Chapter 198

Distance covered: 219 km (total 4233 km)

Up around 7, after a long night of deep sleep. The girlfriend was already out and gave me some of the green tea she had just made. Breakfast consisted of fruit and leftovers from yesterday, then we got packing. We’re getting into a groove, splitting the tasks and being pretty efficient at setting up and taking down our camp.

We parked the car a bit further, by a cluster of farm houses that had a water hose we could use to refill our bottle of grey water. There were stairs on the hillside leading to the Great Wall, we walked up and then walked on an unrefurbished section of the wall all the way to a big round watch tower. Then we went to another watch tower a few hundred meters away, that one rebuilt in recent years. There was not a single person in the whole site, after a small group of tourist had left, which made it extra nice.

In the newer tower, there was a ladder that led to the top, and obviously our dog couldn’t follow. He ran in circles trying to find a way to get to where we were, and eventually threw himself in an arrowslit, which was really scary since on the other side was a serious drop and the stupid little animal would have fractured something for sure. During the whole visit, it was raining a light mist, which felt good in fact.

We got on the road and soon crossed a bridge over the Yellow River into Inner Mongolia. The road signs were now bilingual, with the vertical squiggles of the Mongolian language (the original Mongolian language; in Mongolia the country, they have adopted the Cyrillic alphabet). I drove for the first segment, and then the girlfriend took the wheel once we got to the highway. We soon arrived in Ordos, the most infamous of the “ghost cities” that made it to the western headlines a few years ago. It was built from scratch in the middle of the steppes a bit over 10 years ago, a dystopian-looking spread of enormous futuristic or Hitlerian looking buildings, four-lane boulevards and squares as big as soccer fields. It’s not quite completely empty, just that you get the sense that there should be way more people and cars around.

First we went to eat, starving like we were. The restaurant was vast but only had a few customers, and it’s not just because it was around 13:30 at that point. The decoration was mostly wood and big posters of Genghis Khan and his blood-thirsty descendents, and the bigger tables were under some kind of yurt. It’s weird to see such a genocidal maniac getting so much admiration, but the cunt really performed some impressive feats of conquerin’ and rapin’ and pillagin’ back in the 1200s, putting Mongolia on the map forever. Now, his country is an insignificant landlocked backwater and a significant portion of its territory has been annexed by China, its population assimilated and its culture either forgotten or turned into folklore, like in this restaurant and its waitresses wearing “traditional Mongolian clothing” despite being Han Chinese. The food was solid though, no complaints there: I ordered a yogurt, thinking it would be just a cup, but a whole pot came. We also had stir-fried broccoli (very traditional, I know), a pound of braised mutton, some thick square cold noodles and some pastries, one of them stuffed with onions and shredded meat called a huushuur that I ate every day on my trip to Mongolia in 2015.

We drove further in the city and parked in an unfenced lot by the huge grey customs building, I climbed the stairs and peeked inside, it was empty except rubble and dust and discarded propaganda posters. We were now just by the huge square and its gigantic statues, the coolest being of two horses standing on their back legs and facing one another, like in that Dothraki city in Game Of Thrones.

The square was empty aside from a group of middle-aged tourists in matching blue polo shirts who just came out of a bus. I really wonder how the trip to Ordos was sold to them, do they think of the place as more bizarre or more grandiose? I know some western tour companies like Young Pioneers (known for its trips to North Korea and other strange places) ran tours of Ordos, showing foreign tourists what overly ambitious urban planning is like, and indeed the place reminds me of Pyongyang and looks like how I imagine Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, to be. I can’t imagine those Chinese tourists are constantly told by their guide “Look! Hahaha! A completely empty five-star hotel! How quirky!” but they must see how odd Ordos in. And thinking about it, is it an example of success of failure to have such a decadently opulent city functioning with 10% of its intended population? Both could be argued.

I’m glad I came, but wasn’t much for sticking around too long. We made a small detour to a coffee shop where the girlfriend sated her addiction to sugary caffeinated stuff, and then we drove west. The empty boulevards looked even more empty and absurd when we were the only vehicle as far as the eye could see, and we also dealt with the clownish situation of waiting at red lights with no incoming traffic anywhere.

“Look! There are mengubaos there”, she said pointing at a cluster of yurts. We turned on a side road to check it out, it was a touristic camp of some sort, where one could rent a yurt for the night. It looked abandoned, but a man came and said that yeah, they’re open, but foreigners can’t stay there. Not that I was that interested, at 200 yuan a night it’s not completely unreasonable but if I’m gonna sleep in a yurt, I’d rather it be in the middle of the grasslands than bundled up in a parking lot like a Mongolian trailer park.

So we drove on and turned on another side road, which was brand new and snaked through cattle grazing grounds and fields. For a while, I thought I was driving through rural Quebec rather than China. Then the path narrowed and was just dirt, going through an alternance of rocky expanse, pine forests, shrubby desert and grassland. Amazing stuff. We parked at a place where I wouldn’t block traffic, and we recced the surroundings, deciding on a spot with a bit of shade but still nice views over a valley below and a ridge on the other side.

I read a bit of Isaac Asimov and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership and then we took a walk over to a stupa over the ridge. Once in a while we could hear a cow moo, and now we crossed paths with a herd walking slowly through the steppe and an old man on a dirt bike rounding them up. He was going in zig-zags, pushing a stray calf back to the herd, like the cowboy he is. We enjoyed an awesome view over the sunset in the west before going back to the camp and making dinner. I heated chick peas in a pan, we didn’t have oil so I improvised a bit and used the oil from a sardine can. The girlfriend ate her peas with ketchup packets, I mixed mine with the leftover yogurt from lunch.

Then I dug a shallow pit, gathered a bunch of wood, lit a fire and opened a bottle of red. The girlfriend commented how much Quebecers like to burn things, and how when we went there in the summer of 2018 we had campfires pretty much everywhere we went. “People there even BUY wood just to burn it!”, she commented, astonished. And... she’s right, it is a bit weird if you think about it for a second and a half. I imagine if a Chinese expatriate in a western country wrote a diary like mine, there would be a lot of observations about the culture being strange.