Nei Meng Gu is one of the largest provinces in China, stretching from the frozen wastes of the far north, where winter temperatures in cities such as Man Zhou Li hover around minus 40, all the way out to desert in the west, which borders Gansu and almost touches Xinjiang.
It's surprisingly wealthy, thanks to natural gas, cashmere, coal and rare earth elements. It's also home to that crazy ghost city that's being built despite seemingly no demand for housing in the area.
For those not into coal or ghost cities, the main attractions are the grasslands, great rolling oceans of green that stretch for hundreds of miles, uninterrupted except by the occasional sheep or strolling horseman.
The nomadic tribes that once populated the plains are all gone 鈥� though there are some semi-nomadic reindeer-farming minorities in the far north. However, a tourist scene has sprung up aimed at recreating this grasslands experience, offering guests horse trekking and traditional food plus the chance to watch some Mongolian wrestling and sleep in a yurt.
We went up there for some of that and it was pretty cool. Kind of Chinese-touristy, but once we got away from that, the scenery and isolation were awesome.
To get to the grasslands you have to fly in to the provincial capital, Hohhot. It's about two and a half hours from Shanghai by plane. The city itself is nothing too special, though there is a large Muslim population and a whole area where you can go and eat Muslim food (ask for musilin jie). There's also a Buddhist complex called Silver Temple where you can see about a dozen highly ornate buildings, a couple of which predate the Cultural Revolution.
Some of that rare earth cash has also been splashed on a really fancy museum and arts center, which looks like this.
The building is probably the coolest thing about it. The museum is fun in a kitsch sort of way, with wax models of nomads and lots of stuff about the dinosaurs that have been turfed up in the area. But it's exhaustingly huge and probably too detailed in scope to try to see it all.
Khal Drogo was there to welcome us, which was nice.
Getting out to the grasslands can be a bit tricky. The one we went to is called Xilamuren, and it's about two hours outside Hohhot. There are no public buses or anything like that. You can rent a car, or the in Hohhot has a package deal where you check into the hotel, stay one night and then they'll drive you out there the next day. The hotel also sends one of their chefs to the grasslands to cater for guests during their stay and spruces up their yurts with Shangri-La toiletries. They're aiming to create a really high-end experience 鈥� all the comforts of a five star hotel but slapped in the middle of an almost empty wilderness.
For that, they've partnered up with what they think is the best resort out in the grasslands. It's called "Resort of the Mongols" and has about 50 yurts, plus a huge tent that's used for dining, and a couple of medium-sized private dining yurts. Ah, China鈥�
About half the yurts are cloth tents, the rest are made of concrete. I'd have preferred to stay in one of the tents, but these don't have air con and aren't considered luxurious enough for people as important as me, so we were put in one of the concrete ones. It had satellite TV, a shower and a Western-style flushing toilet. Not very authentic, but certainly comfortable.
In fact, there's nothing very authentic about any of this. Authenticity is a priority for Western tourists, but, as we know it's really not so important for most Chinese, who make up 99% of the guests here. They want comfort, good food and entertainment, and that's what these places deliver.
There's a lot of lamb, fatty, on-the-bone lamb, and lots of tat to buy, plus plenty of baijiu and beer for the tour groups who arrive, and in the evening there's a show, with teenagers in slightly skimpy but perhaps vaguely traditional costume doing dance routines to pounding Eurobeat remixes of Mongolian folk music.
Well, that's not everyone's cup of fermented mare's milk, but we are in China, and that's part of the experience of traveling to tourist attractions on the Mainland. For me, the real draw here was the nature and the space, and that was all around all the time in the silent, endless rolling plains.
You can hire horses just outside the Resort of the Mongols. They're not included in the Shangri-La package and cost about 300-600rmb per nag, depending on how far you want to go. Our guide took us out for about two hours, during which we roamed around, feeling like cowboys, and then visited this fella.
It's some kind of Mongolian prayer hump. You're meant to walk around it five times and then ask the gods for rain, which we dutifully did. Thankfully they weren't listening and the blue skies remained.
After that, we rode to a small camp where they served us milk tea and fed us the local specialty, biscuits of sweet yoghurt-like stuff that the locals all refer to as cheese. The milk tea is made by boiling brick tea with milk, then adding salt and stir-fried millet. It's a vast improvement on the plastic-tasting, overly sweet nai cha that you get in Shanghai.
Our hosts were extremely friendly and didn't charge for the tea or cheese. The horses were also extremely chilled. I've been on horseback once before, when I was eight, but on the way back, our guide let me ride off on my own, un-led. For half an hour I got to trot along, surrounded by hundreds of miles of empty grass, feeling like a badass Dothraki warrior. Except on a pony not a stallion.
After two days on the plains, the Shangri-La's, black chauffer-driven saloon arrived to pick us up. The drive back takes you through more beautiful, untouched countryside, and ultimately up through the hills and back into Hohhot. Then we got another night's stay in this five-star hotel and a chance to explore the capital a bit, before you're deposited back at the airport.
You could do the grasslands as a solo tourist, but the Shangri-La package takes the thinking out of it. The hotel itself is probably the nicest in town, and I'd say it's impossible to visit the plains without spending a night on either side in Hohhot.
The Grasslands Experience Package includes airport transfers and a trip to the cashmere market, the antique market, some temples or the Muslim street, plus accommodation in a Horizon Club room with access to the club lounge. You also get dinner and breakfast at the hotel, and all your meals at the grasslands resort, cooked by a Shangri-la chef. All that costs 11,888rmb for two people. Not cheap, but pretty cool.
The best time to go is right now until about the end of September or mid October. It's sunny and clear, though much cooler than in Shanghai.
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