Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

A beautiful day on the grundle busters of Bayan Nur. This picture was taken just as we realized that our path, which a farmer had told us to take "all the way" to the next village, had suddenly ended. By Evan

I’d like to quickly jot down some thoughts here about our time in Inner Mongolia as I lay in the top bunk of a Mongolian guesthouse in Hohhot. First, and as always, I don’t know why I even bother forming expectations anymore, since they invariably turn out to be wrong. We chose our current route through the “autonomous region” with a few such expectations in mind: 1) we’d be able to avoid most of the terrible industry that blighted our last trip across northern China, 2) we’d spend time with a lot of Mongolians and experience one last cool culture on the way out, and 3) by virtue of 1 and 2, we’d be able to keep up the spirit of the trip and finish out our year on the highest possible note. We were especially anxious for the above after our time in Ningxia, which was a total washout. The place was scarcely more Hui Muslim than large parts of Gansu; it was more a bastion of scientific development, with its vast industrial parks along the Yellow River alternatingly spewing odors of lighter fluid and ammonia.

So you see, we had big expectations for the grasslands of Bayan Nur, a destination we chose specifically for chances to mingle with Mongolians (since it’s just south of Mongolia). The corridor leading from Yinchuan to Bayan Nur, however, was a bleak desert traversed by innumerable coal trucks. Our only consolation for this period was the company of our friend Pete, the company of the whisky Pete brought us, and camping every night in a new place (this may be the single thing I miss the most about the trip after it’s over). Our little whisky sipping sessions were abruptly ended at the fall of dusk nightly, as swarms of mosquitoes in amounts I had never imagined in my worst nightmares (made New Orleans summer nights look like child’s play) simultaneously began their sanguine assault

Finally we did break into the big green patch of Bayan Nur that we had spied on Google Earth, but again my expectations were to be dashed. A simple internet search or query of someone in the know would have revealed that the area has been majority Han for over a hundred years, and what might have been a scene similar to what we found on the Tibetan plateau in the time of Marco Polo is now effectively an exclave of the North China Plain. Thankfully, above National Highway 110, the area exemplified the best characteristics of North China: quaint, tightly clustered villages of earthen buildings and vast fields of grain and sunflowers cut by hundreds of winding dirt “grundle buster” trails from which, had we not asked directions every ten minutes, we might never have escaped.

Dave riding through one of the quaint old villages of Bayan Nur, by Evan

I’d like to make a cultural note here about the Chinese and their concept of directions. We Westerners appreciate precise instructions on which roads will take us from our present location to our destination, i.e. take this road, turn left at the first fork, continue until you get to a point where this road disappears momentarily, cross the bridge, reverse 180 degrees through a cornfield, turn right on the first road there, and go straight down the canal until you get there. In that same situation, a Chinese farmer is likely to wave his arm in the general direction of the destination (as the crow flies) and tell you, “take this road in this direction.” You can try and try to pry loose some other clues about what exact course to take, but 95% of the time, they will be unable to give instructions clearer than “just go that way!” repeated over and over. This is by no means an isolated event, as Chinese all over the country, other than truck drivers and cabbies, seem absolutely unable to express directions to a place they’ve been to a thousand times. My theory is that most of them have either never traveled too far from home or have never had to give road instructions to strangers before. It’s comparable to somebody who has never received a formal education trying o explain why the grammar of his language works the way it does. Usually the answer is simply, “because it sounds right.” Anyway, despite the directional impairments, it was a fun, bumpy day.

Nevertheless, along our entire trek through Inner Mongolia, we never once came upon a non-Han settlement, which was a huge disappointment. Again, if I had done any research at all, I would have known that the Han were resettled into these areas as early as the Qing Dynasty, and that most of the Mongolians, who make up less than 20% of the population of their “autonomous region,” live up in the northeast. This was doubly bad, since my patience for the Han has of late worn all the way through. As I said in my “personal reflections” post a while back, one of the worst parts of traveling through China as an OG (obvious gringo) is that everybody cheers and jeers at you as though you were a trained monkey. Many will talk about us openly right in front of us as they crowd around, and upon learning that we speak Chinese, many will mimic our words between peals of laughter, i.e. “oh ho, isn’t it cute, they’ve taught it to speak a few words! (several people have said things very very close to this)” Now when this happened before, we were either bright eyed/bushy tailed enough to power through it, or something alluring about their habitat or occupation compelled us to ask questions and get beneath the surface. Lately, however, the squalid conditions of most towns we pass and our general fatigue of dealing with LBX annoyance has just been overwhelming. Whenever possible, I pretend not to speak Chinese just to avoid having the same goddamn conversation with the same goddamn people every single day. The goal of our trip has been to commune with LBXes and learn their stories, but lately we’ve mostly been far too burned out to care.

