Travelogue: Returning to Hulunbuir

The first time I went to Hulunbuir was after graduating from high school. Back then, Mr. Jin led a group of us seventeen and eighteen year-old kids from Sanhe straight into the heart of the grasslands. Looking back, it was a very special thing. At the time I was just a kid, wet behind the ears, with a layer of late-adolescent oil all over my face, every pore shouting to welcome a new life. I didn't care whether I was ready or not; I was just enjoying following time as it moved forward, and the first stop was the grasslands: strong, vast, green, full of suddenness and bitterness, and yet somewhere I had never been before.

A full nine years have passed since then. I have been like a horse, occasionally looking around and neighing, but mostly with my head down, chewing on the mixed flavors of life. I have rushed about everywhere, I have lost myself in the dust of the road, I have worn myself out. I thought, there should be a strong voice now: go back and have a look.

To call it "going back," as if returning home, doesn't really make sense, since I didn't grow up on the grasslands. To call it a "voice" isn't really grounded either; it was nothing more than a planned trip, and c just wanted to go somewhere she hadn't been. All of this was simply happening as a matter of course. Maybe there are many things you can't really savor in the moment: it took me another year before I wrote this piece, and I realized that, facing the steady, silent flow of time, I can no longer use words like "enjoy."

But the trip itself was still a pleasant one.

One afternoon we flew from Beijing to Manzhouli, and by the time we landed, night had already fallen. After we got through the PCR test, the pandemic information forms, and a series of other procedures at the airport exit, we had officially arrived. There had just been a light rain, with a gentle breeze and the moist smell of grass everywhere. The few mammoth statues at the entrance of Manzhouli Airport, too, lent the place a cool atmosphere so different from Beijing's. Ah! It was as if I had run into an old friend after many years apart. I wanted to say something but kept stopping short. I was thrilled by the surprise of the reunion, and shy about asking after all those unfamiliar changes that seemed to have been there for so long...

But it had already grown too late, so c and I had no choice but to take a cab to the hotel, letting our tangled feelings disperse, the whole way there, into this vast sky and earth.

c, at Manzhouli Airport

Manzhouli

Maybe because it had rained the night before, the next day's weather was quite nice. Standing under the kind of "blue skies and white clouds" you rarely see in Beijing, we were both full of anticipation for what was to come.

The first scenic spot on our itinerary was the Manzhouli National Gate. Even though it's the National Gate, it's actually not far from town, since this little county sits on the border to begin with... There's a viewing tower at the National Gate site, and from the platform at the top you can see, far across the way, the small Russian town on the other side. Thinking about it now, the viewing platform didn't really offer much in the way of entertainment, but the endless green, the huge clouds, and the strange architecture still made a huge visual impact on us, who had been living in the city for so long. By that point I had already forgotten about everything else, busy only with pressing the shutter and switching lenses back and forth. "Look!" I said to c. "It looks great over there! Matryoshka Square! Oh, and over here too! There's a railway down by the National Gate! It looks like a train is coming..."

National Gate

After coming down from the tower, you can also visit the National Gate up close and step inside. There isn't much to see in there, just some historical displays, an old-fashioned souvenir shop, and not-so-clean glass windows. We made a quick loop through it and headed out of the area, ready to wander around the city.

Manzhouli is fairly easy to get around: walking, bus, or cab, take your pick. Since we had no real destination, we chose "on foot." Manzhouli's main streets are clean and wide, lined with buildings that look a bit forlorn. I'm partial to this kind of quiet, so I could ignore my tiredness and search out all sorts of "happy surprises": clouds far in the distance, woods a little closer, and closer still, everything that the cosmos flowers made look plain and lovable. Even though c and I were walking the same route, the scenery in her eyes didn't fully overlap with mine. Sharing with each other, waiting for each other, we spent a long time on that short stretch of road.

A Little House, Name Unknown

Dinner was Russian food, and the after-dinner dessert was the small Beihu Park not far away.

Beihu Park, as the name suggests, is a park built around a lake on the north side, and it looks like a place where the city's residents go to walk and rest. It isn't large, but it feels delicate and refined, the kind of place that can't help but make you imagine a few lovely stories that may once have happened there. The surface of the lake reflected a blue and white even clearer than the sky, with the occasional duck swimming by, a natural accent of color and space. We were taken with it, but didn't dare linger too long, afraid of disturbing the quiet scene as it was held in others' eyes.

Beihu Park

The day ended at Sino-Soviet Golden Street. The "Golden" isn't just figurative; after dark the place really does turn golden. Walking through it at night, you can't help but feel a bit like you're in a foreign country. c and I walked the loop from east to west, then from south to north. Maybe because of the pandemic policies, the street wasn't all that lively, just a few scattered fruit and barbecue stalls, so apart from the golden lights, there wasn't much that really drew us in. We had walked a lot that day and were already tired, so we decided to head back to rest, and head for the next destination the following day.

