With tickets to any destination in this country seemingly hard to come by I got up early and headed to the bus station armed with Chinese script in order to buy a couple of tickets on the 10.30 bus, as advertised, to Hohhot. Arriving at the crack of dawn did mean that there wasn't much of a queue but with my woefully inadequate Chinese I was in fact unable to purchase said tickets. I suspect this was because there was no bus at 10.30 or at least that is what I made out from my brief and sharp conversation with the woman parked behind the glass screen. In true unhelpfulness she just stared back having satisfactorily played the ball back in my court. I tried to ask when the next bus was but by now some burly man behind was stressting and simply barged me out of the way to shout his destination into the small hole in the glass.

That was enough. My bad temper had started. Fuming, I marched back to the train station to see what train tickets might be available. I found out there were none. Fortunately though and thus preventing me from boiling over, the man pointed me to a small collection of buses heading to Hohhot. And guess what!? There was the 10.30 bus. In fact there was a whole host of buses leaving almost hourly, so I made my way back to the hotel, we packed, ate a dubious Chinese breakfast and headed to the bus with our newly bought tickets and 1 yuan life insurance. The life insurance was slightly disconcerting but mandatory. I couldn't quite work out how much we could claim if we did die during the trip but I doubted it would be enough to fly us and our stuff home.

Still the bus journey passed peacefully and we arrived in Hohhot early in the afternoon, checked into our hotel and were immediately accosted by Grasslands tour touts even before a single call girl had offered us the usual "massage". We decided though that our first priority was to book a way out of the place before all the tickets had sold out. Ineveitably they had and after half an hour of queuing the lady behind the desk kindly informed us that there were no sleeper tickets to Lanzhou, our next destination. We trundeld to the bus station only to find that there were no sleeper buses let alone any buses running to Lanzhou. I then decided that in line with the usual unhelpfulness of the staff there may just be some hard seats to Lanzhou on the train so we went back to the train queue and indeed there were! We bought them, sighing with relief that we could get out of Hohhot and get moving.

That evening we spent an age searching for a recommended restaurant only to find it had closed down last Christmas, but luckily found the opposite restaurant to be more than satisfactory as it served up some sort of meat and potato dish in a wok-like bowl that we could cook ourselves. As we walked back through the wide streets of Hohhot it reminded us of Beijing or indeed maybe a Las Vegas as the neon lights were turned up to the full, a clear reminder of China's modernised way of life - at least in the cities.