The passage through Inner Mongolia did become brighter a few days ago when we finally entered the mountains west of Hohhot, where once again, geography has the upper hand on scientific development. The days were glorious, riding through rolling hills of grain and old villages of earthen houses. The villages, in fact, have been the most charming places we’ve seen in weeks, with the sad exception that most are in varying stages of ghost-town-ification (空村化), young people mostly absent from the scene. At the tail end of these mountains, just before Hohhot, Andy and I were on the cusp of what seemed like a potentially rewarding LBX encounter. Having just caught a ride on a blue truck to the top of a huge mountain, we came across two men and two women in their 60′s with bikes and matching red “Retired Persons of Hohhot Bike Touring Association” jerseys. I tried my darnedest to find out about where they go biking, or what their equipment is like, or what they think of biking at such an age, etc., but the conversation took a bizarre, although not entirely unexpected twist, something like this:

Me:     We rode out of Beijing 11.5 months ago and are about to return there. Here’s my card. [hand them USA-China Friendship Bicycling Team card]
Man:   Friendship between the US and China, that’s a very good thing!
Me:     Yes, it is. So where did you ride today? Was it hard?
Man:   Just to Wuchuan (50 km from Hohhot) and back, not hard. You know, if the US and China are friendly, the whole world will be at peace! We’re both great nations!
Me:     Sure sure, so do you ride often?
Man:   Hu Jintao and Obama! You know, we should explore space together!
Me:     What?
Man:   If our two great nations join together, we can explore other planets! Soon we’ll have such a population that we have to send people to other planets to live!
Me:     Other planets? We’re not doing such a good job with this planet right now. (I was terribly tempted to tell him how much of a shithole most of his autonomous region is, but he didn’t give me the chance)
Man:  Yes, other planets. The future will be great! We must continue our development, and we must be friends with the US!
Me:     Sure…

At this point I realized that this guy was talking the way farmers give directions and just gave up. I thanked the man and said it was a pleasure, at which point one of the women said, “that’s our team captain!” I shook his hand, saying “nice to meet you, team captain,” to which he replied, “serving the comrades! It’s nothing!” A piece down the road we caught up with all 10 or so of them and took the requisite 50 individual photos with them. Finally we were rewarded by a screaming descent from the mountains into the sprawling urban mess of Hohhot, yet another rude awakening.

Thankfully the day was saved last night after a delicious Uighur cooked dinner and beers in a bar where the keeper was Mongolian. After the rest of the crew retired, I hung out with my buddy, a 22 year old herdsman from the northeast who had an uncanny wealth of Asian history knowledge. We talked until dawn about statecraft, the role of climate in determining the politics of Asia, the long dominance and recent subjugation of the Mongolian people, Han encroachment, and their dissolving culture. At one point he devoted no less than an hour just talking about Genghis Khan. It was like stepping into a walk-in freezer on an August day in Baton Rouge to hear this uneducated sage talk, and I’m not just saying that because he gave me free beers all night!

Anyway, back to the subject at hand, Inner Mongolia has not at all been what I expected, but again, that’s because I based my expectations on the name of the region (which I more than anybody should know is a joke) and a big green spot in Google Earth, not actual research. That said, we could probably have done a better job getting into the culture here, but we’re just a little tired of the same thing over and over again. As I assume that the rest of our route, through the corner of Shanxi and northern Hebei, will be rehashes of the first leg of our trip, I fear that the best may be firmly behind us. Nevertheless, we’re going to power through the next 550 km, completing at least the physical goal of our circuit if not entirely reaching all our LBX goals. No matter what, I promise, for those who care, that there will be more posts coming, though probably after our arrival on the 13th, so stay tuned, and wish us luck on our last week! Good night to all!