Hailar

After lunch at Nuomintala Milk Tea Shop (the pot tea and the meat are excellent, highly recommended), we packed our bags and went to the station to catch a train. Passing through Zhalainuoer and Huhenuoer along the way, we followed the Hailar River and reached downtown Hailar. For me this was an overly familiar route, because when I first came here years ago, I was traveling along the same path in reverse. Hailar is the central city of Hulunbuir, and the best transit hub for going anywhere else in Hulunbuir (the prefecture of Hulunbuir is enormous, roughly the size of Shandong and Jiangsu provinces combined), so in a sense it was a place we had to pass through, and our later itinerary really did all radiate out from Hailar.

But we didn't have much of an itinerary in downtown Hailar. We stayed there for three days, mostly just enjoying the leisure of having escaped Beijing. The only two places we went that you could really call attractions were probably Genghis Khan Square and Hailar National Forest Park.

Genghis Khan Square sits right in the heart of downtown, not far from the hotel we were staying at, so it became our after-meal walking spot every day. I vaguely remember that the first stop on my last visit to Hulunbuir was here too, except that it was already late at night, and my phone wasn't very good at low-light photography, so I can't recall too many details. Coming back this time, I went around the square several times. Honestly, there isn't much to see in the way of scenery, but there are plenty of all kinds of people: people singing, people dancing, people doing nothing at all. c and I had a great time there too, probably because this is where the city's "buzz" gathers.

The first time the two of us came to Genghis Khan Square was on the evening we arrived in Hailar. The temperature wasn't too high, and we caught a beautiful sunset of burning clouds. After that we came back on a stuffy night, came at noon under the blazing sun, came on the way back from PCR testing at the hospital across the street, and passed by it in a cab on the way back to the hotel from somewhere else... I think you probably need a few different angles before you can really get to know what's right in front of you. Through this, c and I both seemed to be imagining, without saying so, the small daily life of settling down in Hailar. We strolled slowly along the river, bought cheap fruit from the roadside stalls, casually had dinner at little hole-in-the-wall places... Maybe, in a modern society where everything moves so fast, making up a few days of slow living for yourself counts as one of the meanings of travel.

c Doing the Square Dance at Genghis Khan Square

As for our trip to Hailar National Forest Park, it was spent under the blazing sun and besieged by mosquitoes. I don't know much about different kinds of trees, so the most fun thing turned out to be riding a tandem bicycle... There's also a small zoo inside the forest park, with a few free-range lambs, but there's not much more to say about it.

Bird Tree House, Hailar National Forest Park

Ergun

After taking in the leisurely feel of Hailar, we took a bus to Ergun on a rainy morning.

I had been to Ergun before too, but right up until the bus reached its final stop, the Labudalin Bus Station, this little county itself was still full of unknowns to me. c and I held up our umbrellas and followed the map on our phones to the hotel, then ordered takeout and rested for a bit. The rain stopped in the afternoon, so we went out walking again.

To be honest, the streets here are no different from any traditional new town in the north: ordinary schools, ordinary construction sites, ordinary shops, ordinary residential areas. Rather than feeling like a settlement on the edge of some magnificent wetland, it felt more like a leisurely walk near your own rural hometown. A little farther out, all you get is chickens crowing and dogs barking, fences and hedges. The most obvious difference is probably that the houses here often have a layer of wood wrapped around the outside.

A Little Home by the Road, Ergun

But this impression was quickly broken the next day, when we got to the wetland scenic area. Even though I had finally returned for a second time to a place that had once moved me so much, I couldn't, for the life of me, come up with anything to say about it. All those things like lamenting the seasons or composing poetry, I had forgotten them entirely. All my eyes could see were the magnificent scenery and the rich colors, and it was as if time had been compressed; if anything, the strong wind only set off the rolling lines of the distant land as a quiet flow or a thick, viscous motion. I aimed in two opposite directions and took two panoramas with my telephoto lens.

Looking South, Ergun Wetland Scenic Area

Looking North, Ergun Wetland Scenic Area

But after the trip, I gave it some careful thought too: if I hadn't been holding a camera then, or if I hadn't been treating photography as one of the main goals, would I still have temporarily forgotten about all those things? What would I have thought, said, or written down? I think I've probably changed a lot without realizing it. Just like how the title track of Hanggai's album Back to You is called "Visit," now, a year later, looking at these two photos again, I can actually pick up on a kind of strangeness I had been blind to at the time.

