The Five Horsemen

The tour guide picked me up at eight and we drove to the grasslands. Or, more precisely, I progressively turned into a nervous wreck as the driver tried to break the all-time China-wide hotel-yurt speed record. He looked very happy at the end of the trip, so either he succeeded or he just enjoys watching 30-ton trucks swerve wildly off the road while their drivers curses him and his descendants unto the fifth generation.

The grasslands look pretty much like you'd expect: dry, dusty, windswept and full of what I believe literary types call "rugged beauty," only partially diminished by the eyesore of the still-under-construction traditional mongolian village my friends had spent the night in. We went on a two hour horse ride to a traditional prayer site, marshlands and a mongolian-cheese tasting. It was very much like being on a living, breathing sight-seeing train, except the guide kept hedging the horses to go faster, and a trotting  horse is even less comfortable than a chinese bus. I tried my best to make mine gallop, but the small and shaggy haired mongolian pony was entirely oblivious to my feeble attempts at controlling him. Luckily, he knew the tour so well that the (human) guide seemed entirely redundant. The whole thing was hopelessly touristy and obviously fake, but still fun.

Right afterwards we saw a demonstration of mongolian wrestling and had a chance to try it ourselves, before heading back to the airport and flying to Chengdu.

Landing at Chengdu International in the late evening, we had but one goal: falling asleep as quickly as possible, preferably in a hotel room. We found two taxis and showed the drivers the Holiday Inn Express logo and a chinese map of central Chengdu with the hotel’s location marked. Despite a somewhat confused look on their face, they said “ok” and started driving. Over the next hour they stopped 17 times to ask directions or attempt to drop us off at a completely random hotel which never looked even remotely like a Holiday Inn. Not for the last time, we wondered why most chinese taxi drivers had obviously never thought that map reading could be a useful skill in their trade. In the end, we came to a hotel with vacancies for a reasonable price, so, too tired to argue anymore, we booked three rooms and went to sleep.