Yurts So Good

We started day 2 with a hotel breakfast. Better than others in China I've had, but still not as good as a proper Western one. We were advised to fill up because lunch might not be very good. We piled back into the buses at 8:30 and set off. Instead of going straight to the grasslands as planned (plans are rarely followed in China) we headed to the museum in Hohhot. On the way, I noticed most signs here are in both Chinese and Mongolian script, which is pretty cool. We have a local guide now, who's been telling us stories about Ghenghis Khan, and about how Hohhot is the milk capital of China.


Mongolian and Chinese on a shopfront.


Inner Mongolia Museum

The museum here is really good. We only had an hour there, but got to see what was presumably a traditional Mongolian dance, dinosaurs (they find a lot of fossils in the desert), and exhibits about mining and spacecraft. The dinosaur exhibit was fairly well done, with obligatory animatronics and sculptures alongside skeletons (including what I think was the largest dinosaur found in China). The spacecraft exhibit was also quite good - most of them are launched and recovered from Inner Mongolia. The guides working in the museum all wore traditional Mongolian dress.





We all got dragged out of the museum and back into the buses for a 2-hour drive into the grasslands. The countryside here doesn't look like the rest of China - it actually looks a lot like South Australia, but with yurts. We ended up in a tourist area with a lot of yurts (concrete and real ones) which I think you can sleep in if you want, and a big restaurant where we ate lunch. The food was quite simple, but good - except that there wasn't enough mutton. A waitress came around our table and greeted us in the traditional way by offering us each some milk wine. There was a lot of singing and dancing as well.





After lunch we went outside and had a bit of a look around, then walked out into the open to watch some horse racing and Mongolian wrestling. They gave us a good show, but it didn't go for long - and unfortunately they didn't give us a chance to challenge their champion. After this we were split into two groups - those willing to ride horses, and those taking the bus to visit a Mongolian family. I went with the bus.



The family lives out in the grassland proper, where the only signs of human life apart from themselves are a few yurts, a road and power lines. They don't live in a yurt though - they have a small brick home and keep sheep and chickens. They seem to make their living from tourists like us, and served us some Mongolian things, like milk tea, and a snack I don't have an English name for but the best I can come up with is milk skin - bits of hard skin which forms on top of milk. They have beds with space underneath to build a fire, and a few bottles of milk wine on shelves.


Most of these are made of milk.



After staying there for a bit we walked up to a nearby hill with an aobao - a stone religious structure. You can pick up a stone, walk around it three times, and make a wish as you throw the stone into it. It has more uses than this - I've heard they sacrifice sheep (and there was a sheep skull in it) at these.



We had to hang around for a while waiting for the horse riders - they rode to a different family, then rode back, then took a bus to meet us. It was very windy the whole time we were out there, the kind of wind you can lean on. After the group was reunited, we all went back to Hohhot, which was another couple of hours drive. We had dinner at another big hotel in Hohhot, which was a normal northern Chinese banquet with the addition of a whole fish. After dinner we went back to the hotel, and instead of going out with most of the guys, I stayed back in the hotel bar with the other tired ones.

Tomorrow we'll be going to the desert. This will involve a lot more driving, and we have to leave quite early.