That night we wandered the county town again. Following the map, I found a small "Khasar Square" (Khasar was Genghis Khan's younger brother). After the surrounding buildings turned off their lights one by one as the night went on, you could see plenty of stars from there, so I quickly called c over and we took a few shots together with the tripod. Unfortunately neither of us had much experience, and we didn't end up with any especially good photos of the stars, but being able to see them, to photograph them (and to fool around on an empty patch with no one else there) was already enough to make us happy.

Beginner's Stars at Khasar Square

Our itinerary for the third day in Ergun also began from here. We had realized that this little square sat right in the center of the county town, and very close to the PCR testing site... And since we didn't have a car, we had to take our chances and try to flag down a cab to our next destination: Ergun National Wetland Park. This wetland park is said to be newly built. Unlike the older wetland scenic area, it's very large and far from the city, so the only way to get there and back is by car. We had originally planned that if transportation was really too inconvenient, we'd skip it and just take a public bus straight back to Hailar. Luckily we managed to get a cab in the end, and as a result we picked up plenty of nice surprises.

Compared to the older wetland scenic area, Ergun National Wetland Park is more like a scenic spot in the traditional sense: there are shuttle cars taking visitors around inside the park, some walking routes, mountains, water, all kinds of strange amusement attractions, and some animals in pens. It looks like it isn't fully built yet, but thankfully the scenery is good, and the air is clean and humid enough. While we were climbing the mountain, I heard a guide from another tour group say: "This is where the Ergun wetland meets the Greater Khingan Range." That instantly piqued my interest, and I really wanted to see what the Greater Khingan Range, which I had heard so much about in textbooks since childhood, actually looked like. Of course, in the end I didn't really make much of it; I just looked all around and took a lot of pictures.

c, on the Wetland Side of Ergun National Wetland Park

After that, we missed the last bus back to Hailar, so we decided to take a cab instead. While passing through Chen Barag Banner, we saw an unbelievably bright red sunset. That sight was really hard to put into words. It even made me start marveling at how everything that day had come together by chance. How lucky I am! Who knew the grasslands had colors this passionate!

Sunset in Chen Barag Banner

Coda

So we were back in Hailar. By then nearly a week of the trip had gone by, and my mood had gradually softened. The trip was slowly turning from a kind of reminiscing or seeking-the-way pursuit into a traveler's pleasure and enjoyment. New experiences were slowly filling me up. Over those days, whether it was the scenery, the food, or the people and things I had come across along the way, all of it made me feel at ease, and I had a slightly self-satisfied sense of finding the right path after going astray. But as for c, she still hadn't experienced the most classic kind of grassland scene, so we set our last stop at Huhenuoer, not far from the city.

Calling Huhenuoer a scenic area is a bit of a stretch; really it's just a large fenced-off stretch of grassland by the water, with a few free-range lambs, quite a few horses and camels tied up, and all sorts of amusement facilities. It was very windy that day, but we still had a great time, going through all the "grassland clichés" one by one: horseback riding, archery, lying down on the grass for a nap. Maybe this counts as a pure, simple kind of happiness: idly scanning the half-green, half-yellow grasslands, smiling at each other with your girlfriend, gazing out at the far edges beyond the far edges, occasionally lifting the camera for a few shots when you spot a good composition. Spending a few hours like this without needing to think probably counts as something rare and precious!

A Staff Member at Huhenuoer Scenic Area, with His Camel

c Fiddling with Her Little Camera

As this last part of the trip ended and we were heading back to downtown Hailar, as if Hulunbuir were determined to round out our experience of the scenery, it gave us another surprise: we passed by the Hailar River, the deep blue Hailar River, with the season, the time, and the light all just right. Unlike the frightful wind, the Hailar River looked gradual and slow, and I had never seen a blue like this: pure, intensely overpowering, impossible to gauge in depth, a blue that makes you feel ashamed to wax poetic about it. The water was steady, but on closer inspection it felt full of hidden force, as if the ripples were the ones dragging the wild wind forward...

Hailar River

After the Coda

After that came eating and drinking, casual strolling, buying some souvenirs, and one more loop around Genghis Khan Square. We slept, woke up, and took a cab to the airport.

Honestly, I didn't have much on my mind on the flight back to Beijing, and I didn't talk to c much. I was just thinking about all the work I needed to deal with once I got back. As for this whole "Returning to Hulunbuir" thing, there didn't seem to be much left worth asking about... When I was young, I read an essay that told the story of a man and how things and people had changed over a span of ten years. Back then I thought, that's interesting; isn't writing so heavily about the two endpoints really just a deliberate denial of this person's life across the ten years in between? Now I have a bit more to add: I hope I can look evenly at the today, tomorrow, and day-after-tomorrow of the rest of my life, so that the next time the thought of "remembering ten years" comes, it might come a little more gently.