I like to stay in youth hostels because not only can I meet other travelers, youth hostels have great services that Chinese hotels don't have like, oh, I don't know, clean bedding and bathrooms! I can also do laundry and get online at youth hostels.
Anyway, I had the address of this youth hostel as well as some rough directions from the website. When I left the train station in Hohhot, I got a taxi and told the driver the address. We started driving, and it was a good sign that he was going along with the directions I had from the website.
But that address didn't exist.
The driver was really nice and asked some shopkeepers nearby about the hostel and the address, but it really wasn't there. I don't know where it actually is.
I was disappointed and ended up staying in an expensive hotel (ok, it was cheap but not compared to a youth hostel!).
Maybe it was this incident with the hostel, or maybe I truly didn't like Hohhot, but my stay there was pretty lame. I walked around and talked to some Mongolians about their culture and language and I visited the Inner Mongolia Museum. Both of these were fascinating, but I really just wanted to leave. I felt ready to stop traveling and go home to my family and friends.
When I went to the train station to buy a ticket out of Inner Mongolia, I remembered on my way in that I had seen a ton of trains coming from a city called Baotou, also in Inner Mongolia. On a whim I bought a ticket to Baotou.
It was raining when I left Hohhot and when I arrived in Baotou, the air was fresh and clean. The streets of Baotou are wide, and so are the sidewalks. I have never before seen streets like this in China. And, the population of Baotou is low, so it's not so crowded. Buildings aren't so close together, I didn't get shoved around on the buses, and people were more friendly and personal.
And the sky was blue. It would be a lie to say that the skies in China aren't blue, but it brought tears to my eyes because I had forgotten that blue skies could really be that blue.
While in Baotou I went to a Lamasery about 60 kilometers outside the city. It was gorgeous and colorful, and the landscape reminded me of home. (And, it was a Tibetan site; aren't those off-limits to foreigners? I had no problem getting there. What are you going to do about that, China?)
Anyway, tomorrow I'm leaving Baotou for another city in Inner Mongolia, Tongliao. It's small, and I can't find any travel information on it online. I like places like this because I can truly learn about the people who live there; they want to talk because they don't often see foreigners. (In fact, I haven't seen a foreigner since I was in Datong!)
I'm really glad I didn't leave Inner Mongolia after Hohhot. I think I was getting burnt-out, but the reminders of home in Baotou have brightened things up for me, and I'm ready to face these last two weeks in China and get everything out of them that I can.
