Day 29:

I'm on the sleeper bus to Beijing! It's pre-departure time. I must admit - the third class sleeper in Russia was foul, but this - this is ridiculous! What we've got here is a regular sized bus, stuffed with 24 bunks. And as you can expect, that makes for a sweaty, smelly, noisy affair. But it IS cheap - the twelve hour journey costs about twelve US bucks.

But oh... fuck... the guy behind me has the worst foot odor I've yet to encounter. It's so bad that I'm no longer sure that the cost savings are worth it.

Aw, fuck... this stench is overpowering... I can't concentrate enough to get my thoughts down on paper... maybe when the bus starts moving the air coming in from the windows will blow it away from me and I will be able to continue...

(later)

Okay. It's a little better now. We're still stationary, but the guy to the right of me just lit up a cigarette. His tobacco smell is overpowering the other guy's foot smell.

So. Back on topic. The train from Ulaanbaatar took about twenty-five hours to reach Hohhot, in China. As I mentioned before, Hohhot is the capital of Outer Mongolia, which is the name given to the ethnically Mongolian part of northern China. Curiously, there are more people of Mongolian descent here than in Mongolia proper.

Anyways, we arrived around 9:30 pm, and I set out with a couple of American travelers (Mika and his extraordinarily cute girlfriend Megan) to find a hotel. And it wasn't easy!

The touts outside of the train station pulled out the usual mob shtick to shuffle us into a place that would give them a good commission, but being in a group of three, it was easy enough for us to shrug them off. Eventually, though, unable to find the hotel that we wanted, we followed a non-threatening looking female tout to her "hotel." We followed her down the street... around some corners... into an apartment building... up some stairs... up some more stairs... down a hallway... up some stairs... onto the roof... back inside... up some more stairs....

Eventually we reached a door. The tout pounded on the door for a good five minutes before someone answered. The woman who answered the door looked rather tired, was wearing a VERY short mini-skirt and was holding the largest banana than any of us (the tout included, surely) had ever seen. Needless to say, we promptly left that place.

The three of us eventually spent the night in a grotty place across from the train station. We paid three bucks a piece for a pair of really disgusting rooms without showers.

Over dinner that night (Sichuan hot-pot with tofu and vegetables!) I found out that Megan and Mika were like me, fresh from a stint of teaching English in Korea. They had spent a year (ending this past February) working in Gwangju, which was pretty close to my old HQ of Suncheon. Pretty cool. We spent a few hours eating and drinking. I was made very happy; the combination of good food and good conversation is always a treat for the solo traveler.

The three us us puttered around Hohhot a bit this morning. Mika and Megan had to depart in the early afternoon, so I spent a few hours here by myself. We had all agreed that Hohhot was a pretty gross place, but once I managed to get far away from the train station, I found some nice sites. The museum here is pretty cool, actually. It has a great dinosaur exhibit, and some neat displays on traditional Mongolian culture. One sad note though: Mongolia was the stomping grounds of Roy Chapman Andrews (the famous archaeologist who inspired the character of Indiana Jones). He, and others, found loads of dinosaur bones and fossils in Mongolia. It strikes me as sad, though, that the Mongolian museums have such pathetic collections, and that all of the really compelling stuff has been sent abroad, and to China.

Anyhow, another highlight of Hohhot is a visit to the Muslim quarter. A few blocks in south-central Hohhot (near the mosque) are home to a plethora of buildings designed in a sort of Arabic style. This is also a great place to eat street food, and to scare up some tasty meat-less snacks.

I also managed to find Hohhot's sole McDonald's franchise. It's curious, but ever since I visited Shanghai last year, McDonald's has always seemed to me to be a rather Asian institution. Back home, we've got so many McDonald's stores - maybe one for every 100,000 residents. And they are all owned by upper-middle class franchise holders, and patronized by middle and working class people. Accordingly, McDonald's in Halifax is a dumpy sort of place. But in Asia, there is perhaps one for every million residents, and they are patronized by people who earn a decent wage. The Mickey D exists here as a sort of palace of capitalism - a shining, glimmering, beckoning palace surrounded by a sea of grungy communism and menacing poverty.

Fuck! Enough!