Inner Mongolia: desert sands and grasslands

EAP took us to Inner Mongolia for the weekend. We left on Thursday night and traveled about 8-10 hours by train to 呼和 Hohot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. After breakfast, we traveled by bus to one of the biggest sand dunes in China, xiang sha wan 向沙灣, where we rode camels, sand surfed and had a statistically significant chance of obtaining skin cancer from the hot desert sun. Or at least my skin fried and made me even darker. Mmm crispy.

Luckily, we stayed at a decent hotel after desert fun so we still could shower. The next day, we went to the Da Zhou temple 大昭 and wandered around for an hour or two... and had lamb hot pot. Normally I would enjoy hot pot but the weather was already hot, the restaurant had no air conditioning or fan, and stupid me forgot to bring the fan I bought from some other temple, so you know what all this means... it equals teh sux.

After lunch we traveled to the grasslands 煇騰錫勒 where we stayed in a yurt 蒙古包 and didn't get to shower. They had community restrooms but they were so rancid that I decided to pee in the fields. That night we had roast lamb, which was better than I expected because I normally hate lamb, had a bonfire party and watched performances. We went to sleep pretty early because we wanted to wake up for the Sunrise.

My friends and I woke up at 4 am to watch the Sunrise.. which didn't really come until 5:15 am, so we freezed our asses off because it was freakin' cold in the morning. We rode horses in the afternoon for an hour and got ready to leave Inner Mongolia. We took the train back to Beijing and I took the best shower ever.