MISADVENTURES IN (Inner) MONGOLIA

Arriving at the airport on Saturday we discovered that our ticket for 内蒙古 had been misprinted and that our flight left from another airport. There wasn't time to make it so we changed our tickets to fly out two days later and tried to make the best of it by making a trip to the nearby IKEA instead. We had a hard time explaining to the taxi driver where we wanted to go as neither of us knew the Chinese name, but we knew it was just off the freeway and tried to describe the big blue building full of foreign furniture. "That's not a foreign company!" the driver insisted.

Once there we bought some stuff, observed the Chinese middle-class planning their children's bedrooms, poked bedding, and ate salmon. We spent our extra day puttering around the house, having a classmate over for dinner, and enjoying English-language music. Before we knew it it was time to go to the airport again.

It came as a surprise that much of Inner Mongolia looks a lot like Nebraska.

Hohhot (pronounced Huhehaote in Chinese) is a sleepy little city by Chinese standards, but still bustling and chaotic.

We spent the afternoon walking around and I became slightly obsessed with this eagle above the main square and with the fantastical towers on the skyscraper behind it. Much of the town was quite dreary, as we had expected.

This was the view from the back of our hotel.

For some reason, there were billiard tables outside all over the city. Usually there were young men playing pool at them, but I was too embarrassed to ask if I could take their picture and found an unused pair instead.

As with everywhere else in China, there were many small and large clusters of old men hanging out, smoking, and playing mah-jong, and lots of small dogs hoping someone had dropped some food nearby. [You can't quite see it from this angle, but the one dude had a tricked-out wheelchair/bicycle thing, I guess so that somebody else could drive him around]

There were also a lot of these tricycle vans around. I don't know why.

In the evening we met up with four other classmates who had arrived the day before and ate dumplings at a restaurant with private rooms with such intriguing signs on the doors as these.

I think you can guess where I would have liked to go.

The next afternoon we all boarded a minibus to take us out to the caoyuan (grasslands). The drive was pretty.

Sorry to give you a seizure, but I really like these blurry action shots.

Jessica and I had wanted to go further out, but our classmates booked the trip and so we ended up in this yurt village. We didn't much like it.

Lunch was awful, and dinner was not improved by the beheading of a roast lamb in front of an enthusiastic audience of Chinese tourists. The facilities were repellent and led us all to limit our fluid intake so we could avoid using them. The yurt was not only lacking the Romantic Qing Cheng we had hoped for, but was dirtier than we had expected. The wholesale butchering of traditional Mongolian culture (a shot of baijiu, or 'white spirit' as we arrived, wrestling at 6pm and karaoke by Han Chinese in gaudy costumes after dinner) was less offensive than just plain silly. Also, it was cold. I decided against riding the horses as they were much too skinny and were almost certainly mistreated by their handlers. They all looked like sad little Eeyores.

While our classmates went riding Jessica and I went walking for a few hours on the grasslands, which were lovely and immensely peaceful. I took in big gulps of the clean, sweet air and looked across the horizon for things to explore.

We found some sheep.

And walked up the tallest hill to figure out what this was.

It seemed to be a stone temple of some sort -- those are Tibetan prayer flags on top. It was all very stark and beautiful. We sat on the rocky soil and felt the cool wind blow. I wanted to whistle a little but Jessica hates it so I was quiet.

The next morning we were up at 6 for another unsatisfying meal (in which we thought we identified the lamb from the previous evening), departing for the desert around 7:30. The light was soft and warm on the mountains.

A little after 9 I was roused from a drowsy sleep to the guide telling us we were stopping in a village for a quick stretch and toilet break. As most of us were waking slowly there was a sudden flash of movement and some shouting and commotion and then suddenly the realization that the van had just sideswiped a family on a motorbike. The van stopped. We all turned in horror to see the mother off the bike, face contorted in fury and pain while the father and daughter were astride the bike which was lying on its side on the road (which thankfully was dirt and not concrete). The little girl was crying and obviously in shock, but she and the father both seemed okay. We were all incredibly relieved that everyone got up okay and that there seemed to be no major injuries.

The driver and guide got out of the van right away and began arguing with the injured family. Almost immediately, a crowd of 15 to 20 villagers gathered around. At first we all stayed in the van, thinking the presence of foreigners would only worsen the situation, but after 10 minutes or so we slunk out and tried to make ourselves scarce. We saw the driver offer a stack of money to the family but it was rejected. Shouting and arguing went on for another 10 or 15 minutes as we slipped off to a nearby field for toilet breaks, admired the tranquil scenery, and tried to take it all in.

Suddenly a car drove up and a handful of men from the group pushed and shoved our driver and guide in. We all got a bit freaked out, but were helpless to do anything but watch. The driver and guide demanded to be let out of the car and began arguing with the group again, but then three of the local men forcefully shoved the driver back in again. We didn't know what the hell was going on, and we didn't like it. It looked an awful lot like our driver was getting taken away to get beaten up and suddenly the whole world felt a lot more menacing and unsafe. We sent the two best Chinese speakers as emissaries from our group to investigate the situation. By talking to some of the villagers and to the Korean family that was sharing the van with us we learned that the driver had been taken to the hospital where the family was going. The guide had talked his way out of it since he technically was not involved, but as he couldn't drive he spent the next quarter of an hour making calls on his cell to find a new driver. Eventually a motorcycle arrived carrying the new driver and we all piled back in and headed to the local hospital.

At the hospital we waited for the girl and her mother to be treated, and then stood around as a few of the men from the village crouched in a semi-circle outside the hospital to negotiate with our driver and guide. The hospital expenses had been about 60 USD and the bike repair was expected to be much less, but the family was asking for a lot more, about 400 USD, or roughly a year's salary in the countryside or a month's salary in the city. Around 1:30pm they finally settled and relations suddenly became amicable, even friendly. Half of our group went exploring the town in search of food and we all devoured it hungrily. We got to the sand dunes quite late and with much diminished enthusiasm, but were all in agreement that the experience, though distressing and unpleasant, had been, sociologically speaking, very interesting to witness, and seemed to have ended as well as was possible.

The dunes:

The camels:

I couldn't resist a camel-top view and a brief trot out on the sands...

Nor could I turn down the opportunity to go sand-sliding. This is my classmate Leslie starting out down the very steep hill. It was fast and fun, even though I wiped out about 25 feet from the bottom and had to run/roll down the rest of the way.

We got back to Hohhot in the early evening, exhausted. Because the trip had been, well, a bit sucky, and because we knew there was work to be done before the weekend was out, Jessica and I decided to change our tickets and fly back the next day. We arrived safely in Beijing yesterday evening, and, surprisingly and happily, it felt like home.

Postscript: Returning to school on Monday I asked a classmate about his holiday in a village in Guizhou distributing books collected by the Yale Book Club to local children. He spoke of poisonous snakes, a corpse in the river, pigs being slaughtered during dinner, and seeing a headless chicken knock over a dish of its own drained blood. He totally wins.