Mongolia

The official language is Mongolian (Монгол хэл, ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯᠬᠡᠯᠡ).

License plates have a red band on the left side — even narrow plates have a red band on the left.

You may see a ger (the traditional dwelling of Mongolian steppe nomads) or a brick house off in the distance.

The Google Car is distinctive here — in most cases, spotting it is an instant giveaway for Mongolia.

You'll find bowling-pin-shaped bollards by the roadside.

A wide range of vegetation is distributed here — desert, steppe, and forest.

Not sand dunes, but hard-packed gravel flats and low, bare rocky hills going on and on, with sparse, low, grayish-green shrubs — that's the Gobi (south).

Beyond the grassland, a jagged, snow-capped, rocky mountain range means the Altai Mountains in the west.

If nearly flat grassland truly runs to the horizon, with no trees, rocks, or buildings anywhere in sight, that's the east.

A "patchwork" mountain amid grassland, where only the north-facing slopes are dense conifer forest and the south-facing slopes are pure grass, means the north. The forest is mainly larch.

Treeless, gently rolling hills covered so densely in even-height grass that the ground doesn't show mean the central-to-eastern steppe.

Sparse, short grass with sand-colored ground showing through the gaps, and scattered round, low shrubs (Caragana), mean the desert steppe between the steppe and the Gobi.

Amid otherwise endless grazing land, if you see large, unfenced wheat fields spreading across the hillsides, that's the north (Selenge Province, etc.). Elsewhere in the country you'll barely see fields at all.