Autumn '25 is the season I went back to Asia, after 12 years from my last experience backpacking through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. To be fair Mongolia was not really on my bucket list but a friend of mine was really keen on visiting it and as he started to plan a road trip through desert, I realised I couldn't really say no. So there we go again and after having spent a few days in the capital city Ulanbataar, just in order to get rid of the jet lag and to find the most convenient tour option, we're off to the desert on a monday morning till saturday, me, my friend, a local driver and our tour guide which made himself called Jack.
The Khalkhas are the largest ethnic group in Mongolia and they primarily inhabit the central and western regions of the country where they engage in nomadic herding and maintain a close connection to the land. The Khalkha ruling class was somehow formed by Genghis Khan and to the numerous descendents he had and they represent roughly the 80% of the actual mongolian population. They are divided in subethnic groups: thirteen northern and five southern Khalkha.
The Silk road was probably the beginning of the globalisation as we know it today. It is formed by a network of routes that is 500 years old (XV mid-century) and that connects basically the whole Eurasia, starting from China and going all the way to southern Europe and north Africa. The route was funded by the Han dynasty around the 110BC and it has such a big importance for the Chinese to the point that the great Wall of China was extended to ensure the protection of the trade. Silk, tea and porcelain were some of the goods mostly exported. The name in fact comes from the huge textile business originally produced in China and then exported to the west of the world. The road was not only important for the exchange of goods, but also for the exchange of religious and philosophical practices, such as Buddhism. Unlike the Silk road, the Tea road when built in the XIX century by the Russian Tsar, served a different route that started always in China on its way to the west, but this time crossing mostly only Russia, going through lake Baikal, Yekaterinburg and Kazan all the way until Moscow. As the name says, the road was obviously built to export tea since Russia was the biggest importer of Chinese tea (65% of the total export) which was often carried by camels (an animal that is native from North America and emigrated to Russia 3-5 million years ago through the Bering bridge).
There is an Italian man in the history of Asia that is still mentioned nowadays from tour guides in Mongolia and at the same time he is still unknown to the majority of Italians and his name is Giovanni da Pian del Carpine. Giovanni was born in Perugia around the beginning of the XII century and served as a friar for most of his life. He was sent on a mission to Mongolia by pope Gregory IX in 1245 in order to mitigate the cruel Mongolian invasions, that came all the way from their home country till the point of reaching the Italian peninsula in modern Friuli Venezia Giulia. Giovanni succeeded in his task and he was able to deliver the letter he was carrying with him to the gran Khan which denied the request of stopping the invasion. In his journey, he wrote the Historia Mongalorum, a book that describes his experience and the people he met that became famous and can be put somehow into the travel writing category, together with the more famous "Il Milione" of Marco Polo.