With a few days left of my May 1 holiday, I decided to go north to get away from the tens of millions of vacationing Chinese trying to find warmer weather. With that, I took a plane from Xi’an up to Genghis Khan country: Inner Mongolia.
I landed in the capital city of Hohhot, which I later learned means “Blue City” in the Mongolian language. It earned its name for its big blue sky, which is always a relief to see after a foggy and smoggy winter. The city is rather young for a Chinese city, though, having been established by the 25th generation grandson of Kublai Khan in 1580, and I was eager to get out of the city and onto the fabled steppe that Genghis Khan and his army once roamed.
Mongolia is a vast and sparsely populated place and, as such, it can be difficult to tackle many sightseeing opportunities. I had wanted to visit both the Genghis Khan Mausoleum and Xanadu, the fabled city built by Kublai Khan as a summer paradise where he kicked back with Marco Polo. The two places, though, are located in opposite directions from Hohhot and require a maddening combination of buses and trains to get to. Also, because of the May 1 holiday, many of the buses I would need weren’t running
Instead of just picking one place to visit, I decided on something completely different. At the local Anda Hostel, I signed up for a two day-one night tour out to the famed Mongolian grassland, as well as the nearby desert.
We left early Friday morning on a bus with about 20 other travelers for a two-hour ride out of the city. The passing landscape quickly changed from a modern city to acres and acres of farmland and pastures just starting to develop the lush green grass the area is famous for.
We arrived just before lunch and were shown to our yurt. A yurt, or ger, as the Mongolians call them, is a circular, wooden tent covered with animal skins to keep it warm inside. Yurts have been the housing type of choice in Mongolia for most of the last 3,000 years, although today, many Mongolians on the steppe live in more westernized homes.
If you Google image search “yurts”, you will see a selection of round luxury cabins. This was not our yurt. Our no-frills yurt had no beds or furniture, just a series of pads, blankets, and pillows that we could arrange on the floor for bedding. It could have comfortably slept four people. We were seven to a yurt.
The bathroom situation was that there wasn’t one. For the next 24 hours, I and the two-dozen other guests were on our own to roam the steppe and mark out our own territory for taking care of business. Being that the steppe is a vast, flat plain where you can see to the horizon in just about every direction, meant that someone would almost always be spying you during these moments.
Lunch was served shortly after we arrived. A lamb stew with vegetables and dumplings. The food was tasty and we all made short work of it while getting to know the other travelers. Many were Europeans that were living in Beijing or Shanghai and also trying to get away from the crowds over the holiday.
After lunch, we spent a couple of hours exploring our surroundings. Our hosts were a local family that raised sheep and cattle. Like many ranchers on the Mongolian steppe, they also welcome travelers to their property to rake in some extra cash. It felt a little silly, though, as us travelers crammed ourselves inside wooden sheds for the “authentic” Mongolian experience while our real live Mongolian hosts slept comfortably inside a large house, complete with electricity and running water.
We made our way among the sheep and cows, exploring the hills and a large pond, while constantly trying to avoid stepping in their droppings. There was an archery pit set up where we could take turns pretending we part of Genghis Khan’s horde, except where they could fire with deadly accuracy while riding a horse at full speed, most of us struggled to send an arrow 10 yards straight ahead with feet planted firmly on the ground.
To complete the steppe experience, they shortly brought us out in caravans to a nearby ranch where we were able to ride Mongolian horses, one of the smaller equine varieties. Having lived in Kentucky for six years, I’ve been around thoroughbreds, including coming face-to-face with one of the greatest racehorses of all-time, Seattle Slew. The only thing perhaps more legendary than Seattle Slew’s racing career may be his breeding career, having sired over 1,000 foals, of which 537 went on to win races. As prolific as Seatle Slew was a cocksman (cockshorse?), I don’t think he would have given a second look to any of the horses we were presented with, even as fluffers.
