Blue sky and vast grassland

I just came back this morning (5am!!) from a trip with the school to Inner Mongolia. The word Mongolia, to me, is shrouded in mystery - mainly because I didn't know anything about it!

It was a nice trip, though not terribly well organised. It would have been a lot more meaningful if the tour guide could explain more about the history of the area, as well as the cuture of the Inner Mongolia people and how they lived...the tour guide spoke quite good English, but then I guess it would be difficult to actually explain things deeply in a foreign language.

May be my expectation was too high, and may be this is China, where you have to be a little bit more independent eg. doing a bit of your own research. In the end though, it was an enjoyable trip and I met some really nice people. The landscape of Inner Mongolia is beautiful - the grassland and the desert were so vast, and the blue sky stretched as far as the horizon.

We left Beijing Sunday night, taking the hard-sleeper train, which turned out to be better than expected, and the toilets were actually OK!

On Monday we visited the Xilamuren Grassland, rode horses and visited a local family for traditional snacks, which were quite interesting. I would have liked to see how the family lived, what they do each day, etc - but then their "job" is most probably to entertain tourists like us. Horse riding was fantastic though. Here you can experience and appreciate the wonderful landscape of the grassland.

On the second day we went to the edge of the Kubuqi Desert and visited the Yinkenxiang Sand-Bay, which is a bit like an amusement park in the desert - you can do lots of activities like camel riding, 4-wheel driving, toboggan down the sand dunes, horse riding, etc. The camel riding was a lot of fun.

Day 3 we went to the Inner Mongolia Museum. The museum was a sparkling brand new structure. It was completed only 2-3 weeks ago. A very nice museum (and nice toilets too!) - quite interesting as well, and would be more so if I could read Chinese!

Day 4 we went to the Five Towers Lamasery. The Lamasary was fasinating and is one of the 5 Indian style temples in China. Then took a really long bus ride (I think 5 hours in total, including lunch!) to Datong and visited Yun'gang Caves. It was a bit of a miserable rainy day and we were all grumpy by yet another long bus ride (I guess China is so big it takes half a day to get to one location each day!). The caves were spectacular though. There were huge buddha images carved into the walls of the caves. Unfortunately I don't know much about it since the tour guide didn't say anything about it at all. I would have liked to know a bit about the history of the area - guess will have to google it!

Later we went to Datong city, arriving just after dark. The tour guide plonked us down at the "Nine-dragons wall" - again, no explanation while she disappeared (to get our train tickets, as she explained later). It was cold, dark, wet, and we were all hungry! : ( ....luckily we were in good company....and then I managed to step into a puddle, and so with one wet shoe and foot, I wasn't too happy! ...but I suppose I was lucky in that it was an old pair of shoes!

The Mongolian Hotpot dinner turned out to be quite good, even if the driver got us lost for quite a while and the tour guide had to get a taxi to show us the way! May be it was his first day on the job? Anyway, after dinner all is well again and we were all happy, especially the table that drank a little too much!

The train left Datong at 11pm, arriving in Beijing at 5am the next morning....and some of us were ready to go out for pizza tonight, having eaten only Chinese food over the past week.