On the road again
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The host poured hot and fresh milk tea from an old-fashioned bottle into our bowls and filled our cups with Caoyuan Bai (Grassland White), a well-known Mongolian baijiu. "We call it 'smother the donkey,'" Su He, our local friend, joked. "The traditional Caoyuan Bai is 62 degrees, but this is a modified version, only 38 degrees." Then he taught us the Mongolian way to drink your first cup: Dip your right forefinger into the wine, toast to the sky, toast to the earth, and onto your forehead, then drink the whole glass. Mongolians drink like fishes; after a couple of glasses, even the best drinker among us got tipsy.
The rain stopped after our big feast. The clear sky was full of stars, so many and so shiny that it looked like a huge black silk cape densely studded with different sizes of diamonds.
We kept heading north to the Arxon the next morning, and the grass around us got taller and taller as we drove. As we approached the mountains, the scenery became colorful. Dark green pinewoods covered the top of the mountains, and the lower part was forests of white birch trees. Yellow, purple and red flowers ornamented the grass. It seemed like even the most amateur of photographers could easily take a stunning postcard picture there.
Arxan Mountain didn't get its name from the mountains, but was transliterated from the Mongolian phrase "hot holy water." We didn't get a chance to try out the famous hot spring, but went to the heavenly lake on the mountain. The heavenly lake of Arxan is about 70 kilometers northeast of the city. It is said this heavenly lake ranked the third in China, just after the lakes on Tianshan and Changbai Mountain.
We drove more than 3,000 kilometers in our five-day road trip. But there's much more in Inner Mongolia than what we have seen; the Hulun Buir grassland, Hailar and Manzhouli are all said to have even more breath-taking views, and we'll definitely come back again.
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