Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
retrieved the stove from the bottom of my pack, banged it on a rock and gave it a
thorough clean. I pumped up the pressure bottle then struck a match.
It burst into life with a spectacular two-metre high blast of flame. But amaz-
ingly, rather than simply exploding and killing us both, as I was expecting it to, the
flame soon settled down to its usual belching. It wasn't functioning as the manu-
facturer had intended by a long shot, but at least it produced enough heat to cook a
good-sized meal.
The next couple of days flashed by in a blur, characterised by perishingly cold
mornings, long days of riding along the bitumen and the helpless feeling of being
almost completely without language. People in cars would stop to talk to us, and
we'd stop in villages and small towns, but we could only sit in silence as friendly
crowds full of eager questions gathered around. At first we were unable to com-
municate at all. It was only after a few days, when we'd worked out the words for
Moscow and Beijing, that we were even able to tell people where we'd come from.
It was some time before we learned how to pronounce the word for Australia! Be-
fore that, I guess, people had assumed we were Americans.
A noticeable feature was the lifelessness of the countryside. Physically, the
whole of Chinese Inner Mongolia looked exactly the same as the flat, dry desert
of Southern Mongolia. Culturally - although separated by only a 100 kilometres
and a fence - the two places were worlds apart. In Mongolia white
gers
dotted the
horizon and herds of camels and horses ran free. Here the nomads' homes were
replaced by orderly cottages, and the only animals we saw were shaggy goats and
sheep, penned behind rows of fences. We had scarcely seen a fence in all of Mon-
golia, yet here they were everywhere. The wild young men on horseback were now
wrinkled farmers, putting along the road on loud, smelly, three-wheeled mini-tract-
ors; the challenge of the endless sandy tracks had disappeared. Many of the people
in the two Mongolias were related yet there was no sense of Mongolia's wild, un-
tamed freedom here. Inner Mongolia felt lifeless and constrained.
The towns, on the other hand, were something different again. Their life and
vibrancy was a stark contrast to the countryside. I found myself looking forward
to reaching each new dot on the map in the same way that I'd longed only for
the empty desert a few weeks before. The people seemed diligent and invariably
friendly, and the bustling capitalism of the tightly packed shops gave me a reassur-
ing sense of security that had been missing for most of the past year.
We stopped in a large town about 140 kilometres from Erienhot and began
eagerly scanning the shops for one that might sell hot food. We parked our bikes
