a buddy guiding me out of Guyuan


Back in a coffee bar in Beijing I had already figured out my maps wouldn’t help me that much. I thought I was well prepared though – from a specialized bookstore in Tokyo I'd bought a Northern China road map and a slightly more detailed aviation map, supposedly the best one on the market. But comparing both maps to set out a tentative itinerary turned out to be a worrying affair: roads and even place names didn’t coincide. Find the seven similarities…

Outside the coffee bar, different worries. Apart from being inaccurate and too small for a bike trekking (my daily 120 km corresponding with a pathetic 5 cm), both maps depict place names in roman characters only, making them completely cryptical for the average Chinese along the road. Very few locals read roman characters, even less seem to have an idea what their region looks like from above. While I have no tools to decode the average road sign…

Speech doesn’t help me any further either. Mandarin is an intonational language, with four tones, very hard to transcribe, impossible to pronounce… Being misunderstood is annoying, but being mute while speaking is hopelessly frustrating. Even when I try twenty different pronounciations of the next town’s name, still not a single face out of the full screen gathered around me shows a sign of remote recognition. A recurrent nightmare…



curious faces turn to the traveler, but hands keep trading cabbage at Guyuan's Saturday market





But in the end all works out fine, even for a mute traveler with blind maps. Pretty quickly I learn to depend on the position of the sun and the shape of the land (the aviation map has topography lines), to change my definition of ‘working out fine’. And to find the Chinese characters of the day, corresponding with the next town to reach.

One day one of the faces brings me to the local middle school, interrupts a class without apologizing and has the geography teacher study my map. A little later, I walk out of the school with sets of characters for a the rest of the week…

Lack of maps turns every day into a little pilgrimage, a quest for the town corresponding to a couple of signs scribbled down by a total stranger. Today, the first day on the Inner Mongolian grasslands is a particularly hard one, since the town to reach goes under a couple of names apparently, ranging from Zhangleanqi (on the map) to something that sounds like ‘Lanxie’…

I try “Zhangleanqi?” while pointing in a certain direction / Question mark faces / Get off my bike, show them the characters / “Aaaah, Lanxie!” nodding heavily and showing me the way. Next fork, same story, Zhangleanqi and Lanxie interchanged. Etcetera...



the next fork



lunch in a Hui town


With other muslim minorities, the Hui make up almost 10% of the Chinese population. Still I am surprised to find them so far east on the Silk Route... Opposite to the cats, there's a poster of Mekkah with a quote from the Qur'an.

Here, as in most eateries during the first weeks, I have a plate of jaouza, dumplings stuffed with mutton and scallions. A local classic, safe, and easy to order. Only later I find the characters for 'house specialty' - a secret code to a way more exotic universe, dished up by proud chefs...





Picture the disappointment when at the end of the day, Zhangleanqi slash Lanxie is just another unhospitable concrete settler’s camp. Dust blasting through the town’s oversized cardboard boulevards. Brand new factories on the outskirts. It feels like Zhangleanqi has been dropped off by a couple of trucks just last week. At night, no one outside, loud laughter from behind dirty windows. The Wild Northwest.

This is roadside Inner Mongolia, just like other ‘Autonomous Regions’ in China the forefront of state-organized Han Chinese colonisation. Until a couple of decades ago these grasslands – the plains roughly beyond the Great Wall, from Beijing's perspective – were used as pastures by semi-nomadic Mongolian shepherds, while intensive agriculture faded out at the end of Hebei’s fertile valleys. Today, the Mongolians, of which the majority has been forced to settle down, are outnumbered by Han Chinese by nine to one.

This might explain the disappointing geographical knowledge of the 'locals'. It definitely explains or starts to explain the desertification problem in Inner Mongolia - from the overcultivation of the grasslands to the increasingly severe dust storms in Beijing.

Towns like Zhangleanqi will only get more depressing as I move on north, higher on the Mongolian plateau, to colder, more fragile ecosystems.



notice the Mongolian style dome on the new concrete structure


Jan
September 2004