It’s one week into our trip and we are leaving the heat and sweaty streets of Beijing and Datong for the blustery grasslands of Inner Mongolia. The trains are usually quite crowded, but so far everyone we’ve met on the trains has been friendly and helpful!
Finding a place to stay in the grasslands is difficult without an agency or hostel with local connections, but with some help from locals in Hohhot (the capital of Inner Mongolia) we found a local bus out into the plains.
The grasslands are incredibly beautiful, and so vast that they are difficult to capture on camera!
Kircher calls the Mongolians ‘Tartars’ in China Illustrata. At the time that the Jesuits were travelling, there were many nomadic tribes in the ‘Mongolian plateau’ as Kircher calls it, and thus, ‘Tartars’ became the general term for nomadic peoples in Asia.
Kircher describes the Yurt camps as ‘mobile cities,’ although today the yurt camps are more permanent. He also suggests that the ‘Tartars’ stole and attacked passing travellers and shows the elaborate clothing of priests and ordinary people.
Our experiences with the Mongolian people were (thankfully) quite different to that of d’Orville and Grueber! Everyone we met was extremely kind and welcoming, even inviting us to a local bonfire party.
The bonfire party was amazing, everyone from the ages of seven to seventy was there dancing and having fun, although some of the teenagers preferred to watch from the sidelines, apparently a universal teenage trait.
We were convinced to dance and are very glad to be travelling in different times than Grueber and d’Orville!
Good to hear from you! Enjoy the trip