Let me first apologize for such a long post. It's a description of my week-long trip to Ningxia and Western Inner Mongolia. Hopefully someone might be bored or care enough to read it!
The train to Beijing took us 8 hours south through Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, and Hebei provinces, passing factories, farms, cities, and mountains. We got into Beijing at 11:30pm, excitedly rushing out of the train station to the distinct feeling of the capital city around us. After walking past the crowds outside the station, we finally found a taxi a few blocks down, and headed directly to the airport for our 7:30am flight. We decided it wasn’t worth risking oversleeping, and since the ride to the airport can take up to or over an hour depending on traffic, we would sleep at the airport. So, that’s what we did.
We got to the airport after 1, and were told that we could check in at 6am. We found a spot with some couches, and settled in. I made myself a place on the floor, having had too much experience with airport couches, and set my alarm for 6am. By 6, there was already a line to check-in. We made it through security reasonably quickly, and our trip was off to an only slightly bumpy start.
The flight to Yinchuan wasn’t a long one after our 8-hour train ride and night in the airport. We got in around 9:30am, and took a taxi to the bus station to buy 5pm tickets to Alashan Zuoqi that evening. So, we had the day to explore Yinchuan.
Yinchuan is the capital of Ningxia, the Hui “autonomous” region—a small province in China’s Northwest (actually the northern part of central China), tucked between Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Shaanxi provinces. It is homeland to the Hui (an Islamic Chinese minority group), and has many mosques, goat/sheep meat, and Hui people. Outside the bus station, Yinchuan seemed dusty and plain—Hui men walked by in white caps, the sun brighter than in Harbin.
We strolled for a while, heading towards the downtown area, not realizing how far south we actually were. After asking a local couple for directions, we found that we were actually 5km or so south of the city center. So, we found a cab and headed north. Our cab driver was a Hui man with a thick accent who complimented me on my beard in
Putonghua (Mandarin) and proceeded to ask if we were Muslims. We informed him that we were not, and he went off on a rant about the 5 pillars of Islam, and how we were all going to hell.
Some comments about Yinchuan: the city center is much more developed than its surroundings, there are countless hospitals and drugstores, and parts of the city are very typically Chinese. We walked around aimlessly for a while, witnessing a fight on the street with some nice back and forth screaming, and one man receiving a boxing-like blow to the forehead resulting in a bloody gash, which he overdramatized for a while before giving up. At one point, we walked into the “Yinchuan World Trade Center” to use their bathroom, and they tried to direct us to the second floor (possibly assuming that we were there for some sort of conference). We went to a Buddhist temple north of the city center to climb to the top of a pagoda. Unfortunately, the pagoda was closed, and the place was swarming with wasps. It did seem, however, that these “Buddhist” wasps were particularly peaceful.
That night we headed back to the bus station, and took a two-hour bus to a town in Inner Mongolia called in Mongolian, Bayan Khot (阿拉善左旗 ALaShan ZuoQi, in Mandarin). When we arrived, the city was dark. Candles in the windows told us that the power was out, and the headlights of passing cars shined their beams through the dusty streets. We found a hotel near the bus station, and negotiated for a room. When we went back downstairs, they told us that they had given us the wrong room, and insisted that we move our bags, which we did. By that time, the power had come back on one side of the street, so we went to eat at the only restaurant that seemed to have lights. A bunch of drunk men waved at us, and eventually came over, asking us what country we were from, apparently to settle a bet.
Alashan Zuoqi seemed like a small town, quaint in its backwards ways and power outages. We liked it. We stopped by a hotel right next to the bus station to ask about the next morning’s bus to Alashan Youqi (a town 6 hours west from Zuoqi). We were told that we were in luck—the driver of the bus to Youqi happened to be sitting right in front of us, and promised to save us three seats on his bus so we wouldn’t have to wake up quite that early. Our intel told us that there was only one bus per day from Zuoqi to Youqi, which left at 7:10am, normally necessitating a 6am arrival at the bus station to assure seats.
