Meagan's World: Yurts on the Grasslands

Our trip to Inner Mongolia was interesting, but I am not sure if I ever need to go on an organized tour again. Still, if there ever was a good time to go on an organized tour, it was this time. I was slightly burnt out from excessive travel, and also frustrated with trying to get my life set up in Beijing, so it was nice to be on "cruise control" and have someone else do the organizing for me! Also, I got to meet a lot of people from my school and I see them around campus and that is sort of nice. A lot of the people at my school are quite a bit younger than me, and it was sort of funny to watch them all interact with eachother. Audrey and I were the "old ladies" on the trip. We were 7 to 8 years older than most other people! A lot of kids come to BLCU for a year off between high school and college, or they come here to get their bachelor's degree. I guess I must look or act young because when people found out how old I was they seemed very surprised.

One perk of being on an organized tour is that we always had big meals and lots of people to share with, so we got to try a lot of new things. At each meal we sat at tables of ten, and that is much more fun than eating by yourself or with just one other person. The other advantage to traveling with a tour group is that you always have a ride everywhere and you never have to haggle with taxi drivers or deal with getting ripped off, which can happen easily if you are not paying attention. Paying attention adds stress to any trip, so it was nice to not have to deal with it. Everything in Inner Mongolia is quite far apart, so if it was a good place to be part of a tour.

We took the train over night from Beijing to Hohhot. It took about 15 hours, but it seemed like a blink. We were on a sleeper train and it was actually very comfortable and clean. I was expecting it to be like the trains in India, but they were much more clean and relaxing!

In Hohhot we went to the Inner Mongolia Museum which was sort of interesting, but most of the placards were in Chinese so I didn't get that much out of it. Then we went out to the Xilamuren Grasslands and went horse back riding on these little Mongolian Horses. It was sort of fun but sort of not, since we were in such a big group and so the horses just followed each other.

That night we stayed in a yurt and it was COLD!!! The grasslands are very cold and windy. Luckily, I had bought a jacket before I went on the trip, but even with the jacket I was frozen. The yurts were basically just tents and were not very warm inside, and so I think my muscles were tense the whole night trying to keep warm, and the next day I was so sore!

The grasslands were not as scenic as I thought they would be, but they did feel magnificently open and free compared to Beijing. I was expecting tall grass, but it was very short. I really shouldn't judge all grasslands by the ones hat I went to, because they were the closest to the city and probably the most touristy, but still they were 2 hours from town.