Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China

We landed in Beijing early Wednesday after an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur and took a shuttle to the Beijing Railway station where we planned to board a train to Datong in Shanxi province.  But we hadn’t counted on the Chinese national holiday week starting the next day.  The massive crowd inside the ticket hall didn’t augur well, and after waiting an eternity in a hot queue we learned that every one of the several trains to Datong that day was completely booked out.  The attendant told us that more trains were leaving from the Beijing West railway station and possibly we might get tickets for one of those.  A taxi trip across Beijing and another long wait in a queue later, the news was even worse.  There were no tickets on any of those trains today, or tomorrow, or the day after that!  This was not what we wanted to hear, and already hot and jaded, we checked into a hotel near the station to review our plight.  Airflights were heavily booked too but that night a few cancellations appeared on the internet and we swooped on two tickets direct to Hohhot on Friday.  The time in Beijing passed quickly and late Friday night we touched down in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, bypassing Datong.

Hohhot was founded in the 16th century by Altan Khan, about 300 years after Genghis Khan and his Mongolian calvary unleashed one of the greatest conquests the world has ever seen, subjugating much of Asia, Persia and Eastern Europe.  The Chinese finally drove the Mongols out in the 17th century, in the process taking half of the Mongolian homeland too.  Today this is the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia (not to be confused with the sovereign country of Mongolia to the north).  Little of the Mongolian heritage remains in the Hohhot of today, that is essentially a booming, pleasant-enough Han Chinese city with new construction and renovation going on everywhere.  Only a few buildings feature Mongolian-style decoration; the rest are modern concrete and glass high-rise edifices.

We wandered through the impressive Da Zhao temple that features a Buddha figure carved from a single 20 tonne block of Burma jade - the signboard claims that the cassock over the Buddha’s shoulder is inlaid with 41 rubies and 7,000 diamonds.  We later took a local bus two hours out of town to the Xilamuren Grassland.  Apparently this is vivid green from June to August, but with winter approaching is now drab brown.  We hired a couple of small Mongolian horses from one of the great Khan’s descendants and rode along a ridge overlooking the plain.  Our horses seemed to be descended from a more genteel line than those ridden by Genghis and his men - only once did we break into a sufficiently fast trot to entertain fleeting thoughts of a second invasion of Hungary.