Few visitors to Mongolia arrive expecting a luxurious time. Most come itching for an adventure out in the vast plains where living in a ger - the basic felt tents of the nomadic herders also known as a yurt - is the norm. When US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Mongolia earlier this year to attend a forum, her staff found the only hotel they thought was suitable: a former riverside resort used by high-ranking Soviet army officers in the 1960s and '70s.
The Terelj Hotel is located in the rolling hills of the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, 70 kilometres north of Ulan Bator, the sprawling capital.
"We are literally the only luxury hotel in the whole of Ulan Bator," crows hotel manager Oliver Kühn.
The hotel is by no means an international standard five-star hotel; rather, it's a 52-room, old-school riverside complex surrounded by pine-covered mountains and meadows of wildflowers. It is an oasis of stylish calm in a country in a hurry.
Out front, dozens of young Mongolian men sit in the shade, waiting with their horses in case visitors want to take a ride into the surrounding countryside that stretches as far as the eye can see. A short, breathless walk up a nearby hill offers a view down over the hotel, its few neighbouring buildings and some wooded hills. It feels like a landscape created to inspire.
The Terelj Hotel was for decades a shell of a building, having been abandoned in the '80s and left to fall apart in the wake of the political and social upheaval as the country exited the Soviet bloc.