rafting Follow

I've been somewhat absent here, but I am justified. I've been away. Two weekends ago we (Chunzi and I) took a journey north to the far-flung region of Inner Mongolia. It is one of China's Autonomous Regions, like Tibet in the southwest and Uighur in the west, for example. Obviously, it sits right against the border of (outer) Mongolia. It's known for the ever-expanding Gobi Desert and the prairies, or grasslands. It was the latter that we wanted to check out. We flew into the city of Hailar (Hi lahr), which is actually just a district of the larger prefecture of Hulunbuir. Like the rest of China, by far the largest ethnic group (even way up there) is Han. The Mongols come in second, but it is a distant second (Wikipedia says the whole region is 79% Han and 17% Mongol). Still, nearly every building had words written in Chinese and the strange curly-cue script of Mongol. No English to speak of, aside from the "China Mobile" signs. We didn't stay too long in the city, only long enough to drive through. We had hired a driver for the weekend who would take us wherever we wanted to go (he was Han, and spoke no English). First stop was the grasslands, barely a half hour out of the city. It's this area that everyone comes to see, and there were the requisite yurts and salesmen dressed in traditional regalia that people expect. But our driver drove on, off road and into the great grass expanse. Some pictures: The colors on the grassland are vibrant, and the insects are plentiful. One thing you surely do not see in a place like Inner Mongolia is the suffocating haze that shrouds the city. The skies were crystal clear and the sun shone down with pure beams of yellow, interrupted only by the cotton-swap puffs of clouds that cast jagged shadows on the landscape in the distance. Our staunchly reticent driver loaded us back into his white sedan, some Chinese charm hanging from the mirror next to the red Fuwa and a picture of a woman who looked like royalty. We sped through the countryside, past farmland and beekeepers. Swaths of brilliant yellow -- the flowers of a plant used to make cooking oil -- sat against the green of the grasslands. We continued on north for about 2 hours to a town called Eerguna (pronounced uah ahr goo nah), a wetland town sitting on the Gen He (river). The town proper has a population of around 40,000, but the larger area is around 90,000, tiny by Chinese standards. I assume our driver has spent a lot of time in this town because he had family there (his nephew would join us the next two days) and he went to high school nearby. He also knew all the hot spots. First it was to the top of a hill over looking the town and the entire wetland: Then the trip got interesting. It was a hot day and we wanted to go for a swim in the river so the driver took us to a rocky shore next to the dark rushing current. We skipped rocks for a while (note: only about ten minutes of skipping makes me have to convalesce my brittle shoulder for days) and then got ready for a swim. But before we could, a guy from a nearby BBQ picnic approached us with a big skewer of grilled pork. He offered us some and invited us over to have a drink with them, most certainly intrigued by the mysterious laowai who had wandered into their midst. We sheepishly obliged, taking a seat at the table and getting fed cup after cup of local beer and, later, swigs of the Chinese fire-water baijiu. I had no choice but to drink as quickly as it came because if someone asks you to drain your cup and you don't, it's a loss of face for the other person, an insult. And in my culture, if you can't muster the strength to drink up, well, it's a loss of face for you. So I had to represent either way. These guys were mostly a bunch of government officials, border security and... I can't remember, I was pretty loaded at this point. They said they were all Mongols, clearly to impress us, but they admitted later that they were really all Han. They kept feeding us grilled meat, watermelon and booze as they asked Chunzi rapid-fire questions to translate for me and I tried to respond. It went on like this for more than an hour, and though it was a pretty hazy experience in retrospect, it was unforgettable. (One of the best parts was when they all burst into song, singing what I guess is the regional anthem, a song everyone knows and one we ended up hearing sung or played on CD at least a half-dozen times.) But that was only the beginning of our river friends. Not long after that, after I took a chilly (and drunken) swim down the river current, we got to talking to a bunch of people around our own age. They were all artists -- dancers and singers mostly. It's hard to say all that we talked about (through intrepid translator) as the beer kept flowing. But boistrousness ensued, no doubt about that. After a while they whisked us away to this flower-packed field to pick mushrooms as the sun was setting, casting shades of deep yellow across the green. Even though the mushrooms were decidedly unmagical, it was one of the most euphoric experiences I can remember in a long time. Perhaps it was the afternoon beverages catching up to me, but floating through that sun-soaked field seemed like I had momentarily stumbled into heaven. We were probably only there 15 minutes and again were whisked away, this time back to the top of the hill to catch the sunset -- on the back of one of the guy's motorcycles. Speeding through the Inner Mongolian countryside, wind in my hair and beer in my hand (my first time ever on a motorcycle, by the way), I was pretty certain I was in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The rest of the trip was not un-fun, but that was certainly the highlight. We were supposed to go out with the guys that night, but a 7 am flight and the aforementioned booze pretty much knocked me out. The next day we drove another 3 hours north, through tiny farming communities of thatched huts and makeshift shacks, through the increasingly wooded land and toward Moerdaoga National Park and the little town bearing the same name, wedged right against the Russian/Mongolian/Chinese border. Our final destination. Our driver got lost at first, but we ended up at a rafting lodge that had a giant Chinese chessboard on the ground outside (didn't get to play, haven't learned how). We took the opportunity to raft down the Jiliu River, a 2.5-hour drift that was just lovely, save for the brutal mosquitoes. Oh, and the lightning... there was one bolt that struck no more than 10 meters behind us on the water's surface. We asked the guide if it was OK to be out in conditions like that and all he could say was he didn't know, implying he couldn't care less. We were a bit nervous till the clouds cleared and the sun came out. That night we tended to our bug bites in an overpriced hotel (expensive because of the shower, which hardly worked anyway) and prepared to check out what is said to be China's largest forest park. We did, and it was nothing more than OK. Kinda disappointing, actually. Lots of pine trees, even more bugs, and a long road with kitschy stopoff points. No hiking trails that we could see. How you screw up a national park of such pristine beauty is beyond me, but clearly not impossible. We made our way back to Eerguna and caught up with our friends for a couple hours on the river before we caught our flight from Hailer back to Beijing. We promised to come back and to send them gifts, and to tell everyone back home how hospitable (Inner) Mongolians are and how beautiful their countryside is. Consider it done.