This weekend, Jon, Cara, Jay, Aaron, and I all made a trip up to Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in China (not Mongolia, which is a separate country). On Friday, I took Cara to the Rural Women's Practical Learning Center, where I teach English, and she and I taught my girls American songs to sing. The girls in my class were very excited, as they have been asking me for weeks to teach them some American music. However, apparently Cara and I made a huge mistake and DID NOT include "Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" by Britney Spears. How could we be so dense as not to realize that this song is at the top of the playlist for my 28 non-English speaking students? Go figure.
From the school, Cara and I rushed to the train station to meet Jon, Jay, and Aaron, who came from their internships. We all jumped on our overnight train to Hohhot just in time. We slept in hard sleepers, which I'm sure you've heard of before if you've been keeping up with this blog. Our train left at 7:18 pm, and the five of us hung out on the lower bunks and ate snacks until 10:30pm, when all the lights on the train were turned off. We climbed in our bunks and fell fast asleep until 5:00 am, when the train attendant banged on our bunks to tell us that the train was arrive in Hohhot in 20 minutes. Luckily for us groggy college students, we had a ride to our hostel as soon as we got off the train.
It is important for me to pay due attention to the Anda Guesthouse, where we spent our Saturday night. After finding them on the internet, I proceeded to email the owner of the hostel 8 times to organize a tour to the Gobi Desert, arrange for him to buy our return train tickets ahead of time, arrange for us to have traditionaly Mongolian breakfast at the hostel on Sunday morning, and change the number of people going and time of all things listed above multiple times. However, despite our last minute planning for this trip, Zorigoo, the owner, was fantastic. He went out and bought our return tickets ahead of time for us, and drove us all the way out to the Gobi Desert on Saturday morning so we could ride camels. (more on that later.) The guesthouse was really comfortable, and all the people who live and work there were very kind and warm-hearted. It was Zorigoo who was waiting for us at the train station on Saturday morning at 5:20 am, and he drove us immediately back to the guesthouse, ushered us into our bedroom and told us (not suggested) that we were tired and needed to get some sleep before our big outing.
When we woke up again at 8 am, breakfast was waiting for us downstairs, which we ate quickly and hungrily. Then the five us, and four other guests at Anda were squeezed into a mini bus and driven out to the Gobi Desert, which is four hours west of Hohhot. Part of our tour of the Gobi included lunch, and we stopped along the way to eat at a really great restaurant in Baotou. Then, to the Gobi.
It's hard to describe how bizarre it was to just be driving down a highway, with grass, farms, animals, and a decent number of people on either side of the road, and then suddenly the desert appears right in front of you, looming overhead with massive sand dunes and a huge, empty horizon. It was really beautiful, and in even 50 degree weather the sand reflected the sun enough to make the desert warmer than everywhere else in Inner Mongolia. The air was breezy and from the mini bus we were directed through a Mongol settlement with cement yurts (circular tents that are the traditional Mongolian nomad residence). After that, we walked to a camel farm at the very edge of the desert, where we were introduced to the camels that we would get to know very intimately for the next three hours.
The camels here were very different from what others have told me they are like. I hugged and petted my huge camel, and he didn't smell bad, didn't bite me, and never spit on me. Instead, he nuzzled his head against my chest and let me rub his ears. The sweetest camel I met was a baby camel that was kept in the corral. She came up and stuck her neck out for me to scratch her ears and rub her nose. She rubbed her nose against my shoulders and let me hug her. So sweet! The other thing that is endearing about camels is how funny they look. They have the most comical, lackadaisical faces. Ours had their noses pierced, and to keep them together, our guides tie a rope from the pin in one camel's nose to the back hump of the camel in front, forcing the camels to walk in a line.
I was led in a caravan of four camels with Aaron and two other travelers. The camels and their humps swayed back and forth as they walked across the desert, and it was a completely new experience for me to have only a big hump in front of me to hang on to while admiring the yellow sand dunes. To make the camels go up and down the dunes, the guide made a whirring sound with his mouth, and it seemed to calm the camels, even if they were going down a steep dune.
The camels rode out an hour into the desert, until we reached a huge sand dune that was bigger than all the others. We dismounted our camels, and the guides tied them up while we climbed to the top. Once we reached the top, we saw sleds and a very smooth, steep slope for us to slide down. So...we went sledding...in the desert. It was not terrifying even though the hill was quite long and steep - the sled moved pretty slowly across the sand.
After a couple of turns going down the sand dune, we wandered around the area, exploring the dunes and petting our camels until it was time to turn back and head towards camp again. The camel lies down on the ground when you mount it, and then the guide makes a whirring noise and the camel stands up with you balancing in between its two humps. The camels trotted back towards their corral, and we enjoyed our last looks at the desert. The most impressive thing about the Gobi desert is its vastness and emptiness, a trait very much a part of Inner Mongolia. The rest of China is so over populated, and in Inner Mongolia the Gobi Desert and the Grasslands are practically empty except for nomadic Mongolians. It's such a huge change from all of the other places I have been, I really appreciated the chance to look at a part of China that hasn't been completely industrialized or changed into farmland despite its unsuitability.
