Wo buhui yong kuaizi.: A Weekend with the Inner Mongols

We took off from our lovely hotel Friday afternoon

around 6:00 in order to make our 10 hour overnight train ride to Inner Mongolia. We weren’t exactly sitting in the lap of luxury with our “hard sleeper” tickets: non-private compartments each stacked with two sets of triply-bunked beds (i.e. about the same amount of personal space one has in a coffin). Nevertheless, except for the staring (Chinese people ALWAYS stare at us as foreigners, which I’m pretty much used to and am not usually bothered by, but it becomes vastly more disturbing when the stare-er is laying horizontally at eye level two feet away from you for 10 hours on end…) and the borderline violence (is it legal to slap someone who’s asleep to get their ticket from them?) of the train attendants, the ride there was an overall fun and unique experience you can’t get in the US.

We arrived at the train station in the city of Hohhot (the capital of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region) to blue sky and fresh, clean, dry air, which were much appreciated after three and a half weeks in Beijing with very, very little of either. After a pretty sweet western-style breakfast at a hotel, we hopped on a bus for a couple of hours’ drive through the Daqing Mountains out to the Grasslands.

We were welcomed at the yurts which were to be our home for the night by singing Mongolians and some sort of Hada liquor that tasted a lot like Robitussin. We then spent the rest of the day getting a taste of Mongolian culture via a horseback riding, wrestling matches, a dinner ceremony complete with (whole) roasted mutton, after dinner party, and a nicely authentic lack of running water J. Horseback riding was especially interesting as our guide assigned me a horse which was apparently on the wilder side and so had to stay attached to his the whole time, so whenever this crazy Mongolian man decided to GALLOP somewhere (no, not trot, not canter, gallop! – I’ve definitely never gone that fast on a horse before) to round up a stray horse or ride to the back of the pack to check on something, I was forcedly RIGHT by his side. My friends supposed that the souvenir t-shirt I was wearing from a faux Tex-Mex place I had insisted on eating at the night before might have convinced him that I knew how to ride, but he didn’t speak English, so whenever he was about to take off, he’d look over at me and yell in Mongolian something which, as I figured out after the first time I nearly ate it, apparently meant “hold on”.

The next day we woke up early for a 4 hour drive to the Kubuqi desert's Xinagsha Wan, or Resonant Sound Gorge. I don't know how exactly authentic of a Mongolian experience it was, as the part we ended up in was more like a theme park set in sand, but it was AWESOME and GORGEOUS. After climbing up a ridiculously steep dune, we boarded an all terrain vehicle for a wild ride through the hills and valleys of sand, rode some camels, and ended the day with an episode of dune sledding before heading back into town for a full-course Chinese meal crunched into 15 minutes (we were running late) and a train ride back to Beijing, where we arrived this morning exhausted, having been starred at for extended periods of time by more fascinated Chinese people, and not having showered for three days (you'd think that would have made them face the other direction at least?!).