Beyond The Gers And Grasslands

Inner Mongolia in January is a different kind of beautiful – rugged, icy plains, ruler-straight horizons and an absence of tour buses. Our writer soaks it all in on her visit during the peaceful off season, and finds it the best time to get acquainted with a region where the clash of the traditional and the modern somehow just works.

- Clara Lock

I’m on my way to the Xilamuren grasslands of China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, and the temperature, already subzero, continues to fall steadily.

“It will feel much colder now that we’re outside the city,” cautions guide and hostel owner Zorigoo. He hops out of the van to attach ice chains to its tyres for extra traction during the last part of our journey, where dirt road melts into a slippery blanket of ice and snow. Once he opens the door, the biting wind whips through our vehicle.

In winter, temperatures in Mongolia rarely climb above zero, and can drop to minus 15 deg C at night. Still, it’s not until we disembark two hours from Hohhot city, Inner Mongolia’s capital, that I fully understand what Zorigoo means. I’m dressed for the frigid weather, yet the angry gale relentlessly batters my exposed nose and cheeks. I gasp involuntarily in response to the cold and the sparse beauty of the landscape.

Little wonder, then, that the peak season for visitors is between May and August, when temperatures hover around the mid-20s – perfect sweater weather. But the trade-off is worth it. The grasslands in the off-peak season are free of tourists and the large buses that take them there.

The first thing I notice is that the horizon is ruler-straight, the sort of view that’s possible only when there’s nothing in the distance to obscure the point where earth meets sky. Out here, there’s little besides the brown of the earth, a thick layer of snow on the plains, and the piercing blue of the sunny, cloudless day.

It’s a perfect day for herding, Zorigoo tells me. While some in their culture of nomadic herders have relocated to the city for work, many families who live in the grasslands still rear livestock for a living.