Country Driving [38]
“You should go up there and get a picture of those truckers,” Goettig said.
“You should get a picture,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere near those guys.”
At last, here on the unmarked Mongolian plains, we had crossed the shadowy line that divides Strange from Stupid. There was no sign of police or traffic control, so Goettig and I watched the flares for a while and then turned around. This time the Sinomaps came through—I leafed through the book and found a back route to Hohhot. The moment we arrived, the City Special celebrated by breaking down. The vehicle wouldn’t start, and finally I called Mr. Wang at Capital Motors. “No problem!” he said. “We can come get you.”
“Umm, I don’t think that’s possible,” I said.
“Where are you?” he said.
“In Hohhot.”
“Where?”
“Hohhot. The capital of Inner Mongolia.”
“Waah!” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “All the way to Hohhot! Not bad!”
As always, Mr. Wang took everything in stride. He told me to find a mechanic, do whatever was necessary, and save the receipt. Goettig planned to catch a train out of Hohhot, but he hung around long enough to help get the City Special working. We push-started the Jeep and drove it to a garage, where they replaced the starter for a little more than a hundred bucks. The mechanic chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarettes the whole time he worked on the engine, but after Highway 110 it seemed as harmless as a sparkler on the Fourth of July.
WHEN THE CITY SPECIAL returned to working order, and the weather improved, I finally found the walls again. There were plenty of them out here—of all the places I’d been, Inner Mongolia most belied the singular nature of the term Great Wall. On my first journey I had followed the Ming wall along the southern border, and now I drove nearly two hundred miles northward to another barrier. It was over eight hundred years old, dating to the Jurchen Jin dynasty, and the thing was so weathered that it had faded into the steppes: a long grass-covered bump, thirty feet wide and three feet tall, heading straight as an arrow to the horizon. I couldn’t have found it without a local resident, who sat in the passenger’s seat and directed me across a stretch of grassland. After he told me to stop, and we got out of the City Special, I realized that I had parked atop the relic itself. “It’s not a problem,” the man said. “They just don’t want people to drive on it for long distances.” Another hundred miles to the west, outside the city of Baotou, I stopped at a barrier that dated to the Warring States period, which had ended in 221 BC. It was the oldest wall I ever saw—after more than twenty-two centuries the structure was still impressive, as tall as a man and visible for miles.
In this featureless landscape the barriers seemed quixotic, the markings of lost empires that had vanished into the steppes. Even modern buildings looked temporary, especially in the north, where sheepherders’ shacks were constructed with their backs to the northwest, because of the relentless wind. They were low structures, crouching behind curved walls of mud that had been designed to shed the grit that blows off the Gobi Desert. Apart from herdsmen, few people live in this region, and there are almost no shops. One afternoon I drove for a hundred miles, and the sole indication of commerce was a hunchbacked shack with a lonely sign in front. It advertised an Inner Mongolian two-for-one: “Car Repair/Medical Clinic.”
The biggest city in Inner Mongolia is Baotou, and the sudden size of the place, surrounded by empty steppe, feels surreal.