Playtime Music Festival

This Little-touristed Winter Camel Festival Features Beauty Pageants, Polo Matches, and Ice Archery in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert

"This annual celebration in southern Mongolia honors the shaggy, two-humped Bactrian camel with a vibrant mix of traditional pageantry and competitive spectacles. Highlights include camel polo and long-distance camel racing, theatrical parades of festively adorned camels and elaborately dressed riders in colorful deels, ice archery contests, singing competitions, and beauty pageants for both camels and their herders. Visitors can sample local hospitality inside gers—where hosts offer bowls of fermented camel’s milk (airag)—and shop camel-derived goods like soft-underside wool blankets, socks, and milk products. Founded in 1997 by the Amazing Gobi Tourism Association to reverse a steep population decline after Mongolia’s 1990 economic transition, the festival helped spur a recovery of domestic Bactrian camels (Mongolian numbers rebounded from about 200,000 to roughly 480,000 while the global Bactrian population is only about 6 percent of all camels). The event draws thousands—mostly Mongolian attendees—offers authentic windows into nomadic life, leverages tourism (camel trekking and product sales) as an income stream that can net families 40–50 million tugriks annually, and celebrates both conservation successes and living cultural traditions." - Matt Dutile