China Travel 2.0

Everyone are looking for a wild and natural resort where they can have a wonderful experience. But very few people decide to go there, they are too familiar with the city life style. The Inner Mogolia desert is too wild to them. Jenny and her friends went there during the weekend, I hope her writing can give you some inspiration for escaping the crowded and busy city.

A Weekend in the Tengger
Jenny N. Crumbsey
Before that fateful weekend, there were two animals I was most skeptical of and found no personal relevance for whatsoever – camels, and chimpanzees. I made that clear from the beginning when I agreed to join the desert trip: I would not get close to a camel, let alone sit on one.

Putting a cap on a long workweek, exhausted but excited about the adventure ahead, our first destination on a Friday evening was the airport: we were bound for Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and then Inner Mongolia the next day. Having been too preoccupied with the arrangements and preparations for our spontaneous desert trip, we were admittedly rather uneducated about the exact location on the greater map of china, but on the roughly 2-hour flight, closely following our progress on the flight status monitor,
we had plenty of time to get our geography right.

The minute we stepped out of the Yinchuan airport and inhaled a completely new, different air, the tireds gave way to novelty: we were, already, tremendously glad that we had stepped out of our regular Beijing weekend routines. Our local guide, English speaking guide and driver wrapped us and our gear up into the van and
navigated the cheerful, bubbly foreign bunch to the hotel through an unsensational Yinchuan city. By the time we arrived we were beyond tired and once, with the assistance of the helpful hotel staff, we had managed to secure a little fridge for the cherishable food items we had brought along, the only desire left to satisfy was the short sleep indicated on our Travel schedule.

After a hearty Chinese breakfast at Chinese folk music and the nicotine fumes of the male Chinese hotel guests, we were on our way to the Alashan (Alxa) plateau.

Traversing the Yellow River, we followed a scraggy, scant industrial landscape until a fascinating mountainscape suddenly formed out of nowhere. We passed white flocks of sheep at the foot of a severely weathered section of the Great Wall as we crossed the border to Inner Mongolia, and then made our bumpy way to the edge of the Tengger desert.

This was where our desert daze began: the following two days, we shrieked and screamed our guts out (“Next time, I’m going with GUYS”, the male force in the group, Ping, commented) as we were catapulted up and down and tossed back and forth on daredevil jeep rides up and down sand dunes that seemed to transform and shift by the minute, climbed up sand dunes on foot, hung out on their peaks for a while and dug our toes into the sand and then slid back down again, took infinite frames of pictures of each other looking like sand monsters or terrorist
sleeper cells, collected loads of samples of the extremely fine grains of sand in every crevice of our being which also quickly sent our camera shutters into strike mode in protest, delighted over a camel that fell in love with Thuy, followed the busy scarabs around though they never took us anywhere specific, made sand angels, let our legs dangle in an ice-cold desert lake, circled around in dune buggies, raced each other on listless desert horses, cleared one water bottle after another, and learned the painful way why the nearby Mosquito Lake was named
Mosquito Lake.

We were lucky in that the sun was not at all an enemy on that overcast weekend and so the temperatures were very tolerable – but we constantly fought the persistent company of a sandstorm that at times would send the sand lashing against our cheeks with painful force – desert peeling, we called it – and whip up entire walls of sand.
Our base camp was a tasteful “eco” resort on the banks of Moon Lake, a stunning oasis amidst a sea of sand. The resort featured large bungalow homes as well as a little settlement of individual ghers that can be rented out for the night alongside a standard hotel with all that comes with a Chinese hotel, including a two-man keyboard-and-singer band in cheap Mongolian costumes over sweatpants and sneakers that would magically materialize whenever a jeep with new guests arrived. Aside from the occasional ensuing fake Mongolian welcome ritual, we
enjoyed the silence – and most of the time with great satisfaction the feeling that we were the only humans in the world.

As we were planning on camping out in tents, we never checked in but were still able to make full use of the hotel facilities. Our equipment, we stored in the hotel lobby – we would venture out onto our excursions and return to change our desert outfits, freshen up or gather provisions for a picnic at what quickly became our “Stammplatz” – a table at the lovingly constructed wooden terrace area from which we had an amazing view of the blue lake with waterbirds soaring above the thick green rows of reeds swaying in the wind and the image of camels striding by in line on the yellow desert horizon that transported us into a world far away from the China we knew. We not only discovered that Ping could take a nap anywhere
no matter how adverse the conditions, but that desert makes hungry – and eating became one of our favorite desert pastimes with “we haven’t eaten in a while” a frequent unanimously shared signal.
At the hotel and from the hotel, there are several accommodation and activity as well as excursion options for visitors, whether you are traveling with friends or with family, are an adrenaline-seeking extremist, an eager trekker, or simply looking for a scheherazadian backdrop to kick back to with a good book. There are numerous
tourist attractions to venture out to from here, but our time constraints and the unexpected harsh weather we encountered did not allow for a trip to Swan Lake, another popular destination, or the sacred Helan mountain.

Our night in the desert did not yield much sleep with winds ripping around the plain tents and sand showering down onto us, but our eyes expanded again with breakfast and the sight of the “Kamelknäuel” – the lump of camels huddled together joined by ropes attached to flocks of wood in their nostrils that were already waiting for us under the management of their master. The Sunday camel trek was the undisputed highlight of our two desert days. As we soaked in the
beguiling landscape in the rare windstill moments and gradually adapted to the rolling gait of the bactrian digitigrades, we acquired an appreciation for the large dark eyes, long eyelashes and wide cushion feet of the camels that carried us up and down and alongside the volatile dunes with amazing steadfastness and poise.

On the ascent of a particularly tricky high dune straight through an ugly strong windgust that blinded us for a moment, we heard a desperate call from the tail end of our little storm-defying caravan: “My camel! My camel!” It was a Katrin in distress, whose camel hadn’t been able to gain enough momentum to reach the peak of the dune trailing behind the others and had kneeled into the sand before it would sink in or slip. Under such an extraordinary circumstance, while
our camels were tackling a mean dune and we were fighting the sand in our eyes tightly gripping the saddles, Katrin had leaped off the camel as a preventive measure. Which is why we missed the good part – but we all had a sand-filled, albeit slightly worried, laugh about an anecdote we surely will not forget for a long time.

In the process of our camel encounters, I finally reconciled with the peculiar but admirable creatures that never complained and were so perfectly fit for such a misanthropic environment – true desert hovercrafts and indeed quite endearin characters.

“Now we just have to work on the chimpanzees, Jenny”, Katrin concludes as we, exhausted but brimming with all the excitement and adventure we could have dreamed of for one weekend, leaned back into the economy class seats on the plane back to Beijing to collect more sand from our heads, necks, noses and ears.

Jenny N. Crumbsey,the author

Have any inquires of a desert adventure trip? drop a mail to Winser Zhao.

Tags: camel, inner monglia, ningxia, tengger desert