By Gavin Jon Mowat, People's Daily Online

Mongolia is known throughout the world today thanks in large part to the conquests of Genghis Khan during the 13th Century. He and his descendants created an empire that would eventually stretch form present day Poland in the west to Korea in the east, and from the plains of Russian Siberia in the north to China's Hainan Island in the south. The borders that were once under the control of the mighty Khan have since changed countless times and today an Autonomous Region called Inner Mongolia lies within China's boarders.

Today's Inner Mongolia is one of China's most northerly regions and within its population of some 23 million there are around 3 million ethnic Mongolians. These people still hold traditions of horse riding close to their hearts and I had always wanted to see them ride in the vast open grassland that occupies the Mongolian Steppe. When I finally got to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, I was not disappointed.


A convoy of horses and tourists

Our bus took us into the unknown. Signs along the roadside were in both Chinese and Mongolian script. One language I was only beginning to learn and the other with its vertical writing patterns was a complete mystery to me. I could not put names to the places I was passing through. The longer we drove in the country side the more remote the landscape became. The road narrowed from a large highway to become a potholed single track road winding through a host of small remote villages. I distinctly remember we came to a fork in the road where our driver decided to make a seemingly foolish decision to turn onto a mud track rather than continue on our present tarmac road. As if to fill me with an increased sense of wilderness, the mud track just kept going up, and up, and up, and up! The incline eventually leveled off to reveal what I had come here for. Before my eyes there was an endless expanse of rolling grasslands. The other tour bus that was ahead of us began to pick up speed in the open expanse and it soon disappeared from view in a cloud of golden brown dirt. I looked around at the scenery trying to take in where I was. The horizon was so far away but the landscape remained unchanged to the very point it hit the sky. As my eyes wandered across the landscape, so too my mind begin to wander; where were the people who live out here? And how do they live out here? Almost as soon as those thoughts had entered my head two local children came into view. After spotting the two children walking along without a horse or motorbike in sight, everyone on the bus began frantically searching for any sign of a house, a farm, a school, any building… anything! But there was nothing but grass. As far as we could tell those children had been walking for miles without getting lost in what can only be described as a changeless landscape with no beginning and no end. Any outsider without a guide would quickly loose their bearings and be stuck here. The bumpy drive along the track eventually took us past our first building. It was a cluster of a few modest farmhouses, at the front of which stood a lone horse grazing in the quite breeze. Not long after this our bus arrived at our destination.


Drinking to honor the food


Modern concrete yurts were our home
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