A Trip to Inner Mongolia (Jul 10, 03)

National Day holiday is another Golden Week holiday in mainland China which we get a week off from work. This year, I joined my friends to go to Inner Mongolia to experience the pastoral life for a week.

The trip was quite a memorable one. Other than the scenic environment in Inner Mongolia, there are a few observations that I think would be useful for my travel in the future.
1) You are nothing but a piece of “burden” to a horse - I had a few horse-back riding trainings before and in this trip, we also had a whole afternoon horse-back riding to visit some of the local habitats of Inner Mongolia. To cope with the large amount of tourists in this week, the horse to trainer ratio was about 20 to 1, which I didn’t notice before. We had about 50 people going as a group to visit the local homes, most of the times, we were riding on the extensive grassland, but there were a few narrow hillside paths as well. We were told to watch the time because as the evening approaching, the horses would start to gather themselves and rush to go home. Maybe the horse I rode on was particularly “home-sick”, it rushed to exceed the speed of every other horse in front of it and when it passed a narrow hillside path, it was squeezed in between 2 or 3 bigger horses, and the passenger on top, i.e. me, couldn’t stand the pressure from the 2 bigger horses aside, fell down to the ground, it was such an unexpected event, that I didn’t know what happen and how I got to survive from the running legs of the horses. When I got up from the ground, all I could sense was the sand in my nose, mouth and ears! My friends were frightened and immediately came to check if I still alive. I was surprised that I could still move and talk and of course, complain. Where was the horse? It ran miles and miles away since the minute it dropped me off….

2) The tourist thing: Sleeping in a Meng Gu Bao – The Meng Gu Bao is the original home to the Inner Mongolian. We were told that not many tourists can try to sleep in a Meng Gu Bao because the number of Meng Gu Bao nowadays has decreased a lot due to the cost of maintenance. Fortunately, we had a chance to try one night for it. 12 of us were assigned to share a Meng Gu Bao. There was basically nothing inside except for a wooden platform for us to sleep on. Although it was in October, it was quite cold during the night and with no heating system inside a Meng Gu Bao, we had to sleep close to each other in order to get ourselves warm. It was a long night to sleep in such a cold and harsh environment, not mentioning you have to warm outside to use the toilet during the night. The next morning, we told the tourist guide our experience, and asked how she felt last night, “Oh, actually I didn’t sleep in a Meng Gu Bao, I slept in the brick house over there and there is heater inside.” Ai…. What a dump tourist I am……