Beijing to Kunming : A Commute to Work

[Pat]

Made it into Zhongwei, Ningxia yesterday and am taking a day off to rest up.

I'm loosely planning to get into Kunming on June 17th and taking roughly 14 days to do the route through Xining - Yushu - Sichuan/Tibetan border - Zhongdian/Lijiang/Dali/Kunming.

I'm using a Canon G12 that I picked up just for this trip.. still trying to learn how to use it - so I pretty much just use Auto and Landscape modes.. (although I discovered the Super Vivid Mode just in time to 'bring out the green' in the grasslands!)

Day 5: Inner Mongolia: Hohhot to Wudang Zhao

After resting the previous day, I woke up early and headed for the grasslands north of Hohhot. The road north of the city was mountainous, traffic was light, and the weather was perfect.

The road twisted out of Hohhot:



After decsending out of the mountains the terrain flattened out and after an hour or so of riding I entered the grasslands. Some areas have become tourist destinations where you can sleep in a yurt, ride horses, and sing Mongolian KTV. Hoping to avoid these spots, I rode until I saw an open plain and rode on in:



I saw a herd of horses in the distance and set out for them. They let me ride up pretty close, but as soon as I got off the bike to take a picture, they took off!



These guys on the other hand, moved a lot slower:



A yurt and something that may or may not have been covered in prayer flags:



After chasing the horses around for awhile, I had worked up an appetite and went looking for lunch. I saw a couple guys on motorcycles sitting on the side of the road and asked where I could go to eat. They asked if I wanted to ride a horse, and I told them I only ride Iron Horses. I'm not sure they got the joke. One of the guys asked if I wanted to eat at his house, thinking that this could be a cool experience, I followed him on his motorcycle... straight into one of the tourist yurt camps. Oh well!:



I was brought into a yurt, where this little number presented herself:



I obliged with a belly rub, not realizing in Mongolian culture I had apparently conscented to marriage. We were wed shortly thereafter in a simple ceremony:



Full stomach and newly wed, I decided to go off in search of villages in the middle of the grasslands area. After weaving around for a bit, I came across a wind farm:



And then this little beauty of a road:



The road, or actually series of dirt paths, led past a number of half abandoned villages:



The GPS quickly became useless, and I remembered reading a thread here somewhere that proposed the Theory of Following Power Lines:



The power lines led past some more half abandoned villages:



And then came out on this perfectly paved new road.. in the middle of nowhere:



The new road led past another wind farm:



A village in the shadow of wind turbines:



Eventually I made it back out to a bigger road and set a course for Wu Dang Zhao, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. The road wound back towards and then followed the mountains:



I made good time to the monastery, despite a couple unexpected detours - inexplicably being forced off of a perfectly good new road and into a dust bowl full of trucks, only to wind back around to the perfectly good road again. This, unfortunately, seems to be a common theme, one that would be repeated a couple days later. Hoping to spend the night in the monastery, I rushed to make it just before they closed, only to find out that visitors can't stay in the monastery, only at a little hotel next door. But all's well that end's well, as the hotel was a family run operation and everyone was incredibly friendly. And after a long chat with the husband and wife and a good dinner with four new friends that immediately invited me to their table, I called it a night.