When we got back to the hotel, we were told that they had once again given us the wrong room, and asked us to move our bags. Slightly reluctantly, we moved once again. In so doing, a bunch of Chinese tourists asked to have their pictures taken with us, so we appeased them and went on our way.
The next morning we showed up at the bus station at 6:45am. My stomach was bothering me, and rather than be caught on a 6 hour bus ride in need of a restroom, I sucked it up, and squatted over a hole in the shack out back beside a bunch of Chinese and Mongolian men. When I rejoined my friends, there was some confusion as to which bus to get on. Apparently, the driver of the other bus had failed to secure our seats to Youqi on his bus. There was another bus, which was due to leave at 7:30am, but as we were preparing to get on, we heard one of the
fuwuyuans say “他们不可以坐那辆车—司机喝醉了” (“They can’t ride that bus—the driver’s drunk!”). They apparently overlooked the fact, and pushed us on board. We were obviously quite hesitant, and I asked them if the driver was drunk, to which they responded that there were two drivers, and we’d be fine. We didn’t seem to have much choice.
The ride was a bumpy one, not so much due to the driver but to the road, which was undergoing massive amounts of construction in anticipation of a surge in tourism. We stopped at one point for lunch. None of the three of us were hungry, so we waited by the bus in the shade. While we were waiting, a woman was riding by on a motorcycle when a white sack fell off the back. It didn’t seem all that odd, until we heard a deep meowing sound. She parked her motorcycle on the side of the road, picked up the sack, and started walking towards the other bus, which had also stopped for lunch. Sure enough, the meowing was getting louder. There was a cat in the bag. She continued towards the bus, and set the sack down with the rest of the luggage waiting to be stuffed under the bus. While I can’t say that I know anything about her and her cat’s situation, it did seem a bit like animal cruelty.
Back on the bus, the driver asked us why we were heading to Youqi, and if we had already arranged a tour to the desert. We told him that we hadn’t, and he called a friend of his, who gave us a price, and said he’d meet us when we got off the bus.
Sure enough, upon our arrival in Youqi, there he was on the bus, addressing my American-Chinese friend, Ariane, as “tour guide” (导游) before we could even grab our luggage. We corrected his mistake, and he took us to his tour company’s office to negotiate. It seemed fairly legit. We haggled for a while, not making too much headway. Finally, I told them how we were exchange students, and didn’t have that much money. They agreed to a couple hundred kuai cheaper, and we began the paperwork. When they asked for an additional Y150 per person, we were taken aback, but they said it was for our necessary travel permit to enter the desert. We argued again, but it didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. We had little choice, and finally agreed. Our desert tour was going to cost us a little over Y1000 (USD$140) per person per day.
The driver took us in a jeep to pick up food and water, and we headed towards the desert. After 20 minutes or more of driving, the sand dunes finally appeared in the distance. We stopped at the foot of the dunes to switch to a “more reliable” jeep, and set out. The jeep powered over the sand dunes like a roller coaster, up and down, up and down. We peaked some of the dunes at over 60kph. I don’t think I’ve ever been motion sick before. A couple times, our driver stopped to pick a path through the dunes, or to clear sand off the ridge of a dune to prevent from flying off and crashing. He said he had been driving in the desert for 20 years, and he seemed to know what he was doing—managing the both shifter and a high/low gear shifter for 4-wheel drive. It was a bit like skiing in a jeep.
The Badan Jilin Desert is a very interesting place. Beneath the sand flows water, which keeps the dunes in place, and creates hundreds of fresh and salt water lakes nestled between the mammoth mountains of sand. The stationary sand dunes here, as I mentioned in my last post, are the highest in the world—the tallest of which towers at 1,640ft from base to peak, and is called “Desert Everest”.
We drove for several hours, stopping every now and then by lakes to take photos. As the sun was beginning to set, we made it to our destination for the evening—a lodging by a saltwater lake, beside which a Buddhist temple had been built at the foot of a wall of sand. Though our room for the evening was no Holiday Inn, this place seemed truly magical. There was desert in every direction. No other tourists. As it got dark, the moonlight peered through the clouds and reflected off the lake, and the stars shone brightly above us.
The next morning, we woke up fairly early, and walked around a bit. Our driver went to wake up someone to open the temple for us. We went inside and admired what it must have taken to get all the materials for the temple into such a remote part of the desert. I imagined the monks riding a camel three days through the hot desert, finally making it to this lake, and deciding to stay. I don’t know if that’s how it happened—but had I had the option, I might have stayed as well.
W
e hopped back in the jeep, and drove to another lake, before making our approach on the highest dune, “Desert Everest”. Our driver told us he would get us as high as possible by jeep, but then we’d have to climb to the summit on foot. We set out on foot, falling back with each step in the hot sand, but the climbing went faster than it seemed it would. The top of each dune seemed like the spine of some great monster, split in two: the left side had been ruffled and compacted by the wind, but the right side remained smooth and powdery. A small lizard scuttled along in front of us. There was no one in sight anywhere—no footprints, no sounds of cars in the distance—we made it to the summit, and the world was ours. The desert spread out around us and showed us more lakes than we’d imagined. We enjoyed our victory atop the tallest stationary dune in the world, took some photos, and then headed back down towards the jeep.
The second day’s ride was rough. All of our stomachs hated us for our current situation, and we were more than happy to stop at each lake to take photos. Fortunately, we hadn’t eaten much for breakfast, or it may have been even more unfortunate. At one point, our driver took us to a particular dune where a phenomenon known as “booming sound” is most prominent. The Badan Jilin desert is known for its powerful booming sand—when sand gets pushed or blown off the top layer of a dune, it creates a loud booming noise. We were too tired to climb very high, but we slid down a good 15 feet or so, and experienced what seemed more like farting sand than booming sand. Still, it was fun.
Our trip to the desert was amazing, and despite my nausea, I was sad to go. The driver told us that UNESCO had been here the previous year, and we were a little uneasy imagining the place becoming touristy. With people in every direction, the remoteness and vastness of the desert would certainly lose its power.
Upon our return to Youqi, our driver helped us find a hotel. We emptied the sand from our shoes, and settled in. While we were getting comfortable, there was a knock on our door. The hotel proprietor was there with two PSB (Public Security Bureau—police) officers. They asked to see our passports, and I gladly handed them over. (It’s common practice in China to register with the PSB in place you visit—if you’re staying in a hotel, they usually photocopy your passport and take care of it for you, but apparently Youqi didn’t get many foreigners.) They said they’d take our passports to their office and bring them back in a bit, but I insisted that I go with them while my friends unpack.
Their office turned out to be a small motel-style room in a low building behind the hotel. There were photos of children on the wall, and it seemed as though it might have been the hotel manager’s home. Attached to a small computer between the two beds was a new-looking machine. The PSB officers, two young-looking Mongolian men, were fairly nice and chatted with me as they struggled to use their new machine. I spelled out our Chinese names for them, and we discussed the UNESCO visit to the area and how things were getting more and more touristy. We explored Youqi for the rest of the day and evening, and woke up early for our 6-hour bus ride back to Zuoqi. I threw my bag under the bus, only to find out later that it had been doused with some sort of vinegar sauce, causing all of my clothes and jackets to smell like vinegar for the rest of the trip. (I'm still washing them to get the smell out.)
Zuoqi Mongolians are known for being big in the trade of semi-precious stones, and we spent the rest of our day in Zuoqi walking around and looking at stones and jewelry made of agate and other stones. It seemed that our first, nighttime impression of Zuoqi had been false. The city was actually quite large, and much more developed than Youqi. We walked around till dark, and found a square by a large stadium, where people were playing pool outside under a series of tents. We decided to join in, and played a game, interrupted continually by people watching and photographing us (two of us being white). A bunch of local guys asked to have their photo taken with me, and then we finished up our game. It was Y1 (USD$0.14)/game, and the proprietor tried to give us our game for free, possibly honored (?) by our presence. Of course, I refused, paid her the Y1, and we went on our way.
