Mongolia

Mongolia is the sovereign country with the lowest population density in the world and its landscape reflects it: steppes that run out to the horizon, wooded taiga mountains in the north, glaciers in the Altai and, to the south, the Gobi, a desert of gravel, dunes and red cliffs famous for its beds of dinosaur eggs and skeletons. That fenceless immensity means mass ungulate migrations still exist: hundreds of thousands of Mongolian gazelles move across the eastern steppe following the rains, in one of the last great herbivore movements on the planet. Lake Hovsgol, in the north, holds a large share of the country's fresh water, and the western mountains support one of the most numerous snow leopard populations in the world.