Inner Mongolia (Aug, 2007)
By Raymond on Feb 28, 2009 in travel
Travelling
Inner Mongolia
This is the first time for me to travel in far places with my lover. We went to the Northeast of the Inner Mongolia Province in summer 2007. We enjoyed the trip very much, for the diversity in characteristics and culture of the places we visited. Due to the terrible experience I had when I took part in a tour, I resist travel agents and love to plan the whole journey by myself.
We took a train from Beijing to Chifeng, a major city in southern Inner Mongolia. In the train, I saw some caves on the side of mountains (left). Were they places for living or storage?
In Inner Mongolia, besides the Han (Chinese) characters, signs written by Mongolian characters are also very common. Similar to Korean, a Mongolian character is composed of vowels, from the top to the bottom of the character. You can read it even though you may not know its meaning.
We first went to a small town called Jingpeng or Keqi. It was difficult for me to remember the names of the places in Inner Mongolia, because they were long and made up of rare characters. We took a bus, and we got only one seat. Many bus drivers here illegally took up more passengers to earn more by taking up more passengers. The extra passengers were asked to get down the bus before a checkpoint, and the bus passed through the checkpoint, then made a detour back to rejoin the waiting passengers. Perhaps such experience is rather scary if you don’t understand it.
Jingpeng is the middle point of several places we visited. Before we went to Dali Lake, Reshuizhen and Chifeng, we had to get back to Jingpeng first.
We contacted a host of Mongolian tents through telephone. Knowing that we’re students, he kindly offered us lower rents. Because he was not co-operating with travel agencies, there were very few visitors and we were generally not disturbed. It was a great experience to live in the tent. Besides a big bed (dominated half of the tent) and a small table, there was nothing in the tent. No TV, no electric lamp… We were really getting nearer to nature. The grass was not as tall and beautiful as I expected, because it is a dry grassland. Anyway, it is great to enjoy another kind of life style. A lot of food is milk product, as many herdsmen are keeping sheep there.
The host was good at forecasting weather by just looking directly at the clouds. Every time it was going to rain, he would inform us before 5 min and close the “ceiling” of the tent. It was an interesting piece of music when the rain droplets hit heavily on the tent.
We expressed our hope to the host that we were most interested in knowing more about the real life of people living in the grassland, and we had no interest in those developed tourist spots. The host was really very kind. He drove us to many places with spectacular scenery by a jeeper, which was formerly used in army, although it shook more heavily than a roller-coaster.
We went to the side of a inland lake. Blue sky, beautiful water, gentle breeze, colorful flowers… and there were only two of us in this world!
We visited some homes in the grassland. There were very old people who still lived very simple lives. On the other hand, machines had also been gradually introduced. Some shepherds used automobiles to guide their sheep to the water. Together with many herds of sheep, we walked from a home to a pond where the sheep drank. It was hard to touch a sheep, as they would avoid you when they saw you far away. But there was one special sheep which chased behind us and licked us (a lot of saliva). Perhaps it was grown up by men.
The side of the pond is another spectacular view! Besides sheep, there’re also horses and cows walking around leisurely, and birds flying just above the water freely. The world is harmonious.
There was also a “narrowest” river in the world. Its width was less than a meter, but the total length seemed rather long. As it was so narrow, it was rather hard to observe its panorama, but interestingly, colorful flowers grew along the river, and we could see this ribbon of flowers extending to somewhere far away.
Reshuizhen means the town of hot water in Chinese. We’ve heard that the hot spring water there is quite famous, so we wanted to have a try. I thought that it should be something like a SPA, but it turned out that the “spring water” was pumped to the bathtubs in your room through normal pipes…
Anyway, it was nice to experience the life style of people living in a really small town. There was only one street in this town. It was very interesting that most shops here sell souvenirs. Probably most of the people here depended on tourism.
The banner in the above left picture tells that “A student in the high school has been accepted by Tsinghua University. Let’s announce the good news to all people in the town.” It was the first time for me to truly realize that it is really very difficult for a Chinese student from small towns to get into Tsinghua University. Very often people asked us where we came from when we travelled, because they felt interesting that two small children (well, we looked like children) travelled by their own. All of them felt extremely envious if they were told we are from Tsinghua. To me, this is rather interesting, as I did not hear about Tsinghua a lot in Hong Kong.
Transport in small towns is rather inconvenient. Sometimes we had to sit on the road site and wait for a car for long time.
In Chifeng, we took a train to Hailar. It was a small city, but everything is neat and clean.
From Hailar, we headed south to Honghuarji. There’s a primitive forest of Pinus sylvestris. We enjoyed staying in a small wooden house and watching the sunset here.
Manzhouli, northwest of Hailar, is located at the border between China and Russia. The culture here is greatly affected by Russia. Some buildings in the Russian and Japanese style still exist. Probably to attract more tourists, some constructions are deliberately designed in foreign styles. We could also find many mestizos of Chinese and Russian in the street.
This is the National Gate where the train passes through the national border every day. Just wonder whether the Russian soldiers feel funny that so many Chinese visitors stack up at the border and take photos.
The photo in the right shows the Plaza of Matryoshka Doll, or Russian Nested Doll. Matryoshka is related to the latin word of mother. There’re many big lovely designed and drawn nested dolls. In Inner Mongolia, many shops sell nested dolls. After we came back to Beijing, we found that these dolls can be easily found in the market… And after we travelled in more places in China, we discovered that all the souvenirs in all places of China can be found in Beijing’s market…
Photos of a Soviet Russian Prison.
Food in Inner Mongolia!
Among many places I’ve travelled in , I feel that food in Inner Mongolia are the most delicious.
1) Russian style lunch.
2) Steak, and… well, I even don’t know how to call them in Chinese. The buns are stuffed with soup and meat. The pie is made of corn and…
3) Grilled pork chop. It seems the cooks in Inner Mongolia are very good at grilling.
4) Mutton, with a good match of spices.
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