Kubuqi desert aka Warren photoshoot

As I had said earlier, I decided to break down the Inner Mongolia post into two parts.
This being the second. Rather than being focused on the Kubuqi desert it is more of Warren's photoshoot result.

On our 2nd day in Inner Mongolia, we went to the Kubuqi desert. Late October seemed to be the perfect time. It was a little cold, but in the bright desert sun, it wasn't too bad and it wasn't crowded. After renting out our awesome desert shoes, of which one of mine had a hole and defeated the purpose, we went on to explore the desert. Warren, fearing the health of his camera being invaded by sand particles, left it in the car and thus, by default because the photo subject.

We had a fun camel ride, and Warren lurved his camel. I was glad to be sitting at the very front, so as to not smell too much camel, but that did end up bringing the rear camels head way too near to my foot for comfort. However, it was a calm ride ( at least the camel did not spit).



Then it was decided that the desert was a perfect place for jumping pictures.

Warren did some awesome jumps, as captured here. Our tour guide was impressed by Warren's skillz. He said he watched Warren jump from the other side of the camp, which was slightly creepy but understandable. 

I did not do so well, when I had to jump. It seems that I was trying to do a really bad impression of the Karate kid crane stance mid air.

VS

After we got tired of jumping, by which I mean inhaled too much sand, Warren posed for "awesome white person in desert" shots. A few from the collection are shown here:











The day ended with a sand slide. It was a bad decision in retrospect. Sand ended up entering my ears, nose, eyes, hair, permeated through my clothes and needless to say, it did not make the over-night train ride to Beijing easy. As if the snoring and Chinese radio shows weren't bad enough, the feeling of sand on your body that scratched every time you moved, made that train ride unforgettable to say the least.

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.