Inner mongolia - Hohhot

Towards the end of October, I was getting a little travel lusty and convinced Warren to take a weekend trip. 

Inner mongolia, a north-eastern province of China with its grasslands and deserts seemed inviting enough.

I did enlist the help of a travel agent who said that we would live in yurks at the grassland, see Mongolian people dancing at the bonfire and other fun things. We did know it was cold and we wouldn't see rolling green grasslands but we hadn't imagined quite this:

We arrived at an ungodly hour at 4am at Hohhot (pronounced as Hu-huh-haw-tuh). Then proceeded to the "grasslands". It was freezing and I was shivering and just wanted to go back and sit in the van (which we did after sunrise). The whole dew freezing at dawn made for this empty beer bottle to look artistic.

We did see the sunrise and our over enthusiastic guide took a picture of Warren and I holding the glowing sun !

The rest of the grassland day was kind of a let down though. We saw some horses but didn't ride them because everything was barren. We had lunch with the Mongolians (no fire included) and I tasted some of their wine which I think was 50% ethanol (*gags*). Due to the freezing conditions, our yurk stay was canceled and we proceeded to the city. Warren and I decided to just go exploring the town on our own and that was quite fun. We saw a temple, giant statues, walked around in the market etc.

But the highlight of the day was going through the local vegetable market and looking at the ginormous produce. We were amazed at the sizes of scallions and carrots and onions they were selling. See for yourself:

Later we had dinner at a non-English speaking place with a Chinese menu. It was quite eventful as the adjoining table had 6 boisterous middle-aged men whose goal was to make conversation with us. Warren and I tell Chinese people that we don't speak Chinese usually as an opening line. That is a good way to stop them from bombarding us with questions. In reality we know a tiny bit of survival Chinese but our vocabulary being limited to about 20 words or so, doesn't really help us in carrying out social conversations. 

However, this dinner group was not deterred by our inability to speak the language. I think they believed that if they talked "louder" and "used more words", we would eventually understand what they are saying. They were sorely mistaken though. I am still not sure what they were trying to say. They gave up eventually, but ended up taking pictures with Warren and I (more with Warren, him being white and all) as a consolation prize. 

It was a quaint town, not touristy at all. We went through the entire day and almost the whole weekend, without seeing any foreigners !

I was going to write about going to the desert the next day, but that is going to be a tribute to Warren's jumping picture modeling skillz, so it shall be a separate post, hopefully soon.