We chatted with the lady at the front desk, asking her if she knew how to get to a place called Moon Lake (about an hour day). She said she had a friend who could drive us the next day, she called him, and he came over to negotiate a price with us. The next day, he met us early outside the hotel, and we headed towards Moon Lake. When we got there, we found that on top of the fairly high-priced Y60/person entrance ticket, they required that you use their Jeeps to get to the lake. The minimum per jeep was four people, so all in all they wanted almost Y1000 for the 3 of us to enter the lake area. This price didn’t even include any of the activities that we were hoping to do, like sand-sledding, camel riding, and whatnot. We told them we might just walk to the lake, but they said it wasn’t possible. Apparently the lake was 15km away, and would take someone who didn’t know how to walk in sand 6 hours, while it would take someone who knew how to walk in sand 4 hours. What’s more, it was a windy day, and we might lose our way. They told us how a lone traveler had come a while ago, and thought the price was too high, so he walked on his own and got lost for two days. Heeding their warnings and our wallets, we
called our driver back and asked him to take us to a Buddhist temple complex by a mountain instead.
It seemed we’d made the right decision. We had a great day hiking up into the green mountains, beholding the Buddhist temples, Stupas, and Aobaos (large white territorial structures), and hiked fr an hour or so up past the main temple to a crossroads facing a huge, green plateau across the large open space. We enjoyed the sight for a while, and then headed up towards a temple at the top of one of the mountains. When we got there, an older Buddhist monk took us into a cave, and told us to take the water from the rocks and put it on ourselves for good health. Then he took us into a small room and told us to eat jiaozi (dumplings). We were a bit confused at the large plate of jiaozi in front of us, but we each had one or two so as not to be impolite. Afterwards, we went into the temple, while 8 older monks were chanting, playing bells, and horns.
We talked with one monk, who told us how it was a holiday, and that they only made these jiaozi for a short period of time each year, and that they would bring us good luck for the rest of the year.
We left feeling very special at having had the luck to come to this temple on such an important occasion, and headed back down towards the main temple complex. We called our driver to pick us up, and headed back to Zuoqi. We took a cab to a more bustling part of town, and ate Mongolian lamb-meat hotpot. The next day, we called our driver back, and asked him if he knew anywhere to ride horses.
He took us west of the city a bit, and treated us to traditional Mongolian milk tea, goat-milk cheese, and sour solidified yoghurt. Then we took turns riding the horses. They asked if we knew how to ride, and I told them I had ridden, but not in a very long time. The horses were not trained to the point that they were willing to be ridden. Our Mongolian friends let me ride on my own, and I got into a fast trot for a while, until my horse decided to try to decapitate me by riding under a low-hanging cord. I fell off, and was a little disappointed at myself. I felt a little better when our Mongolian driver also fell off his horse in the same way.
After riding, we headed back into town, and took a bus back to Yinchuan, where we found a hotel, walked around a bit, went to a temple fair, and then explored some more. Our last day in Yinchuan, we took a tourist bus out to the XiXia tombs, Yinchuan’s most famous site. It was raining fairly hard, so we explored the museum, got a quick look at one of the tombs (a large mound of dirt that had once been covered by an ornate structure), and then headed back to the bus.
That night we headed back to the airport for our return flight to Beijing. We got into Beijing after 9pm, found a hostel, walked around the night market at Wangfujing for a bit, and then went to Houhai for some drinks. The next morning, we woke up and headed up to Wudaokou for a Western breakfast, and then headed to the train station. Our driver told us we wouldn’t be able to get there, since they were rehearsing for the Chinese National Day, but after some persistence, he agreed to take us as far as he could. It turned out his worries were in vain. We got to the train station, and in 8 short hours found ourselves back in a rather brisk Harbin, not quite ready to get back to class.
Well, sorry for the novel. I have tons of pictures, some panoramas, and videos to post soon, so check back!
Click "Hybrid" on the map below, and zoom-in to explore my trip!
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