The season decides everything
The grassland is green from roughly late June to early September. That is the trip. Outside it the grass is brown stubble or snow, the camps are shut and the horses are not working, and you will have travelled a long way to look at a frozen plain from a minibus. There is no clever shoulder season. If your dates fall in May or October, go somewhere else and come back.
Within the window, mid-July to mid-August is peak: the grass is fullest and the Naadam festivals - wrestling, horse racing, archery - fall then. Late August into early September gives you most of the green with fewer domestic tourists. Pack for a 20-degree swing between afternoon and night: the July and August daytime average on the grassland is around 18 to 21C, and the nights are cold enough to want a coat inside a yurt. Bring a raincoat, a sunhat and real sunblock.
Who this is for
This is a landscape trip. You go to look at space - grass to the horizon, and a few hours away, dunes doing the same. The pleasures are riding, walking out from camp at dusk, mutton, and the night sky, which is as good as anywhere in China.
It is for you if you have done urban China and want the other thing entirely, if you can ride or want to learn, and if you are comfortable with an unscheduled day. Good for photographers, very good for teenagers who need to be outdoors.
Skip it if you need your days structured around sights - there are none out here in the museum sense, and Hohhot's are modest. Skip it if you are short of time, because the driving eats days. Skip it if roughing it bothers you: a grassland yurt can mean canvas and a shared washblock.
Vegetarians will struggle badly. This is not the usual China caution. The regional diet is mutton, beef, dairy and wheat, and on the grassland proper there is very little else; vegetables are trucked in and treated as a garnish. A "vegetable dish" will often be cooked in mutton fat or come with lamb in it, and at a yurt camp you eat what the kitchen has made for everyone. Vegetarians can manage in Hohhot, where there is normal Chinese restaurant food, but on a two-night grassland stay you should expect to live on noodles, bread, pickles and eggs, and you should say so in advance and in Chinese when you book. Vegans should not attempt it - dairy is the backbone of everything.
Getting there
Hohhot is the gateway. Bullet trains run from Beijing in about two and a half hours, roughly every twenty minutes through the day, which makes this one of the easiest "remote" trips in China to reach. Hohhot Baita airport is 15 km out with 40-odd domestic routes. Baotou, further west, is the better gateway if the desert is your priority.
Getting around, and the thing to plan for
The grassland and the desert have no rail link between them. This is the single logistical fact that shapes the itinerary. The grasslands sit north and east of Hohhot; the dunes - Kubuqi and the Resonant Sand Gorge - are south of the Yellow River, nearer Baotou and Ordos. Getting from one to the other means a road transfer of several hours, or doubling back into a city to pick up a train. There is no bus that joins them usefully.
So either hire a car and driver for the whole run, or treat Hohhot as a hub and make two separate out-and-back trips, or drop the desert and spend the time on the grass, which is the better landscape anyway.
Driving times from Hohhot, by road:
- Xilamuren, the nearest grassland, about 90 km and an hour and a half. Doable as an overnight.
- Gegentala, about 140 km, two hours.
- Huitengxile, higher and more open, about three and a half hours.
Public transport to the camps barely exists. Almost everyone books car, driver and yurt stay as one package, and here that is sensible rather than a trap.
A five-day shape
- Day one: Hohhot. Arrive by train. Dazhao Temple, the Five Pagoda Temple and the Inner Mongolia Museum, good on the Mongol empire and on the region's dinosaur fossils. Eat in the Muslim quarter.
- Day two: out to the grassland. Drive to Xilamuren or, better, further to Huitengxile. Arrive mid-afternoon, ride before dinner, and walk out from the camp after dark.
- Day three: on the grassland. Ride properly - half a day out and back, not the twenty-minute circuit inside the camp. Visit a working herding family if your driver can arrange it. If your dates line up with a Naadam, spend the day there.
- Day four: transfer to the dunes. The long road day, south-west towards Kubuqi: camels, sand sledging, a night at a desert camp - or, if you are skipping the desert, a second grassland in another direction.
- Day five: back to Hohhot or Baotou and out by train.
Five nights is honest. Three works - Hohhot plus one grassland - but half of it is spent in a vehicle.
The food, and what surprises people
Milk tea is salty. *Suutei tsai* is brick tea boiled with milk and salt, sometimes with butter, millet or fried dough in it, and it is drunk all day as a staple rather than as a hot drink with a meal. First-time visitors expecting something sweet have a bad moment. Push through it - by day three it is the best thing in the region, and it is what makes the cold mornings bearable.
The rest:
- Mutton. Roast leg with a dry spice crust, hand-torn boiled mutton eaten with a knife and salt, and whole roast sheep at camps for groups. The local habit is almost no sauce: good mutton here is boiled and dipped in salt, and the heavy cumin-and-chilli treatment is the northwestern style, not this one.
- Mongolian hotpot, a clear mutton broth rather than the numbing Sichuan thing, and the ancestor of what the rest of China eats.
- Dairy. Dried curd, clotted cream, milk skin, milk tofu, fermented mare's milk - genuinely unlike anywhere else in China. The dried curd is very hard and very sour.
- Hohhot's Muslim quarter for *shaomai*, which in Hohhot means mutton-stuffed open dumplings eaten at breakfast with tea, not the Cantonese *siu mai*.
One health point: the region records isolated cases of bubonic plague in wild rodents. Stay away from marmot burrows, do not handle dead animals, use repellent, and go to a hospital promptly if you get a sudden fever with chills and swollen glands.
What is genuinely overrated
The nearest grassland camps. Xilamuren is an hour and a half from Hohhot and is accordingly a car park with yurts, karaoke, a souvenir arcade and a staged wrestling display. If you can spare the driving, go further - Huitengxile or beyond - and the difference is total.
"Authentic yurt experience" packages. The word yurt covers everything from a herder's home to a concrete hotel room with a domed roof. Ask: canvas or concrete, where is the toilet, how many other yurts.
Staged entertainment. The costumed welcome with milk wine and a scarf, the wrestling demonstration, the "Mongolian wedding". Every camp does it, it takes an hour, and it is the worst hour of the trip. A real Naadam is the opposite and worth planning around.
The desert resorts. Resonant Sand Gorge is a managed adventure park - zip lines, sand buggies, a chairlift - rather than a desert. If you have seen real dunes, use the time on the grass instead.