Our camels finally returned us to the Mongol settlement, and we were able to explore a little. This place was a little bit touristy, but luckily for us the tourist season starts in two weeks. We were alone with all the Chinese and Mongolian people working on the settlement, managing a temple, small museum, and concrete yurts that guests can stay in overnight if they choose to. We found two ostriches and a funny dog that really enjoyed terrorizing the ostriches. Every time we went close to the ostriches' fence, they would come towards us a little bit - maybe because they were curious and probably because they wanted to bite us. As soon as they got close the dog would run at the fence, barking like crazy, and the ostriches would lift up their feathers like a skirt and prance around the inside of their corral to the other side to get away from the dog. It was so funny. The dog was very friendly though, and I of course couldn't wait to make friends with him.
We left at around 4pm and started the drive home. We went straight from the Gobi Desert back to Hohhot, and it was a long trip. We were all pretty tired when we returned, but very hungry. The five of us plus two hippies also staying in the guest house set out for some late dinner and managed to have a feast in a nearby restaurant before going to bed.
The next morning we came downstairs and were met with an appetizing aroma. Zorigoo's wife made traditional Mongolian breakfast for us with hard white cheese, a pancake that is fried with mutton and carrots baked inside, cornmeal, Mongolian cream and Mongolian sweet cream. It was so good, and very filling. We were all a little nervous about eating so many dairy products, because outside of Inner Mongolia, the rest of China consumes very few dairy products. We hadn't had any dairy products since we left for China, so we were a little nervous we would get sick. However, we all felt wonderful afterwards, and the breakfast was so delicious.
Cara decided that she would hang around the guesthouse and work on a paper she had due today, so we decided to leave her in Hohhot for the day and let her concentrate. We explored the city a little bit, and went into a temple called the Great Mosque. It is an attractive building built with black bricks, combining Mongolian and Muslim architecture to create a really beautiful mosque. The worshippers there didn't mind us visiting, and they all waved at us while we wandered around the grounds.
After exploring the Great Mosque we caught a bus out to a town called Zhaohe about an hour and half north of Hohhot. There is absolutely nothing in Zhaohe until the tourist season starts, but there are yurts and horses, and of course there is the fact that Zhaohe borders a huge grassland in Inner Mongolia called Xilamuren.In keeping with all the vastness, Jon, Aaron, Jay, and I wanted to eat a roast lamb in a yurt and then take off across the grassland on horseback. As soon as we got off the bus a woman was waiting to take us to her yurt and serve us lunch. We ordered a roast leg of lamb for the four of us, Mongolian milk tea, and Mongolian Baozi. The milk tea was warm and delicious, predominately made of goat milk with a little bit of tea. The roast leg of lamb was definitely worth writing home about. The woman returned to our very decorative yurt, where we sat with our shoes off on mats around a low table, with a huge leg of lamb, from hip to foot, that had been roasted over a fire. It was so delicious, and certainly enough to fill all four of us. We gorged ourselves on milk tea, leg of lamb, and baozi before leaving the yurt to meet our horses.
I was a little disappointed because our horses had no names, but they were very docile and sweet...so we thought. It turns out, anything would set them off, and when Jay, who was probably the worst horseback rider I've ever seen, kicked his leg the wrong way and set his horse off galloping, the rest of our horses followed suit. So there I was, galloping wildly across the grasslands along with the three boys, our guide following a little ways back on his horse, yelling "turn right" and "turn left" every once in a while.
Sometimes walking, sometimes trotting, and sometimes galloping, the four of us explored the huge expanse of the grasslands. We came across a herd of cows feeding on the yellow grass inside their fence. Other than that, we were alone on grass that has yet to turn green and continues on for a hundred kilometers. It was again, just like the desert, so strange to be practically alone in China, where everywhere else is full of people. Our horses were very patient with us - all inexperienced riders (especially Jay).
When we returned after a couple hours of riding, we found that getting a bus back to Hohhot was a little bit difficult. We couldn't just buy a bus ticket at a bus stop, as Zhaohe is practically a ghosttown. Instead we just had to wait by the side of the road for a half an hour, waiting for a bus that would stop to pick us up. In the meantime, we had people from the town try to rip us off by offering us mini bus rides back to Hohhot for the wildly overpriced cost of 300 Yuan, or about $45. We weren't having any of that, and finally caught a bus back to Hohhot for 20 Yuan each, or about $3.
When we got back, Cara was eating pastries and finishing up her paper. We all packed our bags and said goodbye to Zorigoo and his wife. We had one last thing to do before we got on our 9pm overnight train back to Beijing. We had to eat Mongolian hotpot!
Hotpot is kind of like a poor man's fondue. In a hotpot restaurant, a big vat of boiling hot water is placed in the center of the table, seasoned with different spices and vegetables. Then heaping plates of mutton, chicken, potatoes, lettuce, bok choy, and anything else you feel like ordering are brought to the table. You dump the food into the pot and fish it back out with your chopsticks after it has been flash-boiled. We gorged ourselves on hotpot until we were all sweating from the spices and heat, and then we picked up our backpacks and headed for the train station for our overnight train.
After our arrival in Beijing at 7:25 am, we all trudged back to Beijing University for much needed showers and naps, and of course, to upload all our exciting pictures!
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