Aruna | Nomad

Every time I carry equipment for camping, I think of my parents’ experience of raising cattle in their hometown in Inner Mongolia during their retirement years.

In recent years, in order to protect the grassland ecology, April to November will be a grazing ban period on the grassland. Cattle and sheep cannot be allowed to roam freely and can only be kept in pens.

There was a period of time when my parents went out to herd sheep at night until four or five in the morning. Having been teachers all their lives, their bodies could not keep up with the hard work after several years.

At that time, although they lived in Inner Mongolia, they had never experienced real nomadic migration, and they were very yearning for it. My father told me that they had to migrate once a year, from the summer camp to the winter camp. It took several people a day and a night or more to drive cattle and sheep, bring food for the journey, and go to fertile pastures to follow the water and grass.

Just like our current camping, we are in the midst of nature, bring the necessary food, and in the absence of signal and interference from mobile phones, two days pass quickly, and we can do a lot of things, such as tents, fire, cooking, making milk tea, paddling, walking in the mountains, sunrise, sunset and starry sky...

And it is oneself who migrates, to the mountains.

Aruna checking the campsite for the last time after a camping trip: