Don't mess with the mountains of Mongolland....

DECEMBER 1, 2007: Welcome to coal country in winter. Most of the countryside here in north-central China is cloaked in thick brown smoke at least 20 hours a day. Locals like to claim it's "humidity" but the clear air in the few places where there are no people is all the evidence i need (aside from the fact that it's obviously smoke). Photos from Shanxi and Shaanxi

The blanket will hang around for about the next 4 months, given it's now sub-zero day and night and practically everybody burns coal to stay alive. If the Yellow River is the giver and taker of life elsewhere, coal is the giver and taker of life in north-central China. The roads here are so dominated by coal trucks that some poor souls manage to stay warm by walking along the road and collecting the small pieces they drop. The plants close to the road live and die in coal dust and the roads leading to and from the mines are coal dust roads. And have you ever been stopped at a railway crossing for 5 minutes by one of those endlessly long trains? When we crossed from Shaanxi Province into Shanxi Province (yes, two different provinces, same pronunciation in English) we had to navigate around a nose-to-tail traffic jam of giant coal trucks the right lane of the highway that stretched over 20km back from the border. I am not exaggerating - nose-to-tail, more than 20km long, and only very occasionally moving, crawling, a few metres forward. There's a whole economy based on this permanent coal-and-metal snake, the result of a requirement that each truck be weighed before it crosses a bridge at the border.


The coal has even managed to give me a "makeover" in its own image. Day after day, i have looked in a mirror and was shocked to see an eyeshadow-clad emo staring back. Not only that, i've been waking up in the morning with black nuggets of reconstituted coal in the corners of my eyes instead of sleep.

Speaking of which, in Fugu, or "Prefecture of Grain" (where not a grain of grain is to be seen, only coal) i awoke in the middle of the night convinced that the hotel would burn down. This outrageous premonition, however, was immediately supported by a terrifying raft of evidence. The place was very warm and very cramped. Our tiny room was surrounded by 5 or 6 others. Through the paper thin - combustible - walls (effective at stopping noise like a sieve stops water) came a regular clicking of lighters. I had looked into most of the other rooms - cupboards would be a more apt description - and none had any furniture other than beds. So people all around were definitely smoking in bed. One exit. No fire alarms. And then the clincher: i went to the toilet downstairs near the exit...the only exit...and found it blocked by a steel door, padlocked shut. Average, China.

In truth, compared to the supposedly dirt-poor places we've been before, this part of China has little respect for average lives. Despite being relatively rich statistically - due mainly to coal - people here live, work and breathe in filth. While in Gansu and Ningxia most people have their own walled compound (country) or Soviet apartment (city), people here live mostly in hillside grottoes (country) or stinking, crumbling alleys (town and city).


The area is full of historical relics and many towns and villages have ancient city walls either within or nearby. People often make their homes in them:



Datong ("Big Alike") is a big, big city with more than its fair share of palacial hotels and black Audis. But off any of the flashy main streets you find squalor - even right in the centre centre.

Since obtaining the peasant truck there's been less excuse to divert from the original brief of taking the closest road to the Great Wall. So what happens when you follow such a ridiculous idea too closely?

Around here the Wall marks the border of Inner Mongolia, the large chunk of what was traditionally Mongolia that China now rules. (The Mongols can't complain of course, having taken over China a few centuries ago.) As usual, my two maps of the area didn't agree on which roads did and didn't exist. So when i pulled out the map of Inner Mongolia and saw a nice, straight road running right alongside the Wall for 50km, it was clearly the time for a Mongolian adventure.

It started well: the road was new and flat. But after about 10km we were heading in the wrong direction so i asked a peasant for directions. He sent me back where we'd came, looking for a turn-off we hadn't seen just past a bridge we hadn't seen. With help from another peasant we eventually identified the turn-off, a rough, rough sandy track that led us quickly into the most picturesque rural setting i've ever seen - ploughed-up fields everywhere, chickens, ducks, pigs rummaging through rubbish piles, tethered sheep, chained dogs, donkeys with carts moping next to mud and straw walls while peasants thresh corn or dig holes or warm their hands on wood fires. It's all a big mocking irony of the Wall: the land outside it is noticeably better than inside. It probably has a lot to do with the large population it protected.

Anyway, as i said, the map indicated one long, straight road. What we found, in this agrarian fairyland, was a very large number of very similar-looking roads criss-crossing one another. And "villages" here (and in China proper) are not singular dots as they are marked on the map but usually are several groups of houses spread around a valley or over a hill so you never know when you've reached the next dot. This was, to begin with, a mere annoyance: ask another peasant "Are we here yet? Is it left? Or right?" Right, they tell you, but the road looks suspect. It's slightly smaller than the one you're on, has no recent tyre tracks, and cuts between two fields. You follow it anyhow but it simply takes you into a small leafless forest and fades away after 5 minutes so you turn around and go back and you want to shake your fist at the peasant but as you drive past her she asks you if you've seen her sheep. The question is so quaint that it melts your heart and you smile and tell her no, you haven't seen any sheep up that way.

More and more wrong turns precede more and more consultations with bemused peasants. Eventually, by a process tantamount to trial and error, you're alone again, climbing a grassy mountain and you hope there are no more junctions ahead. But there are and you waste time exploring several more dead ends. The day wears on and by 4.30 the sun is setting and you're on top of a mountain and you still have, you guess, 10km to the nearest proper road. Then, after an unbelievably rocky stretch, a peasant tells you you're going the right way and you spot a blue 3-wheeled truck ahead and "Ah," you think because it's the first one you've seen since this little adventure began, "we'll follow him all the way to the highway." And after about 15 minutes he takes a strange turn, left a crossroads, ("i thought we were on the right track"), and you follow him anyway, waving to try to get his attention to ask him where he's going but he's in front of you and doesn't see you or doesn't want to stop and instead keeps going faster which puts a lot of dust in your eyes. Eventually 2 guys coming the opposite way on a motorbike set you straight - back the way you came and go straight where the blue truck turned left. Now you're getting anxious with darkness closing in and you're thrashing the shit out of your fragile little 3-wheel scooter/truck and poor Boxxy in the back howls as she is flung against the side of the truck with every painful bump on the rough rough road while you think about how royally a mechanical failure would fuck you up, here atop a mountain where? in Mongolia but precisely, you don't know and it's getting very very cold. You've gotten a few hundred metres past the crossroads when you come across another village but this time there's more than the usual loose dogs to worry about. The villagers are in the process of building a kind of drainage or irrigation ditch, right across the road. The thought flashes through your mind that the last remaining untried direction at the crossroads might be some kind of detour or ring-road around this tiny village or part of a village. No way, you think, and frantically seek a villager to set you straight for what must be the 15th time. "You can't get across", he says. "Can i carry it across?" you reply rhetorically and he stays out to help you. You're just about to attempt this when he suddenly remembers he has wooden planks inside and goes and gets them for you and you get across with your wheeled vehicle only falling into the ditch once. Evidently not too many "wheeled vehicles" pass through here. And 20 minutes later you make one final wrong turn, based on nothing but a whim. And it turns out to be a shortcut, and you've found the highway and you will live tonight.

(But not before a one-hour ride at 50km/h in -10 degrees which equates to -22 degrees with wind chill and leaves you with no option, you feel, but to shriek classic popular songs out at the top of your voice in both volume and pitch. It genuinely warms you a bit.)