The horses that we were led to saddle looked like that they had been around since the last reign of the Khans. We mounted our soon-to-be-heading-to-the-glue-factory steeds and took off on a slow and steady trot. Here is where I’d like to say that like Jean Cruguet riding Seattle Slew to the 1977 Triple Crown, I took the reins and rode my colt masterfully across the steppe. Instead, my horse followed the same path that it probably trots a half dozen times a day with random foreigners on its back. My presence may have well have been a sack of potatoes for all it was concerned.
After the horse-riding, we caravanned back to our yurts where we were given our next mission: to wrangle up enough cow shit to stoke a good bonfire. While we were enjoying a balmy spring day, it isn’t rare for it to drop below freezing at night, and with heavy winds blowing across the steppe, the bonfire is a necessity.
We all set off with a dung basket in separate directions to collect all of the cowpies that we’d been carefully avoiding all day. Unsurprisingly, a dung basket is just like any other large basket, except that it is used to collect cow dung and absolutely nothing else. It didn’t take long, after all, the entire area was covered with cow droppings, and we took turns dumping our treasure into the fire pit.
Soon after dinner, the wind began to pick up and we gathered in a circle around our cow shit bonfire with a couple cases of beer. The sun had set and as the night went on, more and more stars became visible. In close to three years in China, I don’t think I’ve seen a single star in the night sky and here I was with hundreds of stars clearly gleaming overhead. Near the horizon was a red sphere, that I could only surmise was Mars. Despite its contents, the fire was odorless and, looking up, I was able to forget where and when we were. We were looking up at the same sky that Genghis Khan would have seen 800 years ago.
The next morning, we woke up shortly after sunrise. Breakfast was a tasteless traditional milk cookie and an equally bland milk tea with balls of millet grain floating in it. After breakfast, we packed up and loaded into SUVs for the long drive west to the desert. After sleeping on the wooden floor of the yurt, I was looking forward to the modern comfort of the Isuzu Rodeo and I promptly fell asleep.
I woke a couple of hours later. We were still on the road, the steppe turning into mountains, on the other side lay the desert. In one of the mountains, there was a temple built almost exactly halfway up. There were no roads at all on the mountain and as we were trading guesses on how they went about building the temple, our driver pulled off the road into another large temple, this one much larger, but on the ground, just off the highway.
After explaining that the other SUVs in our caravan would have stopped an hour or so back, for a bathroom and snack break, we kept on motoring down the highway so that he could show us Meidaizhao Temple, a site that obviously meant a lot to him.
We entered the temple grounds and our driver began to guide us through every detail. He was a Mongolian and a Buddhist and immensely proud of both. He explained how “dalai” was a Mongolian word meaning ocean and that the third Lama had traveled from Tibet to Mongolia at the invitation of Altan Khan, a descendant of Kublai Khan to spread Buddhism. The third Lama adopted the honorific title ‘Dalai’ bestowed on him by Khan and every Lama henceforth would be known as the Dalai Lama. This would later include Altan Khan’s own grandson, who would become the fourth Dalai Lama.
The tour was short, but it may have been the highlight of the trip, owing mainly to the passion of our driver as he played tour guide. When we left the temple, we saw that the others had caught up to us and we headed off for some lunch before entering the desert.
Similar to how the vast plains of the steppe spread out in all directions around us, the desert seemed like an ocean of sand arranging itself in dunes on all sides. We pulled into the parking lot of a tourist company that rented out ATVs and provided camel excursions into the desert. Unfortunately, we were not here for the dune buggies, but rather the camels.
Camels are hideous creatures. They are ugly and have a cantankerous disposition, although it’s fairly easy to have empathy for the beasts. Much like the horses we rode the day before, these camels lived the dull life of carrying annoying Instagramming tourists a kilometer into the desert while trying to avoid the snapping baton strikes of their handler.
Our listless camels carried us out over the sand dunes to one giant heap of sand, where we took turns walking up and sledding down on metal sleds. After 20 minutes, we all had sand in every place on our body that you can think of and just as many which you can’t. Finally, the camels returned us and we piled back into the Rodeo, where I fantasized about the sand-shedding shower that awaited me during our three-hour drive back to Hohhot.
