Upon arriving in Hohhot, we realized we hadn’t really discussed a whole lot about what we were planning to do in Inner Mongolia. Oops. Actually, we hardly planned anything for the trip. But we knew we wanted to go to the grasslands and to the desert, since those are the things people travel to Inner Mongolia for. So a taxi driver stopped us just outside the station and asked if we wanted to go to the grasslands, and we discussed the idea with him for a bit. Since that really is a little bit sketchy and difficult to make sure we won’t get ripped off once we get in his car, we settled on going with a travel agency instead.
CITS is the only foreigner-oriented travel agency in China, so it is incredibly expensive. Therefore, we eagerly joined up with a Chinese tour group instead of the CITS English-speaking version, to save at least 50% off the cost. I’m sure we didn’t get as much information out of the trip, since the tour guide talked a lot and we only understood a bit, but it was totally worth it. We got the same experiences, and we had fun being the only foreigners in the tour group, too. And we got to practice our Chinese. A lot.
Having settled on a two-day tour with the group, we first had a day to see Hohhot by ourselves. We enjoyed wandering around the Muslim Quarter; discreetly (or not so discreetly) taking pictures of Chinese Muslims; finding the Great Mosque, which turns out to be the only non-Muslim looking building in the Muslim Quarter; eating real Muslim chuanr, which is really tasty lamb-on-a-stick; wandering through a Buddhist monastery; seeking out the best chocolate in the entire city, which ended up being Russian (yeah, it’s fun to travel with Europeans who actually know good chocolate, which is not the same thing as Chinese chocolate); and eating some more lamb, this time done in a hot pot style. Hohhot does not have much of a nightlife, which meant that Wednesday night after arriving and Thursday night after wandering the city all day, we went to the same place: the horse-racing yard, which has a strange little section with Mongolian gers (or yurts, which is the type of building that is apparently traditional Mongolian… to see what one looks like, go to the pictures of my trip). There were supposedly some performances in the evenings, but the first night we were too late, so we decided to go back the second night. Turns out we would have been better off not going back. The performance was lousy. When we left there around 8:30 p.m., we decided to take a bus back to our hotel. Strangely, a girl we met at the bus stop decided to get on our bus and make sure we got where we were going. But then she got off the bus with us and wouldn’t leave. So we ended up wandering around the central square of our area of town for more than an hour, awkwardly trying to get rid of the random girl who had attached herself to us. It was random and awkward, but at least it was in Chinese. At least we were practicing.
Friday morning we got on the tour bus and headed to the grasslands. The most awkward part of the trip was when the tour guide was trying to coax everyone into doing a “performance” on the bus to pass the time. Of course, he couldn’t pick on the adult Chinese, because their sense of losing face is too great. So the only two people who ended up “performing” were a young Chinese girl and me. I’ve never been so glad to know a Chinese kids’ song before. So I dutifully sang “Liang zhi laohu” (“Two tigers”) and everyone laughed.
The grasslands were beautiful. It’s difficult in China to get away from people, buildings, construction, and the ever-present ambition to “develop.” The grasslands of Inner Mongolia is where you almost can. Of course, going with a tour group meant that we were not actually alone and there was still a lot of manufactured fun, in the typical Chinese style, but we managed to enjoy it anyway. The whole group of us (which was about 30 people) rode horses around the grasslands for 3 hours, stopping at various sights appropriate for taking pictures and such. Of course, even riding horses through the grasslands was guided, but I was okay with that. Having never ridden a horse before, I relied heavily upon the guides telling my horse where to go. Turns out my horse knew more Chinese than I did, which was not really encouraging. Eh.
The meals in the grasslands were not thrilling. In fact, I’m pretty sure the four meals we ate with the tour group were the four blandest meals I’ve eaten in China. That’s not to say anything about traditional Mongolian food. That’s not what we ate. We ate whatever was the cheapest thing the agency could buy and get away with, since that meant more money in their pockets. So I’ll just say that we enjoyed our first meal on our own after the end of the tour, when we got to eat real Mongolian food.
After a mediocre performance around a small coal fire Friday night, the three of us decided to get away from the group and enjoy the solitude of the grasslands as much as possible. Unfortunately, the cloud cover prevented us from seeing as many stars as we had hoped to see. But we still enjoyed being out, away from the people, away from the oft-repeated questions about where we come from and why we’re in China, away from the development, away from the manufactured fun and manufactured beauty. We enjoyed it so much, we decided to get up the next morning in time to see the sun rise.
Someone had told us the sun would rise about 5:00 a.m., so we set our alarm for 4:30. We slept in a ger with three other Chinese people, whom we really never spoke to. Oops. So we quietly came in after 11 p.m., after they were all asleep, and we quietly got up at 4:30 a.m. to go see the sun rise. Ha. Bad idea. Turns out the sun doesn’t rise in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in October until after 6:00 a.m., and on the morning of October 4 this year, the sun didn’t rise at all. Oh, it got light out (eventually), but there was no sun. How disappointing! Thankfully, though, the rain didn’t start until we were back at the ger village and inside eating breakfast.
After breakfast, we all got back on the bus to head to the desert. This is a good example of the manufactured environment in China. The desert we went to wasn’t really the desert. It was just a few square kilometers of land a bit outside the city that had been filled with desert sand. But whoever had made this desert had at least thought to bring camels, too, and we got to ride the camels. Really! How cool is that!? We had fun riding the camels, although to be honest, the thought of riding a camel is about the coolest part of it. At least the day after riding a horse for three hours it was. We were still in pain from the horses, and the horses at least went faster than a slow stroll. But the awesomeness of the thought of riding a camel made the experience fun anyway. Actually, the three of us had a blast in the desert. We had sand fights, pushed each other down onto the sand, and more or less ran around like a bunch of kids. The Chinese people in our group looked on a little bit jealously, but would in no way consider joining in on our fun. The tour guide actually told us later that he liked the three of us, because we were bold and had fun yet followed instructions and returned to the group when told.
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