Hohhot Hotels
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I have a plan, a start point & an unknown ending.
Just the way I like it.
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The waiting continues
Entry 36 of 58 | show all | print this entry |
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All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware
- Martin Buber
· Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, Northern China.
· Prague time +7hrs
· Days to get to Prague - 23
More delays
Hohhot. So what am I doing creating an entry for here? Weren't we just supposed to be hanging around here for a few hours to catch the train to Ulaan Baatar? Of course. That was the plan. But with the way this trip has gone to date that wasn't likely to happen, now was it? As I said in my previous entry from Beijing we had verified in the Beijing CITS (China International Travel Service) that a train was indeed leaving here for Ulaan Baatar on Sunday night. Well, low and behold, when we got here and went to buy tickets in the train station for the aforementioned train we were told it doesn't go until Monday evening. Same time of day as we were told, same train number as we were told. Just different days. And we only found out this information having first left the train station to search out the Hohhot CTS (China Travel Service) who, we were told in Beijing, sold the ticket we needed. Well having eventually located that office we figured out the guy there, who couldn't speak a word of English, was telling us he hadn't any tickets and we eventually figured he was sending us back to the train station. So back we went to where we first came from only to discover the train wasn't until the following evening. Man, I was pissed. Henk was silent. Another day wasted. I can't ever remember travel being this frustrating. Noting is going to plan and we're wasting so many days, days we can't afford to be wasting. We seem to be a day early or a day late for everything. I guess we should be thankful the train from here to Mongolia is running at all. So what does latest little hiccup mean? Yep, you guessed it. Just like Seoul, Weihai and Beijing before this we have to sit around and wait, this time for the best part of two days. We had planned on waiting a day but this delay has now pushed that out to two days. And what it means is that instead of two nights in Ulaan Baatar we will now only have one. We've no choice. We lost so many days up to now that we have to get a move on. Somewhere is going to have to loose the honour of entertaining us for our preferred length of time and I hate that it's going to be Ulaan Baatar, somewhere I'm looking forward to seeing and somewhere I'd attempted to get to previously.
So we still plan on getting the Thursday afternoon train from Ulaan Baatar to Russia but now we won't be getting into the city until early Wednesday morning, not early Tuesday morning as hoped and expected. If only we didn't have to waste days sitting in Hohhot doing nothing.
Poor Mans Mongolia
So what of Hohhot? Well, I don't have my guidebook so I have limited information on the place. As I've already mentioned it's the capital of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia and it was once, along with vast stretches of Siberia to the north, part of Mongolia proper. I remember reading that it's a good place to come if you want to experience the Mongolian way of life without actually going to Mongolia. How true that is I'm not sure (we're still in China after all). The famous Mongolian Gobi desert, vast areas of extensive desert steppe where nomadic herders look after their grazing livestock and live in traditional Mongolian Ger tents, extends south from Mongolia into Inner Mongolia making tours of the famous grasslands possible from places in Inner Mongolia, such as Hohhot. Not that we had the time to take an aforementioned tour. Nor will we when we get to Mongolia proper. But that's okay; we had decided long before leaving Korea that Mongolia for us would be Ulaan Baatar and Ulaan Baatar alone. That decision was mainly based on the -30 degree temperatures in the Gobi typical of this time of year.
The calm before the.... fireworks
Anyway, back to Hohhot. Initial impressions of the city, after getting off the train from Beijing and searching out the CTS office, was that there didn't seem that much to Hohhot. It was quiet and everything was closed. In my experience that's very unusual for any Chinese city. Yes, even at 8am on a Sunday. So having bought our train tickets for the following night we were content to get
a hotel, take it easy and wait. Again. We watched some Winter Olympic coverage on the TV, seeing a Canadian girl win the gold medal in the moguls.
New Year mayhem, Mamma's dumplings & Propositions
That evening we were drawn out of our room by a combination of hunger and the deafening noise of fireworks going off
outside our window. Nothing prepared me for the scene that greeted us when we emerged from the hotel. The streets were packed. Jam packed. Where were all these people earlier this morning, when the city resembled a ghost town? Fireworks were going off all around us. Fires were burning by the roadside. Smoke from both was thick in the sky. I assumed China was being attached by an invading army who were sacking the city with remarkable ease. But no. Nothing that drastic. We soon figured out tonight was the last night of the 2-week long Chinese New Year celebrations, the event that had caused us so many delays up to now. How ironic I thought. We hung around the streets trying to make sense of the madness, snapping photos and entertaining the locals by just being 2 foreigners amongst the crowd. I couldn't help notice just how chaotic the town was on the night. I realise it was a festival night and there were hundreds of thousands of people out and about but I've been in similar situations in China before and I never recall feeling that sensation. The whole city seemed very unorganised, in a very un-Chinese way. It reminded me of being on the
streets of India, not China. After having enough of the festivities (see the uploaded photos for more on that) we entered a local restaurant where the attention we got made us feel like Pop Stars. Showing our piece of paper with 'dumplings' scribbled in Chinese we, shortly after, received a plate of 'Mammas' amazing dumplings (private joke only Henk will understand). Sufficiently fed and watered, and with the festivities winding down, we made our way to our hotel room, turning down offers from pimps as we went. Even being unable to communicate didn't prevent us understanding what they were offering. Seemingly the going rate was 50 Yuan, about €5. And that's without bargaining. I got a feeling that Hohhot was a very sleazy, dirty town. Just like the feeling of chaos I mentioned earlier I never remember feeling that way about any other Chinese city I have visited.
Hohhot. Over & out
The next day we took it easy and managed to extend our checkout time until 7pm giving us a place of refuge for most of the day. With
our last few Chinese Yuan in our pockets we ventured out in the afternoon for more of Mammas dumplings and to stock up on supplies for the upcoming 30 hour train trip to Ulaan Baatar in Mongolia. Then it was time to bid China goodbye. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that our next stop will finally be Mongolia. Hopefully we'll start to get a bit more luck regarding our travel connections and times. We'll be moving at an even faster pace than previously envisioned, and that was even too quick for my liking. But as I've said before it can't be helped.
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