Xi'an - Xining - Yinchuan - Hohhot

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Greetings from Inner Mongolia! Apologies (especially to Dad!) for the relative dearth of blog entries - unfortunately have spent the last couple of days being pretty sicky and not really in a bloggy mood. However, feeling a lot better now, and very excited for the days ahead! This is going to be a beast update, and I'll definitely try to add some photos if I can.

Right... so. Leaving from Xi'an. We'd booked ourselves on to a hard sleeper from Xi'an to Xining, a city which is right on the Tibetan Plateau. The train itself was fine, despite being on the top bunk! Chinese hard sleepers are a pretty civilised way to travel - bunks are comfy and clean enough, in tiers of three, and although open to the corridor, everyone settles down not too badly. Our only problem was that we were on the top bunk and had to scramble up like a monkey! We also got into a fight with a random Chinese woman dressed in rainbow clothes which was all very amusing. I also had the rather dubious pleasure of being stared at for 11 hours by a random man - it was OK though, we bonded over apples!

Took us a little while to find our hostel in Xining, but when we did, we were pretty happy, as it was lovely! Very homely and the lady who ran it reminded us of Hongfen from Study China 😊 Was funny to be in a hostel on the 15th floor of a tower block mind you! We got up pretty early the next morning to explore Xining - a lively town, with the somewhat incongruous sight of monks in robes everywhere, which was so cool. Had a nice lunch with the interesting ingredient of numbing peppers - numb tongue ahoy! In the afternoon we just wandered around a bit and bought some China tat :P Found an amazing food market with just about anything you could ever need - meat, the nicest looking vegetables, fish... yum yum! Spent ages wandering around there. Went back to the hostel and sorted out a tour to Qinghai Lake and Kumbum (teehee) Monastery for the next day, and went back out for dinner... which is where my problems started! Had an OK tea, but right away the tummy said NO WAY and so I was rather ill during the night, which bode well for the day trip 😞 - that's me just beginning to feel normal again now tbh, but at least I'm getting better! Been drinking plenty of fluids, including some DELICIOUS rehydration sachets...!

Anyway, Qinghai Lake and the monastery. Off to the monastery first, which honestly was amazing. Monks everywhere, chanting, incense, and some gorgeous Buddhas. So ornate, and so unusual to see Chinese people (who normally do EVERYTHING in tour groups and chatter incessantly) being quiet and contemplative. A really Tibetan experience - just don't mention the Dalai Lama :S People in China really don't get things like why he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, Han Chinese don't tend to consider minorities as Chinese at all - despite the government's central message of tolerance for all minorities and 'look, we gave them a homeland'. Leaves you feeling a bit cynical.

After Kumbum, we drove to Qinghai Lake, which is I think the largest inland lake in China - 200-odd km in circumference, 3200m elevation, and they hold a Tour de Qinghai cycling race every year! The drive through the Tibetan countryside was beautiful and I saw lots of yaks!!!!! The lake itself was... inneresting. It just seems like, if a place in China can be turned into a tourist trap, it will. All around the lake were just so many people selling rubbish like dog skins (!) and faux-Tibetan nonsense. A man also tried to give me his phone number, which was a bit disconcerting! After leaving the madding crowd a bit, though, got some gorgeous photos of the lake, and overall really glad to have gone.

Next stop: Yinchuan. Otherwise known by myself and Megan as something entirely less polite, and a total death-town. We got there really early, in the pouring rain, and immediately had a bad feeling about the place. Added to this feeling of malaise was the fact that try as we might, we could not find the hostel, on account of some pretty shoddy directions. Sitting in a KFC mulling over a steaming cup of yummy rehydration salts, we decided to cut our losses and just get out of Yinchuan, so promptly returned to the train station and booked tickets for that evening to Hohhot. Which left us with a day to kill in Yinchuan! In the end, it wasn't too bad - went to Ningxia Provincial Museum, which had clearly just been rehoused in a brand new, shiny building, and did have some really interesting exhibits, particularly on the Hui Muslims. Despite that though, Yinchuan is not recommended... give it a miss if you can!

Hohhot so far, though, is about 110% better! After a bit of hoohah with a hostel trying to overcharge us we moved to a different one, which is probably the nicest hostel of all time! The people that run it are really lovely, and it's more like a homestay than a hostel. Also, there's a yurt in the courtyard! They were happy enough to let us check in straight away and I just spent the day in bed - really needed it and feeling all the better for it! Managed to eat something in the evening - went to a Western place for something my tummy is used to, ordered spaghetti, and got noodles with herbs... ummmm...! Good effort, though. We're just hanging out at the hostel now, and have booked a grasslands tour for tomorrow, and then a desert tour for the day after - cannot wait!!!! Will go and pop some snaps up now, then go and sit in the yurt!

Jen

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