May 19th: Datong to Hohhot

May 19th: Datong to Hohhot

We left in the morning from Datong, finally able to see the skyline of the city. Along the city streets there are only a few types of tall buildings that look homogenous. Each of them perfectly even in a grid, like the whole city was built in a short time with little creativity. Things in China are often grand with few details, almost as if they haven’t finished rendering. A stressful drive in the city traffic led us to the countryside where the scenery was quite nice. At some point we took a wrong turn that led us up a beautiful hill climb and down into a village with a washed out bridge. 20km down the road at our next checkpoint we realized the store we were supposed to turn left at was just an empty field. We checked the map and turned around, only to get back to the bridge and lose all control of the accelerator.

The motor was still running at idle so we both assumed correctly the linkage to the throttle was disconnected. Sure enough a bolt had come loose that connects the cable to the carb pulley. We found a spare nut that didn’t quite fit correctly and wrenched it on extra hard and away we went. We found our way back to the route but our navigational success was short lived when we took the wrong way off an freeway exit and ended up lost again but this time with our british friends Dominique and Nigel. Our prowess with our GPS assured them we had found an alternative route to the destination and so we motored away into the busy streets of Hohhot, losing a lot of time on the way. We arrived at the first race track of the event and took off across the dirt course and finished with a decent time, but not without room for improvement. Hohhot is much friendlier and more interesting than Datong. We are very excited to see this trend continue as we make our way further into the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. 

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