Heavy thunderstorms last night, slowly passing, as if they too had decided to stay for the night at Bayanxile's pasture home. In the morning, I take a misty walk to the bathroom, the usual hole in the ground in a separate shack. - it's till raining. My room has a big window. Dreary Bayanxilemuchang and its supersized “Enjoy the beautiful grassland and Mongolian culture” sign next to the Sinopec gass station doesn’t make a convincing alternative to the road ahead . Who minds some drops of rain when both a mysterious section of the Great Wall and Dalai Nur, a freshwater lake, are on the program of the day? Maybe real yurts, with real nomads, finally? I wrap feet and tent in the plastic cover of the breakfast table – soon I’m biking off, on the other side of the big window.





Rain gets worse - amazing how different the grasslands look without towering blue skies overhead. But then, as gradually as the road climbs, the rain gets lighter, up to a point it stops to bother. It’s snowing! I can’t help laughing out loud.

As long as I keep biking (and laughing) the cold is okay – hands and feet go into permafrost. It’s silent, almost cozy, in my grey bubble with fuzzy white dots. Until an overwhelming buzz takes over from the humming of my tires… Through the thick curtain appears the slender silhouette of a wind turbine, slowly making its turns… An equally undisturbed shepherd completes the surreal picture. Back to the future. The shape of the earth mound in the distance seems regular enough to qualify as the northernmost, almost forgotton part of the Great Wall. Dalai Nur is off radar.



mud mound or Wall of China?


Pretty worn out and slightly disoriented, I manage to stop a truck. The driver pulls over, climbs on his load of coal and hoists my bike all the way up, as if he picks up bikers in blizzards all the time. My frozen hands fail to take out extra ropes to secure the bike, but he assures me it’s going to be allright.





Thawing hurts, but he has cigarettes and a warm coat, and I have bulk peanuts. Another cozy bubble. After noticing my bike through the cabine’s rear window, stable on a bed of coal, I fall asleep. My generous friend brings me eighty kilometers further east, to Keshiketengqi, a sizeable city with sizeable puddles, in a valley surrounded by mountains.



bike on a bed of coal and snow through the rear window, and waking up in the next city



4 different sets of characters on MongolTV: Cyrillic, Roman, Chinese, Mongolian


As we drove down from the highlands, it is diffiicult to tell whether here too rain turned to snow today… In any case, magic continues - at night, after winter gear shopping (shoes gloves socks for 15 dollars) skies are on fire, and lava creeps through the streets.





The real city of Keshiketengqi feels very different from the pioneer outposts of the past weeks. Walking around, I realize the truck drove me back to inhabited China, safely inside the Wall. At the same time, chances to come across a real yurt from here are seriously shrinking - getting to know fellow nomads in Inner Mongolia turns out to be tougher than expected. Next time I’ll have to fix myself one of those packaged ‘stay a night in a yurt’ trips...





Ironically, back in Beijing, I will see a small independent movie called Heavenly Grassland - city boy grows up with Mongolian nomad step(pe)parents in unspoilt yet harsh surroundings. Landscapes felt deja-vu, and indeed the closing credits reveal the movie was shot in the grasslands around Keshiketengqi…


Jan
October 2004