I have to admit, that after our experience of Baotou, and the superstar status our pale skin brought us while we were there, I boarded the train to Hohhot with some apprehension. I wasn't sure I could cope with another city of open-mouthed oggling.
But I needn't have worried. We became normal citizens again as soon as we set foot in Hohhot, which was immediately apparent as a progressive, attractive and friendly city. We were no longer being gawked at, and the pretty gardens and tree-lined streets allowed me to finally relax.
Hohhot. It looks easy enough to pronounce, doesn't it? In China, when a word has two syllables, it always has two equivalent Chinese characters (three syllables equals three characters, etc). So, we were perplexed when our train tickets showed four Chinese characters. Were we on the wrong train? Were we heading in the wrong direction? No, in fact, Hohhot is pronounced with four syllables: 'Hu-He-Hao-Te'. And its meaning is even more intricate: 'Arching blue skies over the grasslands'. Just another complexity of the Chinese language that we need to get our heads around.
Upon arrival at the train station, we were picked up by one of the workers at the Anda Hostel. This was a beautiful place to stay, with lovely staff, pretty grounds and a good location (although the trauma of the broken toilet is still haunting me).
Despite feeling weary from our extremely busy itinerary of the past week, we filled our free afternoon with a trip to the Inner Mongolia Museum. The fact that admission was free was an added bonus to our battered budget. The museum was a massive and impressive building, housing four levels of exhibits, ranging from marine biology to to dinosaurs to communist history to Genghis. Yes, the very reason we were there was to see the many artifacts attributed to the reign of Genghis Khan and that of his grandson Kublai Khan. We were in Mongol heaven, and despite the lack of English explanations, we learned a significant amount about the life and times of our blog's namesake.
One of the highlights of our time in China, was our day trip to an untouched, unrenovated section of the Great Wall of China. Anda Hostel organised a driver for us, and off we set, not knowing what to expect other than 'a place that no other tourists visit'. With a quick detour to visit the 700 year old White Pagoda, and a scrumptious lunch of typically Inner Mongolian food (fried mushrooms, sweet and sour eggplant, omelette, and more), we drove through tiny farm villages and along winding dirt roads, to finally reach our destination.
After hiking up a steep incline, we arrived at the wall. It wasn't glamourous like the Mutianyu section that I visited a few years ago near Beijing. And it wasn't touristy like the Badaling section that Richard had been to. But its crumbling, ruinous, unkept grandeur was simply breathtaking. This section of the wall currently separates the provinces of Inner Mongolia and Shanxi. Two thousand years ago it kept the Mongols out of China (well at least it tried to), and in our mind's eye we could see the footsteps of Genghis and his hordes of warriors and horses as they stampeded through. The wild grasses blowing in the wind and the black birds circling above, added to this image. The massive wind turbines that blighted the nearby landscape didn't. But this was the only downside to a brilliant spectacle. We were the only tourists there, and in fact, the only other person we saw was a farmer with his flock of sheep.
Our experience of the Hohhot cuisine has been interesting and varied. The mutton kebabs we ordered through sign language and a ridiculous attempt at Mandarin were tasty, but the rest of our meal order was lost in translation and failed to appear at the table, so we had to supplement our authentic dining experience with some KFC chips and a chocolate sundae. Our hostel also provided us with a lovely Mongolian hotpot the following night.
Hohhot is a city I could easily visit again one day, and the crucible of Mongolian and Chinese cultures creates an exotic atmosphere which has left us with many wonderful memories.
On that note, we now turn our attention to our next stop, Beijing, where, despite our pale skin, we will be thrown into anonymity, and to be frank, I'm quite pleased about that!
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