China and Mongolia: A tale of two prairies

The train from Hohhot to Ulaanbaatar takes more than 36 hours but about 16 of that is spent not moving, either in the Chinese border town of Erlian or, on the Mongolian side of the border, Zamyn Uud. Erlian was pretty dominated by shops for Mongolians coming over the border to buy stuff cheap. Most of the town looked like this:

There was, however, a cool park full of dinosaur statues; according to the inscription on the base of the first statue, Erlian is the “Hometown of Dinosaurs.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia have been the site of lots of dinosaur skeleton finds:

Because the border stop was during the middle of the day, and the time we were actually moving was mostly during the night, we barely got to see the countryside, only as we were traveling across the border. And it was remarkable how much the scenery changed. So much of China’s landscape is altered, even in Inner Mongolia which is famous for its grasslands. This is the main tourism draw there (for Chinese tourists; there are very few foreign tourists there) but, as I saw in Xinjiang, China seems hellbent on destroying whatever it has that’s unique, then replacing it with a cheap substitute packaged for tourists. Most of the prairie I saw in Inner Mongolia was altered in some way. (Why Chinese tourists like this, I have no idea, but judging from the number I saw both in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, they don’t seem to mind.)

Here’s the view from the Genghis Khan Mausoleum, for example. According to legend, Genghis Khan passed through here and decided that he wanted to be buried here. But it’s been so developed over the last few years that it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like in his time:

And the contrast between the two sides of the border was hard to ignore. On the Chinese side of this border there was a road, a perfect row of trees (it seems like most trees you see in China are in a row) and some guys building a berm alongside the tracks. On the Mongolian side, nothing:

(You can kind of see the fence to the right of the photo; that marks the border.)

In Zamyn Uud, on the Mongolian side, I went to dinner with a Chinese guy on the train, “Steve,” who spoke pretty good English. It was his first time out of China and he pronounced Mongolia, at first glance, “kind of broken,” which is true. The area around the train station was a little rough, the pavement was broken and the buildings in bad shape. The plaza in front of the station was full of open-air pool tables with rough-looking guys playing. I bought a SIM card for my cell phone from a guy in a cart and it was used. He said the restaurant seemed “western.” I asked him why, and he said it was because it had a few paintings of nature scenes and horses on the wall, and it made me realize how thoroughly Chinese everything in China is. In Hohhot, a city of more than a million people, I walked around a lot and saw no non-Chinese restaurants other than a handful of McDonalds and KFCs and a couple pizza places. And in those Chinese restaurants, try ordering a Coke (to take a small example). The first restaurant I ate at in Ulaanbaatar, a fast food place where everyone was a local but me, had several Mongolian dishes but also Russian solyanka, Korean kimchi, Turkish kavarma, some thing called azu that is apparently Armenian, and cheeseburgers.

So far Ulaanbaatar is cool, and I’ll wait a while before digesting my impressions. But one of the most striking things: compared to Chinese people, who are possibly the frumpiest in the world, Mongolians have a bit more flamboyant style. The women dress, let’s say, somewhat more “Russian,” while among guys polo shirts with popped collars are alarmingly ubiquitous. It’s like Georgetown on the steppe here. More soon…