Inner Mongolia: Part I

A week of travel in China is always exciting, especially when that travel takes you beyond the limits of the China you already know. And when the travel is done with people who are becoming good friends, it becomes even better. So where do I start about my week of travel to Inner Mongolia, the northern-most province in China?

For the short version, just read the next paragraph. For the long version, keep reading. For a visual version, see the pictures of my trip.

I went with two friends to Inner Mongolia, where we hung out, rode horses in the grasslands, played in the sand of the “desert,” and practiced our Chinese with all-too-willing natives who rarely see white people. That was the trip in a very, very small nutshell.

In a much larger nutshell, I’ll start at the beginning. Tuesday afternoon I met up with a couple from Flanders, who I will refer to as G and WT, to catch a train to Hohhot (Huhehaote in Chinese… it took me all week to remember that), the capital of Inner Mongolia. Unfortunately, the train from Shenyang to Hohhot is a slow train… making the trip a thrilling 22 hours long. On hard seats. (No, I’m not just complaining about the seats by saying they were hard. Chinese trains have five types of tickets. From most expensive to cheapest, they are: soft bed, hard bed, soft seat, hard seat, and no seat. I’ve never taken a soft bed, which has more privacy than the hard beds, but the hard beds make an overnight train ride quite comfortable. Soft seats are hardly better than the hard seats. But when we bought our tickets, the only options were hard seat or no seat. Clearly, we chose the former. Especially since I think those two tickets are actually the same price.)

Impressively enough, we had a reasonably good time on the train ride out. We shared a three-person bench, which faced another bench for three and had a small table between. A young Chinese couple across from us were some of the most normal Chinese people we met on the entire trip. We taught them some card games and had fun talking with them a bit. Since they started in Shenyang and were going to Baotou, which is the end of the line, they were there the entire time we were. The third person on that bench changed several times.

Sleeping on the train was entertaining, to put it positively. G, WT, and I laid on each other as much as we could to get comfortable, but it still didn’t work out all that well. And even more entertaining was waking up every half hour or so to find Chinese people gathered around our bench, watching the foreigners sleep. Yeah, awkward. (The three of us were the only foreigners on the train, at least in the seats.)