Photographer Davide Monteleone and I
may have had one of the only drivers in the Gobi—that forbidding expanse of
gravel and sand in southern Mongolia—who had no sense of direction. Granted,
the instructions we received were pretty vague: at the second (or was it the
third?) livestock path, we should take a left. What counted as an animal
thoroughfare, we wondered? Was it that little indentation in the gravel? Or the
line of hoof prints heading east?

After much bumping along, we finally
reached our destination, a traditional Mongolian circular tent called a ger,
surrounded by a crowd of camels, goats and other livestock. I wanted to talk to
the herders, who were unhappy with the compensation they had received from Oyu
Tolgoi, the copper and gold mine that is Mongolia’s biggest foreign investment
project to date and which may add one-third of future value to the country’s
GDP. Davide was photographing the forbidding panorama and the hardy nomads who
live there. And then, just as he was trying to compose a picture that would
convey the aridness of the landscape, it began to rain. Fat drops fell, landing
on the camels’ eyelashes. Here we were in one of the driest places on earth, in
the middle of a freak rainstorm.

Mongolia is a land of improbable
contrasts. It is the most sparsely populated country on the planet, with fewer
than 3 million people. Yet it is also, by some estimates, the world’s fastest
growing economy, powered by at least $1.3 trillion in untapped minerals. The
natural-resource boom is remaking the capital, Ulan Bator, which now boasts
shiny new skyscrapers and luxury malls that contrast with the city’s decrepit
Soviet architecture. Yet one-third of the country remains impoverished.
Democracy, which the country’s citizens embraced after a peaceful revolution in
1990 that displaced the long-ruling socialists, gives people a voice through
regular elections. But corruption has eroded the life-changing potential of the
rush of foreign investment—valued at $5 billion last year in a country with a
$10 billion GDP. Mongolia, today, is increasingly a land of haves and
have-nots, a land of both wind-chapped nomads and mining executives who power
Hummers, not horses. For anyone in Mongolia, our off-course driver included,
it’s hard not to feel disoriented.

Hannah Beech is TIME’s China
bureau chief and East Asia correspondent.

Davide Monteleone is a Moscow-based
photographer represented by VII.