No Melon Seed Cracking, No Smoking

No Melon Seed Cracking, No Smoking

These were the first words by way of announcement as we rolled out of Hohot on the way to Datong by bus during the next leg of our Inner Mongolia/Datong trip. ‘Melon seed cracking’ is the literal translation of 嗑瓜子, which refers to the eating of sunflower, pumpkin or other melon seeds after cracking them between the front teeth and skillfully grabbing the little prize with the tongue, something people frequently do while killing time for whatever reason, like a long bus ride. Most often people just spit the seeds out on the ground or wherever they happen to be. However, this was not going to be acceptable on this bus presumably because he who was making the announcement would be he would be cleaning up the piles of seed husks at the end of the trip.

The bus ticket from Hohot to Datong (大同), the home of the Yungang Buddhist grottoes, was 50 yuan or about $7 US for the 3 and a half hour trip. It's just the kind of trip I love—overland through eastern Inner Mongolia and then south into northern Shanxi (山西) province. Shanxi means ‘west of the mountains’ though there is hardly a place in China that is not east, west, north, or south of some mountains or others.

As we headed east—but also on the previous day above Hohot and in Xinxiang as well, I noticed that lots of tree planting has been going on in recent years. Many seem to have been planted just this spring and many othes are clearly only about 5 to 10 years old. Most are along road sides, in the dry gulches, or on the lower slopes of the low mountains we were winding through. Most were making it, but given the drought of the past 3 years some have not. Twenty years ago it seemed that very little tree planting was being done after the demise of communes, after which time everything was to be done only for immediate profit. Though the profit motive is more operative than ever, tree planting has made a come back probably for environmental reasons, and hopefully not too little too late. High on the bare brown mountain sides in a several places there were huge slogans spelled out in white stone, “Re-beautify the mountains and rivers.” Note the appropriate emphasis on Re-. At least a start is being made on doing something about these dry valleys and bare mountains. It's encouraging. I choose to be encouraged.

The 4-lane highway was incredibly crowded with truck traffic and very few private cars. The trucks carried mostly semi-finished goods like pipe, specialty steel products, light machinery, etc. License plates were virtually all local Inner Mongolian plates so there is almost no long distance hauling by truck as in the US. Thus, in spite of the loss of some land, the highways seem to be serving a better more regional purpose than they do in the US. Our driver was exceptionally aggressive. He laid on the loud horn constantly and it always sounded the same but the meaning did in fact vary. Sometimes it meant “Be careful because I'm passing you on the left” while other times it meant “Watch out because I'm passing you on the right shoulder” or perhaps “Here I come squeezing in between at 90 km/hr." or maybe "Get out of my way because I'm passing someone who's in the process of passing someone else.” Variations on a theme, as you can see. The right shoulder is in fact a passing lane or at least is used as such without hesitation. People have no qualms about passing vehicles that are themselves passing vehicles in the face of oncoming traffic. Amazingly it somehow all seems to work because everyone is operating by the same rule and accidents are in fact quite rare. That basic rule of the road is that driving here is an elaborate second-nature game of chicken.

In spite of the rather dry and somewhat bare countryside, the villages we rolled by seemed to be prosperous enough, well kept, and in a generally good state of repair. Fifteen years ago I wandered into rural villages like these in the northeast where homes had only dirt floors, not to say that there couldn't still be some like that here. As is typical, all the homes face southeast with their high back walls to the cold northwest wind and the courtyards and large windows welcoming the warm sun, which here does manage to get through the dust and minimal pollution. Villages varied in size from maybe less than a hundred to three or four hundred, but not so big as one would see in the far south, where more people can live per square mile due to year around agriculture. Some homes still had corn drying on the rooftops and in a few places further north farmers were still digging up potatoes. In this dry area there seemed to be little in the way of a second crop. The poplars in the valleys were getting quite yellow and reminded me a lot of northern Minnesota, but in that their beauty was comparable I wasn't homesick. To my joy and amazement, I even saw a couple of wild geese in flight.

In the fields with some regularity there were traditional mound burial sites, in some places quite elaborate with large round piles of soil and stones and even occasionally low concrete walls rather than the more modest oblong ones with a few flat stones in front. These were once strictly forbidden lest farm land be wasted on the dead, but even 20 years ago they were making a comeback.

In a couple of places I saw a few new Buddhist statues, in particular one maybe 20-meter new concrete lying Buddha with some new temple buildings going up around it. Clearly there has been some renewed interest in Buddhism, but new structures on this scale are still rare.

In this somewhat less developed area, I saw more donkeys than further south but also more milk cows. Maybe it could be said that as donkey labor decreases with mechanization cows are on the increase replacing old animal labor for cereal crops with new animal sources of protein.

Across the valleys parallel to our highway was a train bed with long trains passing every 20 minutes or so all heading west probably out of Shanxi coal country, maybe toward the Batou steel mills in central Inner Mongolia.

Fortunately, we managed to get an hour and a half into the trip before the DVD player came on at the front of the bus with loud syncopated pop song music videos sometimes accompanied by anime characters or else MTV style singers. There was even one disc of Cantonese songs, and all of them had karaoke lyrics at the bottom. Fortunately, no one started singing along.

Outside, in stark contrast to the DVDs, the wild geese and the yellow poplars around the villages made it clear that the quiet beauty and simplicity of the Chinese countryside hasn't been totally lost. Yet, near Datong a ceiling of grey daylight took over and spoke to the precariousness of country life as 5 huge coal-driven turbines and their accompanying stacks came into view, the center of a tangle of power lines heading off frantically in every direction to carry needed power but also noise and neon into every village and valley.