Biking in the grassland

Our first activity was mountain biking in the grassland. Despite the weather (cold and slightly rainy) we decided to go. It took us quite some time to get the bikes ready as of course tires were not full of air and seats were adjusted for Chinese height. Once all the technical details were sorted out we left the yurt hotel. After 5min biking we quickly realized something: wind blowing at your face does not help and make biking tough and mud is really not your friend (how can you move forward when you are 5cm deep in the mud?). By a combination of biking and walking we eventually moved forward.
The grassland is quite impressive. It reminded me of the Mont D’Arree in Brittany. Long green area, nothing on it (well except for wind mills that seemed to be everywhere here), few flowers… we passed a village and met some of the inhabitants of the grassland (horses, pigs, sheep).
Have a look here.
In the village it started to rain hard and I went to hide from the rain into a little brick house that looked open. Silly me, it was the toilet. Namely, 3 holes in the ground, separated by a 1 meter high wall. The smell was impossible and the sight was even worse. Everything you can think of that goes through that hole in the ground just piles up under it for you to see and smell. Not to mention that apparently some people missed the hole and it fell right next to it… And this was only the first of a long series of similar common toilets we’ve had to go to (to be honest after a while we started going in the while behind a rock or a tree as a better alternative).
At some point Alice and I gave up the biking and preferred to walk. Honestly if I were to do it again I would skip the biking and just hike the grassland. As once you don’t need to focus on where you will pass with your bike, you can then enjoy the landscape much more and even notice the butterflies flying around.
A few hours later (feeling like we’ve been up for the whole day, that’s what happens when you wake up at 4:30am) we stopped for lunch in another Mongolian village. Leo our guide directed us to a yurt which he said was a restaurant. He ordered food for us while we were resting in the yurt. The inside of the yurt was very simple. About 1 meter from the entrance you have a resting area where you can sit, lie down, eat… that’s the living part of the yurt. We waited a long time to get the food. So long we complained after 45min. the reality is that our “chef” was a woman cooking in her kitchen and of course she was not prepared for 6 people in one go. Bottom line nothing was prepared in advance so she started from scratch… thus it took long… and the food was not really good. Very greasy and some dishes that included the yellow flowers from the valley next door was not to our taste. But we did try every dish of this poor woman.
Video lunch in Mongolian village
Stomach relatively full we crossed the village to go see the Yellow Flowers valley.