Up to this point in our cross-China journey, my friends and I have not really veered much off the China tourist path. Longji Rice Terrace was slightly less traveled but still appeared in flyer advertisements plastered around Guilin and Yangshuo. Weighing the tourist factor based on how many pages are dedicated to the place in Lonely Planet China, the city of Shanghai has fourty-one pages, the city of Xi'an has fourteen pages, and the vllage of Yangshuo has ten pages. Our next stop is significantly more rugged. The entire region of Inner Mongolia has only twelve pages. Hohhot, the largest city in the area, doesn't even have its own listing.
I'm fairly convinced that Hohhot has only one guesthouse and that situation is only because the owner of the elite guesthouse is very entrepreneur. The owner picked us up at the airport in his family's beat-up sudan like he would a visiting family member. When we arrived at the guesthouse, his wife hurried us into the kitchen for welcoming tea.
We weren't staying at a guesthouse, not really. We were staying at the family's home, which they opened to foreign tourists. Their toothbrushes were neatly stacked on the shelves in the bathroom and their clothes hung on the laundary line in the courtyard. We even watched a Ricky Martin behind-the-scenes documentary with the owner's twelve-year old son, Donetello, while we waited for dinner to be served.
We were tired from our Xi'an trip and would have been happy with just a simple rice dish for dinner, but the owner's wife had something else in mind. She spent nearly three hours preparing a traditional Mongolian mutton dumpling dish that was simply phenomenal. The meals was one of the best that we have had on the trip.
Travelers come to Inner Mongolia to visit the grasslands, and we were no different. Instead of staying in one of the fenced off "tourist camps" of yurt-shaped cement, we spent the night with the guesthouse owner's Mongolian family friend on the grasslands. In the morning, the owner, his son, his niece, his college age friend, who spoke English almost fluently, and the three of us piled in the van like we were going to visit grandmother's house.
When we reached the range house, we were ushered into their yurt in front of their house for additional welcoming milk tea. Around the tea were bowls and small dishes that I could not identify. They turned out to be items that could be added to the tea like a grain called millet, Mongolian butter, something that looked like cheetos without the flaming orange cheese, and something that tasted like flanks of pie crust. I became fond of the Mongolian cheese. It had the crunchy texture of how I would imagine pool chalk tastes, but it still had a sweet aftertaste that I found intriguing.
We spent the day roaming around the grasslands and playing with the family's goats, particularly one energetic baby goat that tried to eat my camera. We horseback rode to a crude circular tower made out of tiered levels of stone and honored the Mongolian tradition of circling the monument three times while tossing stones at it. As far as we could see were the rolling hills of grasslands blanketed with silence except for the whistling of the wind.
That night we tried on traditional Mongolian formal dresses with our surrogate family from the guesthouse. We made a bonfire out of dried dung and gazed at the multitude of stars visible without light pollution of any kind. One other fire was spotted miles away but other than that interference, we had nothing but stars.
A day later we went on another "family outing" with the college-age friend and the owner's niece to the Gobi Desert. The desert was an amusement park for Inner Mongolia, equipped with four wheelers, zip-lines, slides down the dunes, and what I can only describe as the DC Duck supped up to roll over the massive dunes. I felt like I was on a desert ship designed by Mad Max.
We rode two hump camels, and I happened to get the only almost pure white one. I affectionately named mine Booboo while my friend named her camel George. We came up with goofy Saturday cartoon-worthy antics for the camels as we rode through the water-smooth sand.
When we left Inner Mongolia, it felt like we were leaving an adoptive family. Our experience in the region certainly goes well beyond the twelve pages denoted to it in the brick-size Lonely Planet guide. Inner Mongolia proved to be the perfect respite in our cross-China trek.
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