Inner Mongolia

If someone were to ask me how the four days spent in Inner Mongolia were, I would struggle to find many words besides ‘character building’. The trip as a whole was not what we had intended- and we saw far too much of the inside of the bus. Three busloads of students piled into the buses at 5am on Tuesday morning and began the long trip for Inner Mongolia. Arriving for We spent the first night in the grasslands, where the temperatures would’ve dropped below 0 degrees, and without a coat I found myself layered in all the clothes I had bought with me. 

For everybody else, however, Baijiu was the fix for the cold. Chinese liquor that sits at a casual 60% alcohol, something I was not informed of when drinking it. The night in the grasslands was spent in the open air dancing to gangnam style with all the students. At the end of the night we returned to our small huts and tried our best to sleep through the cold.

We awoke the next morning to our first breakfast Inner Mongolia style. The meals over the course of the trip consisted of vegetables and bread. The bread we ingested over the period resembled a large dense rock. They did a good job of soaking up the sauce of the vegetable dishes, and the spares could be piled neatly into beanies and smuggled out of the dining halls to be eaten on the long bus trips throughout the days.

The combination of the cold and the lack of meat in the dishes saw everybody flick into survival mode. This reached an all new low (or peak perhaps?) when we entered the dining hall after a group of Chinese tourists had finished eating a meal of whole lamb. Entering the dining hall after, we saw that quite a bit of the meat as still left behind. Perfectly good meat, our sense of what was good and right in the world melted away, and the meat was transferred onto our table and finished off in no time at all. 

The second day of the trip is when it all went a little pear shaped. We departed from the grasslands and drove for the whole day, with the highways being shut down for construction. Intended arrival being at around 2pm, we pulled into the desert at 7:30, a casual five and a half hours later than planned. We rode the camels, slid down the sand dunes and rode through the desert on a big truck before reboarding the bus headed for our hotel. 

Reaching a tollway checkpoint at 8:30pm, we were informed that we were half an hour late and could not get on the freeway. We would instead have to take the dirt road. We found ourselves on a road just meters across from the major highway, riddled with potholes and a myriad of other trucks. After two hours in standstill traffic and our watches informing us it was midnight, we calculated to have been on the bus for a rough 12 hours so far. We were nowhere near our hotel, and were soon pulled over and searched by the police. at around 2am, the last thing you want to hear is more bad news. Like perhaps that drivers have to stop driving between 2am and 5am, and that we would have to shut the bus down for those three hours. Luckily, we avoided this fate, and shuffled like zombies into our hotel at 4am- with no dinner and no intention to ever get on a bus again.

For myself (and for most other people), this set back really did put a huge dampener on the remaining leg of the trip. Over the next few days, we ate more rock bread, were taken to big factories and spent hours on the bus. Due to us sleeping until 11am the next day, we set everything back by 5 hours, and so we had very little time at tourist attractions. What we did get to see we were too exhausted to enjoy. The bus contracted a serious case of cabin fever, with crying, yelling, and charades in the aisle. A rollercoaster of emotions were present, from it all being a big funny joke to us feeling trapped and panicked (no toilet on a bus for days does that to people!!). 

Our group of eight decided on the last day that we could not take the bus back to Beijing, and had just had enough of the whole tour. Instead, we left the bus at Datong and headed for the train. However, it was not to be. Entering the station, our joyous faces of freedom were soon wiped clean when we saw the boards. No trains for four days. With classes starting again in two days, we had just sent the bus away and were standing in the Datong bus station, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere we needed to be. Calling the bus to stop, we did the walk of shame back through the bus and took up our seats, welcoming with the outline of our asses firmly imprinted. Despite this, the trip back to Beijing took less time than expected, and we were ecstatic to be back in Tianjin when we finally arrived home at 11:30 Friday night. 

Would I do the trip again? Definitely not. Would I recommend the tour? No. Was it a situation that having survived it I can survive just about anything? Most certainly!