One of the advantages having a relatively late starting position is that we have plenty of time for breakfast (but not always – see the end of this blog!). So when we were told that our breakfast was in the restaurant on the 26th floor of our hotel we were pleased. And what a view – we chose the table with the best view and settled down to enjoy our view over the mountains.
Figure 1 The view from our place in the revolving restaurant (before it moved)
But by the time we had queued for the one expresso machine serving 300 Westerners used to their coffee fix the view seemed to have changed to one of expressways under construction. Gradually we caught on that we were in a revolving restaurant!
Hohhot besides being one of the world’s most extraordinary cities economically (like Petaling Jaya where we were brought up, but much bigger and growing as if on steroids) is also tucked in beside mountains high enough to be ski resorts in the winter.
Figure 2 Our lunch stop at a purpose built picnic space in the Inner Mongolian prairie
We didn’t have a great start to the day and my navigating was entirely to blame. I missed a right turn immediately after the hotel and we drove around in a circle twice before Mike pointed out my mistake.
We arrived at the dirt track for the first speed trial an hour late but for some reason didn’t get penalised as we deserved to be. Since the previous day we had been penalised for being caught in a traffic jam, which was more the fault of the organisers than ours, I guess these things even out.
The speed trial was great fun even in a two ton Bentley which is not really the car you would choose for such an event. We raced round a track of about a mile on a dirt road and made lots of dust. Mike drove conservatively but even so made good progress.
Then we drove through what must be the mainstay of the Inner Mongolian tourist industry. First we drove up to what appeared to be one of their ski resorts (the temperature in Hohhot belying its name falls to an average of -10 in the winter) looking rather parched and dry in the summer and then through the great grasslands which resemble what much of the mid West of the US must have looked like before being cultivated.
The fact that China has ski resorts is a reminder that Beijing is the site of the 2022 Winter Olympics, some of the events taking place quite close to the Great Wall where the rally started.
There seemed to be plenty of yurt camps in the prairies where people spend a few days living in yurts (called girs locally) and riding Mongolian horses. Though business didn’t seem all that good – most seemed to be fairly inactive.
The drive into Erenhot was on a fast straight road and I made pretty decent progress. We will discover when we get to the border whether the automatic number recognition system has built up a series of speeding fines (or worse…). But by the time we arrived we had caught up the lost hour!
One of the noticeable themes of China is that when they decide to do something they do it big. We passed a field of solar panels at least a kilometre in length before seeing field after field of propellers. We had reached the biggest wind farm in the world. This, the Ulanqab Wind Power Base is still in the course of completion and is eventually planned to produce 6 gigawatts of energy from a field (or more precisely a series of fields) covering 3,800 square kilometres! The propellers stretch way beyond the horizon. Technically this isn’t a Belt and Road project. But it showed the sort of project that might well be replicated.
Figure 3 Inner Mongolia’s Beyonce
Erenhot is the border town, population 80,000, between China and Mongolia. It received an economic boost when the railway axle change operation, necessary because of the different gauges in China and Mongolia, was transferred there in the 1960s. But it is also famous for its dinosaurs. Dinosaur fossils have been found near Erenhot since the mid 1990s and the authorities have capitalised on this to build theme parks and statues. You simply can’t miss them.
The rally must be one of the biggest things to hit Erenhot and the locals put on a show for us with their local version of Beyonce singing her heart out. Sadly loud pop music wasn’t what we really wanted after a hard day’s driving and we gave her precious little support.
Figure 4 Not so sure about the hotel…..
When you are staying in what the pic indicates to be a rather more dubious looking hotel one of the tricks (so I’m told) is not to pay any attention to the knocks on the door offering things. So when we heard a knock on the door at 10pm my instinct was to ignore it. But Mike decided to open it and fortunately so.
A disgruntled Nick from the organisers had clearly drawn the short straw which was to go round every P2P hotel room and warn us that because of likely blockages at the China Mongolia border, our start time had been brought forward. Ours had moved from 9.37 am to 7 am and breakfast was at 6!
So much for our lie in…we adjusted the alarm time and (fortunately) went to sleep.