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| Inner Mongolia |
A mysterious town near the city of Taiyuan
In the Xi’an region, it was so boiling hot that it was painful to even walk to the toll gate and start hitchhiking. On the same day more north, the temperature suddenly drops by some 20°C. I suddenly feel happy and able to do things again. It’s incredible how heat turns me to a lifeless zombie, and how normal temperature turns me back to a human being. (And it’s even more incredible that for Vojta it makes no difference.) When we get out of the truck in the suburbs of Taiyuan, it is raining, the air is mild and I am the happiest person in the world.
Vojta wants to see a historical site nearby and the driver is almost going past. We don’t even have to go downtown. This is another reason to be happy; it is hard to hitchhike and to find camping spots in cities. And it is particularly difficult to get around in Chinese cities in general if the only thing you understand is your map, whereas people around you don’t really read maps. A map doesn’t help you much to use the public transport either. So we try avoiding Chinese cities at all cost. So far, we’ve been incredibly lucky; the only major city we’ve been to is Xi’an – and we went there on purpose. Now we seem to be lucky again. The Jinci Temple is 2 kilometers away. We comfortably walk to the village, order noodles in a local diner (we already know how to do that if there are pictures of meals) and pitch the tent in a nearby park. It’s the first time we are using this tent in rain (our families brought this tent for us to Kyrgyzstan) and it’s leaking. It can’t spoil my happiness, though – we just cover the tent with Vojta’s big raincoat and the issue is solved.
We spend the next day in the temple. It is a vast garden with pavilions, lakes, statues and massive trees. The inscriptions say it is almost 1500 years old. I find it as unfamiliar as most of the things in China but it is a spiritual place and I enjoy walking around all the strangely shaped pavilions and towers. It is also raining the whole day and everything is fresh and green and I love it.
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| The Jinci temple |
To continue north, we decide to avoid the big city of Taiyuan completely. This requires walking a few more kilometers and hitching a ride on a small road across the mountains. There are hardly any cars and we get stuck. Late in the afternoon, we get picked up by a guy and a little girl with a van. The guy doesn’t seem confused at seeing us hitchhiking, which actually is confusing. We show him our list of sentences in Chinese saying what we are doing, and he seems to understand.
Then, he leaves the road and brings us to a deserted ancient village in a small river valley. The hillside is covered by a cascade of stone houses pressed against each other, and stairs. Except from round red Chinese lanterns suspended on roofs or wooden structures, the village looks completely abandoned. The only house that looks used is the one belonging to our driver. He shows us we can sleep somewhere in the village and tells us to come back in the morning. At least we think so. We don’t manage to ask him where exactly we can put up our tent, though, so we start exploring the village.
The houses look historical but we are not exactly sure how to tell anything historical in China. Some of the houses are decorated on the outside but they still are crumbling, some of their roofs are missing and they are mostly empty. We have no idea how old this place is, why it’s abandoned and why it’s decorated. In one of the houses, the lights are on. The door is a bit open, so we can see a lady monk sitting on the ground, maybe praying. We don’t want to disturb her but as she is the only person around, we dare knocking on the door and try to ask her if we can put up a tent nearby. She says something without any gesture and we don’t have the slightest clue what that was. So we give up and just find a nice place for the tent on one of the terraces, with a nice view of the valley.
In the morning, we continue exploring the place: the village is pretty big, with narrow lanes and staircases between houses that look almost identical. In some of them, there are some items, such as brooms, wooden containers, basic farming tools or new chairs that totally don’t seem to belong here. One of the houses near the river looks fake, like a stage for a theater play. On the road in front of the village, there are some signs we can’t read, a map we can’t read either, and many pictures from movies. Vojta comes up with a theory that the whole place might have been built as a scenery for shooting a famous movie. It might also just be a crumbling village where a movie has been shot.
We go to see the driver who brought us here yesterday. He greets us and offers us instant noodles – the same brand we always buy. At least something is familiar here. He shows us his house – he lives in a place that looks like ancient cellars, and the temperature inside is nicely fresh. He also shows us a text handwritten in English, related to this place. We try to decipher the handwriting to find out something, but it’s hard and the text seems to just be a visitors book entry.
The guy asks us some questions too but we are not able to answer. We try to tell him to write the questions on our phone in order to run it through the translation app, but he just writes them on a piece of paper and we are not really able to copy it into the phone, so we can’t figure out what he is asking. So except for our hitchhiking letters, we stay as mysterious for him as he and his village do for us.
Helpful police and a less helpful toll gate officer
When we have crossed the mountains, we join the motorway again. Even though this is not the police province of Xinjinag, we sometimes still seem to disturb the police or the toll gate staff when we try hitchhiking. Every toll gate is different. Sometimes, the staff don’t care at all. Sometimes they are extremely helpful. Sometimes it takes some explaining.
