Contents:
Zhangjiakou
Baotou
The Yellow River
Hitching a Ride
Mud Pit
A Wet Desert
Back to Baotou
Thieving Old Woman
Zhangjiakou
I want to get out of this filty town of Guanting. People tell me there will be a train at 10:30 a.m. I hope another freight train will stop before then so I can hitch a ride, but one never does, so I catch the 10:30 a.m. train. The train gets to the city of Zhangjiakou around 1:00 p.m. Interestingly enough, the conductor on the train neglects to ask me to buy a ticket, and when I leave the train and exit the station no one asks to see my ticket either; furthermore I myself completely forget that I need to buy a ticket, so the train ride is free.
In Zhangjiakou I have to take a bus to the other side of the city where there is another train station that has trains going to Baotou. The ticket to Baotou is not cheap, at 88 RMB ($11 US). While waiting for the train, I go to a grocery store and buy some more oatmeal and dry whole milk, both of which I am out of, as well as some cookies and water for the train ride. I also buy some bananas at a fruit stand.
I sit down to eat lunch and a lame beggar starts bugging me. I don't know what he wants, but someone shouts at me to give him a banana, so I do and he takes it and goes away. It turns out to be a good thing that I gave him one, because I barely have room in my stomach to finish the bananas, and they are so ripe that if I were to carry them with me they'd probably get all mushy.
The train is about an hour and a half late. Finally they let us go out to the platform, but the train still isn't there yet. A military train carrying military vehicles on flatcars and servicemen in boxcars is just pulling out of the station. It is interesting that some of the vehicles on the train have the front end on the end of one flatcar and the back end on the front of the next one. I guess they really like to pack them in to save space. The men in the boxcars all smile and wave and yell “hallo” to me as they pass.
I buy a bag of three fresh Chinese cucumbers to eat while I wait. Chinese people like to munch on whole raw cucumbers; I don't understand why most Americans don't; after all they make a tasty, healthy snack.
Baotou
The train finally arrives and everyone boards. It is extremely crowded, and I have a seatless ticket. Two cops come along and make me show them my passport. This is the first time in my journeys in China that any cop has asked to see my passport. After giving my passport back they make everyone clear the aisle and walk with me up and down the train trying to help me find a seat. Of course there are none available, so they make a man sitting on the floor between cars get out of the way to give me room. I sit down there on my backpack so I will be comfortable and can see out the window. It is actually more comfortable than the crappy seats.
Later the train gets less crowded so I end up in a seat. I overhear someone sitting across the aisle from me explain to her girlfriend why I was carrying such a big pack. "He's probably an American returning home from attacking Iraq," she says.
The train to Baotou takes about twelve hours, arriving at around 3:00 a.m. Used to not sleeping by now, I immediately set off in the rain, walking towards my destination, which is now only 38 kilometers (24 miles) to the south. The people standing outside the station selling taxi rides and hotel rooms ask me where I am going, and I keep telling them I am headed for the desert. They think I am a nut, and say it is much too far to walk, especially at night in the rain. They keep asking me over and over where I am going, and finally I get fed up and just say “I already told you” when they ask again. Most of them give up, but one woman follows along with me for five minutes or so. She seems genuinely worried about me.
I find a road which crosses under the railroad tracks and heads south. As I walk through the rain big trucks roar by. I see many squished toads on the pavement, as well as a few live ones hopping accross the road.
I decide to force myself to get ten kilometers closer to my destination before taking a break. This actually means walking considerably more than ten kilometers, because the road I am walking on often veers east for a while before turning south again. I need to find a better road to walk on!
The Yellow River
Finally I find a nice, straight railroad track that heads just about due south. I climb up the embankment and walk on the tracks instead of on the road. The railway has numbered marker posts every one hundred meters (328 feet), so I can see my progress exactly without obsessively referencing my GPS constantly.
Around the time it is just starting to get light, I find myself crossing a kilometer-long trestle over the wide Yellow River and the flooded sunflower fields that stretch on for miles on its banks. The water of the Yellow River is yellow with silt, but the banks of the Yellow River are even more yellow, with sunflower blossoms. No wonder they call it the Yellow River!
It is hard to believe with all this water everywhere that I am now less than 30 kilometers (19 miles) away from the bone-dry desert—or maybe the desert isn't always so dry after all.
Two hundred meters past the trestle, I have met my rest goal; I have gained another 10 kilometers and the place where Xiujuan and I camped in the desert two months ago is now only 28 kilometers away. I stop and take off my shoes to rest my weary feet, and have a breakfast of oatmeal. A train rumbles past. My feet are getting cold and wet in the rain, so I reluctantly put my shoes and backpack back on and keep walking.
Another two kilometers further and I am passing through hundreds of acres of cornfield. I climb down, pick an ear of corn, and eat it. It is not very good, extremely tough and hard to chew. It must be meant for animal feed, not human consumption.
