of 360-degree views of the nation’s most amazing sites. Since then, Street View has also gone off-road in Mongolia with the infamous 39-pound Trekker camera rig strapped to the back of a Mongolian operator.
The Street View team has earned kudos by taking us to some of the world’s most interesting and exotic places. Street View has taken us on virtual tours under the sea, up the sides of El Capitan and even back in time. The challenge for Street View is to find even more exotic places to capture, a challenge the team seems to keep meeting.
The latest Street View tour of Mongolia takes us across more than 3,000 miles of the country’s deserts, lakes, rivers and grasslands. The country boasts more than 250 sunny days each year, prompting many people to call it the “land of the eternal blue sky,” Cynthia Wei, Street View program manager for Google Maps, said in a blog posted Wednesday.
Those sunny days helped the Street View team capture an array of sites, including the icy surface of Khuvsgul Lake, the sun rising over the Eastern Highway, a path by the Selenga River, the barren landscape of the Gobi desert and the entry into Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar.
As always, you can choose which way go on your virtual journey by zooming in or out and moving your cursor in any direction to get a panoramic view of each image.
“Although adventurers will spend weeks exploring the hidden treasures of Mongolia, you can now join us on a whirlwind tour in just a few clicks,” Wei said, wishing us a “nice journey.”