This time, it seems it will be difficult. The officer in charge invites us to his air-conditioned booth and asks us a lot of question. We show him all our letters, and he decides to help us. He actually insists. Through the translation app, he suggests us taking a taxi, taking a train and taking a bus. We explain him that we want to hitchhike, so he suggests he will pay a bus ticket for us. We refuse again. Eventually we convince him that hitchhiking is the only option, so he goes with us to the toll gate, stops a car with a license plate of the next city and orders the driver to give us a ride. The driver doesn’t protest at all and we feel almost sorry for him. Who would defy a police officer’s wish. This was our shortest waiting in China so far, though.
We are less lucky at the next toll gate: the lady on duty just tells us to go away. As simple as that. Thanks to her, we take a small country road and embark on the discovery of the Chinese countryside.
The onion vandals
We continue slowly, mostly with farmers going from one village to another. We also catch a ride with a guy who probably is an architect and has layouts of pavilions in his car. We walk through an entire town on foot. We become an attraction for the owners of public bathrooms in a park – they find us so funny as we wash our t-shirts that they burst out laughing and we must take a selfie with them.
When the night comes, we have hard time finding a camping spot as we are in an urbanized suburb. Eventually we find a grassy area along the road, behind a line of trees. We just need to step over a low fence. The area itself is quite vast but there are no trees, so we go rather far so that we can’t be seen from the road, and put our camping mats among a bit taller plants.
In the morning, we are woken by somebody shouting. We were probably not hidden that much well because he is shouting at us – and he is waving his arms animatedly. This helps us find out that Chinese people can indeed gesture while they talk. We also find out that we are lying in the only line of onion plants there is in the entire grassy field.
If there is a hell for travelers, once we get there, this farmer will surely show up to remind us of the onions we killed.
The cities of Shangdu
Some time later, after we hiked the sacred mountain of Heng Shan, Vojta comes up with the idea to see Shangdu, the ancient capital of Kublai Khan’s dynasty. It is in the province of Inner Mongolia and almost on the way to the border crossing to Mongolia we are planning to take.
Before we get there, people are extremely hospitable with us again, some truck drivers invite us for food and settle with a shop owner to let us camp in front of her shop.
The region of Inner Mongolia seems to be less populated than the ones before, motorways are emptier and it is not difficult to hitchhike on the entrance ramps or directly on the road.
Shangdu looks like a completely ordinary province town, except that people enjoy staring at us even more than anywhere before. They stare at us when we are buying food, they stare even more when we ask where to find a bathroom, and when we try asking for directions to the historical part of the town, a ring of more than 20 staring people forms around us. They don’t tell us any directions and actually tell us nothing at all. They are just standing and staring and when we try to smile at them or tell them our names, they just keep on staring. It’s not fun, so we just leave and try to look for the historical district on our own.
We are not sure where to start, though. The town looks anything but historical and there are none of the brown signs that everywhere in China point towards cultural sites. We can’t find anything in the map either. Eventually Vojta verifies the location of the Kublai Khan museum – and finds it’s some 300 km east in another Shangdu spelled in totally different Chinese characters. Well played. We are not even surprised anymore.
We still manage to get a cultural experience in this Shangdu though – as we embark on an urban hike back to the motorway, we come across people dancing on a square. On the ground, there is a recorder playing loud music, people stand behind it in regular lines like in an aerobic class and dance to the rhythm. We have noticed a similar dance session in Xi’an but we thought it was a special event for tourists. This town looks anything but touristy, so it probably just is a thing Chinese people do.
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| Dancing in Shangdu |
We don’t join them as we don’t understand dancing and rhythms, but Shangdu offers us another opportunity to see some culture: on the next square, there is an open cinema. A historical drama is showed on a big screen and people sit around on boxes and stools. We of course don’t understand any dialogues but it doesn’t matter much: there are battles, a heroic warrior, a beautiful girl who does nothing, and in the end a character dies and it’s heroic and sad.
The next day we find the other Sangdu: it consists of two grassy mounds in the middle of an empty plain, and a museum. There also is a parking lot guard who speaks Japanese, and that’s nice. Not that we know anything in Japanese but he understands the concept of not understanding Chinese, so we talk about life through a dictionary and it’s kind of fun.
After leaving the ‟right” Shangdu, we are heading to Mongolia. Compared to the distance we’ve already covered, the border is very near. Our days in China are almost over. The god of hitchhikers, if there is one, must love us and be watching over us. We’ve just crossed the fourth largest country in the world, by the way a tough dictatorship, without having any idea about pretty much anything, yet everything has gone smoothly and almost everybody have been nice to us. China was the country I was the most afraid of, and now I think I will miss it, in a way.
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| Mao is watching you |