Hitching a Ride
The road, now a freeway, is crossing the railroad tracks again, and the tracks are taking a sudden turn to the east, so I decide to go back to walking on the road. Besides, now that it is morning I think I can probably catch a bus on the freeway. I watch a very streamlined passenger train whiz by on the tracks. It's the first time I've seen such a modern-looking train in China.
After walking on the freeway for an hour or so, a truck driver stops and offers me a ride. He is an Inner Mongolian man. I ride with him, gratefully watching the kilometers to my destination rapidly tick down on the GPS. Finally the arrow has swung all the way to the right, so I am no longer making any progress toward my destination. The man lets me off at the next exit and I continue onwards on foot.
Mud Pit
My goal is now less than seven kilometers (4 miles) away. The railroad has again crossed the road and is now headed more or less in my desired direction, so I walk on that for a few minutes. But of course the direction gets more and more wrong, so I switch to a small dirt road heading more westward. Many big trucks carrying rocks and gravel pass by me. Finally I get to a spot where they are digging up an entire streambed for miles and trucking the mud to the top of dirt mounds they have piled up. There they wash the mud down through gutters with various sized meshes along the way to separate out various sizes of gravel.
The operation results in lots of mud everywhere. I get stuck in the mud several times while crossing the stream and have to backtrack and go around. Finally the workers help me find a crossable route. I leave the streambed and start to hit sand before passing though a desert village of gray dome-shaped concrete huts. Then I leave all the trees and bushes behind and continue on across the desert, my destination now only a few kilometers away.
A Wet Desert
The desert is quite a bit different than it was two months before. I find it is not so bone-dry after all. It has just rained, so the sand is wet and firm and much easier to walk on. Now when climbing a dune I don't slide back half a step for every step forward I make. When I was here before it was unbearably hot. Now it is chilly.
Thus I soon reach the place where I camped with Xiujuan. I follow the GPS's arrow until the indicated distance gets down to exactly zero meters. I find that I am standing in the exact spot where I stood two months ago when marking our campsite as a waypoint in my GPS. The GPS is certainly very accurate, as least relative to itself. The shapes and positions of the sand dunes haven't changed at all; I still recognize everything. I thought sand dunes are supposed to move due to the wind, but I guess the movement is pretty slow—or maybe there isn't much wind during the summer months.
It is now 10:00 a.m. I gather some sand in a Ziplock bag and label the contents in Chinese characters with a Sharpie: “Inner Mongolian desert sand”. I also print the date and exact latitude and longitude on the bag. The sun is beating down and things are warming up, which feels good. I plop down in the sand right where the tent had been a couple months before and get some much-needed sleep. I sleep until afternoon and then eat some oatmeal.
When I wake up I find that the top layer of sand has dried in the sun. I feel it is better to have dry sand than wet, so I dump out the wet stuff and collect dry sand, skimming the centimeter-thick dry layer off the top.
I head out of the desert. I don't return by the way I came, but instead I head to an animal park at the edge of the desert where people rent camels. I think because of the tourists here there might be a bus back to Baotou available.
Back to Baotou
I see a bus driving up to the animal park, but it is a charter bus and I can't ride it. They tell me there are no public busses available here, so I walk down the road. Soon I unexpectedly come upon the place Xiujuan and I caught the bus back to Baotou the morning we came out of the desert. Some people I meet by the road there say a bus may come at 4:30 p.m., but 4:30 passes and no bus comes. Finally one of the men walks home and returns with his SUV. He gives me a ride over 7 kilometers of bumpy dirt roads to the freeway, and helps me flag down a bus back to Baotou.
On the bus I meet a woman who really wants to talk to me. However, she assumes I won't understand her accented Mandarin dialect well enough, so she writes everything she wants to say to me on little scraps of paper, in unusually neatly written Chinese characters that I don't have any problem reading. She writes that she is a teacher and her town has no English-speaking people in it. She wants me to come live in her town and teach English.
The bus breaks down, so the next bus stops and we all get off and board it. Twenty minutes later I am back in Baotou.
Thieving Old Woman
I stop in a restaurant and order some food. As I eat, the family that owns the restaurant and some customers crowd around and ask me all sorts of things, such as questions about the US. Then they ask to see what an American dollar looks like, so I show them one. They think it is pretty ugly compared to colorful Chinese bills, but they are still extremely interested.
An old women wants to look at the dollar bill, so I hand it to her. Next she wants to see my Chinese cell phone, so I let her look at it too. I finish eating and am ready to leave. I pay for my meal and try to get the old woman to return my cell phone, but she refuses. Finally, after twenty minutes of begging her and telling her how important it is that I maintain contact with my friends, I just reach into her pocket and tug the phone away from her. I don't bother to reclaim my dollar.
