Reminscing on my trip to Inner Mongolia.

This is a bit of a nostaligic week for me. Looking back two years, this is the week I left China for the last time. I'm really happy here and house sitting gives us a chance to still do a few different things, travel and not feel bogged down and bored, but sometimes the old homesickness for China comes to visit for a while.

Before I left I had a trip to Inner Mongolia. I had so many places I wanted to visit in China, but you need years of travelling to see all the famous places, i'ts just not possible. But a trip to Inner Mongolia was on my list, so I did that just before I flew home.

This was one of the most interesting trips I made, partly because it was so different from the rest of China and because I planned to do a few unusual things. I took a three day bus tour which took me to the grasslands and then a day trip to the desert. I have ridden on an elephant in Thailand, and I had a hankering to ride a camel too.

The grasslands are just wide open spaces, with little habitation, but the amount of agriculture that goes on there is absolutely mind boggling. One bus ride of about five hours had vegetables growing as far as the eye could see, on both sides of the road, and considering they only have a few months of summer, they must have it down to a fine art.

I took this from the bus window and we were high up but this is sweet corn growing. These fields went as far as the eye could see. It is also one of the major potato growing areas for China. Even though the Chinese eat tons of rice, they also eat a lot of potatoes.

I went with a friend who had never seen such a clear sky. The skies in China itself are usually smoggy, especially in the cities. There were scenes there that got my creative juices flowing. The day after I got back I wrote this short story. It says it all really.

The silent grasslands.

Never had she heard such silence.  Never before had she been in such a wide open place, where the cold wind could wander at will, to go around or through you depending on its whim.  Never had she seen such a vast almost uninhabited land, with few people, no high rises, no buses, cars or motorbikes with horns a-honking.

 She stood in awe, neck straining back, eyes reflecting the myriads of stars in the sky.  Never had she seen such a clear sky.  She gazed at the edge of our galaxy displaying its splendour as it silently flowed from north to south, its white opaline dust almost within reach. This was the first time in her twenty eight years of life she had seen the Milky Way.

Never had she felt so small, so insignificant, such a little speck on this great big ball we call our home.  Never before had she felt such oneness with the earth, with the endless sky, and the emptiness of it all.

 For a young Chinese woman, used to living in what are called ‘small’ cities of perhaps two or three million people, the vast grasslands of Inner Mongolia were a wonderland of space.  The tall grass heads moved with a breeze unimpeded by endless blocks of tall apartments.  The air was clean, no smog, no fumes from hundreds of smelly old buses trundling by.  The water running beside the roadside was clear and pure, and out in the vast emptiness there was no light pollution to veil the stars from her gaze.

 She stood there in the late evening watching the moon rise over a bank of trees. She was outside the little Yurt, the local dwelling she would soon sleep in.  She stood thus for a long long time, quiet, absorbing the silence, opening her face to the wind, at peace.

 These are the little round Yurts where everyone on the bus tour stayed. They were not very big and had a bathroom at the back, pretty smelly in my case, the toilet didn't work properly.

I got up really early to take some pictures of dawn over the grasslands. It was very quiet and peaceful and very beautiful.