9-Day Inner Mongolia on Foot: Volcanoes, Plateau, Grassland and Desert

Your guide meets you at Baita Airport or Hohhot railway station and takes you straight to the old quarter. Dazhao Temple was built in 1579, in the generation after Altan Khan founded the city, and its main hall holds the 2.5-ton silver Buddha that gives the temple its other name, Yinfo Si, the Temple of the Silver Buddha. It is the oldest still-active lamasery in Hohhot, and the Dalai Lama III title was formalised here in 1578 - your guide explains why a Tibetan religious ceremony in a Mongolian city mattered so much.

Behind the temple, Saishang Old Street runs a few hundred meters of Qing-era shopfronts selling leather, silver and dried milk products. It is tourist-facing but the buildings are genuine and the snack stalls are where Hohhot actually eats. Try shaomai, the city's signature mutton dumpling, at a century-old teahouse - locals eat it for breakfast with brick tea. Dinner tonight is your first proper Mongolian meal: hand-torn boiled mutton with the fermented milk liquor that traditionally goes with it.

Xilamuren is the grassland Hohhot goes to on weekends, which sounds like a dismissal and is not: it is a genuine pastoral basin on the north slope of the Yin Mountains, 90 minutes from the city, where the yurt camps sit beside working herder households. The day is deliberately un-museum-like. You ride horses with a herder guide along the riverbed - the pace is set by the least confident rider in the group - then visit a family for milk tea, dried cheese and the unhurried conversation about winter temperatures, school fees and wolf stories that is the actual point of grassland travel. Archery and Mongolian wrestling can be arranged at the camp.

Entry to the grassland itself is free; the activities are arranged and paid through the camp and are listed as extras so you choose what suits you. After dinner the camp lights a bonfire, someone brings a morin khuur - the horse-head fiddle - and the sky, two hours' drive from a city of three million, goes properly dark.

The grassland is best twice a day, both of which inconvenience people who sleep in. Your guide gets you up before five in high summer, when the mist sits in the hollows and the herds cross the riverbed in silhouette; the camp's horses graze loose at dawn and nobody is photographing anything. Come back for a slow breakfast of milk tea, fried dough and boiled mutton, then spend the middle of the day the way herders do - resting. Late afternoon, options: a longer ride toward the hills, a walk to the aobao cairn on the ridge, or nothing at all.

If you are traveling in July, this is also the day we can route to a local Naadam gathering - horse racing, wrestling and archery - when one is running within reach; the schedule is announced only weeks ahead, so we confirm at booking. Second night in the yurt camp, or return to a Hohhot hotel if you prefer walls.

East of Ulanqab city, thirty young volcanoes rise out of the grassland, and the geological park around them has become the most photogenic 'Mars landscape' in northern China. Entry is free; the shuttle inside costs 30 yuan. The classic walk is around and up Crater No. 3, a complete scoria cone with a crater you can stand inside, and the larger North Crater complex, where the black rubble fields look freshly poured. The cone nicknamed '炼丹炉' - the alchemist's furnace - is the one in most photographs.

The park is barely a decade into tourism, so the infrastructure is a shuttle road and some boardwalks, nothing more. Come late in the day and the low sun pulls every ridge of the lava fields into relief. Astronaut-suit photo rentals are a local sideline; your guide will negotiate if you want one. We drive back to Jincheng or your yurt camp at Huitengxile for the night, depending on tomorrow's plan.

The name means 'cold plateau' in Mongolian, and the drive climbs onto it within two hours of leaving Hohhot. Huitengxile is an alpine meadow at about 1,800 meters, one of the highest grasslands you can reach on a day trip from a provincial capital anywhere in China. What makes the view unmistakable is the wind farm - hundreds of turbines strung across the ridgelines, turning slowly over the herds. In July the meadow is knee-deep in wildflowers; by late August it goes gold.

Huanghuagou is the scenic core: a gorge the meltwater has cut into the plateau, with birch woods at the bottom and rock walls shaped like elephant trunks and turtle backs. The sightseeing package includes the grassland train, the horse-drawn cart and the cable car, and we use all three, because the loop from the north gate down to the gorge floor and back is otherwise a long hot walk. The evening show 'Meeting at the Aobao' runs in season. Tonight you sleep in a yurt camp - heated, with proper beds and private bathrooms in the better camps - and the step outside is genuinely dark enough for the Milky Way.

Xiangshawan - the name means 'resonant sand bay' - sits where the Kubuqi Desert runs into the Yellow River plain, about an hour south of Baotou and three hours from Hohhot by road. The sand here genuinely sings: slide down the 110-meter face and the dune produces a low organ-note that Chinese sources have documented for centuries, one of only a handful of singing-sand sites on earth. The park is built as a set of 'islands' - we take the full package for the activity island, which includes the cable car crossing, a camel train over the crest, sand sledding, dune buggies and the zip line.

The scale is the point. From the top of the main face you look across a sea of dunes that runs to the horizon, with the green strip of the Yellow River irrigation country just visible behind you. In the evening, the sand cools fast and the light goes amber. Guests who want the full picture stay overnight at the desert hotel or a yurt inside the park; the default tonight is a hotel on theOrdos side.

Wudangzhao was founded in 1749 and rebuilt continuously since; it is the largest Gelug-school monastery in Inner Mongolia, layered down a valley in the Yin Mountains like a smaller, whiter Potala. In its teaching heyday it held over a thousand monks and functioned as a monastic university for the whole region - philosophy, medicine, astrology and the esoteric schools each had their own college hall. Walk the halls in order, then take the kora path behind the complex, a forty-minute circuit past prayer flags and mani stones with the whole monastery below you.

Photography is not allowed inside the prayer halls, which is itself information: the interiors are dense with thangkas, butter sculptures and a library of Tibetan sutras printed on toxic-ink-proof paper the monks still read. We lunch in the valley on Baotao's mutton and oat noodles, and either return to Baotou for the night or push on toward tomorrow's destination.

Genghis Khan's tomb has never been found - Mongol custom hid the burials - so what stands at Ejin Horo Banner is a shrine, and a working one: the Eight White Yurts have been carried, rebuilt and worshipped since the century he died, tended by the Darkhad guard families whose descendants still keep the perpetual lamps lit. The present temple complex was completed in 1956 after the shrine returned from wartime refuge in Gansu and Qinghai; the halls follow the Mongolian yurt-temple form, three connected domes on a platform, with the statue hall, the relics hall and the saddle hall. Whether or not you care about the history, a site one family has guarded for nearly 800 years is worth a morning.

Afternoon is a short drive into Kangbashi, the new district of Ordos whose boulevards, library and museum - a polished aluminium blob by MAD Architects - have made it the world's most photographed 'empty city', though it is considerably less empty than the internet claims. Your guide gives you the honest version of the boom-and-correction story. Overnight Ordos.

We keep the morning loose on departure day: the Saihantala urban grassland for a last walk if your flight is late, a final shaomai breakfast if it is not. Your driver and guide take you to Hohhot Baita Airport or the railway station with the usual margin - Baita is 15 kilometers east of the center and the high-speed station is on the northern edge, so tell us the ticket time and we will work backwards from it.