On leaving the station we were accosted by a short fat man with an incongruous white trilby. Grabbing my arm he kept saying “China, China” and he pulled us towards a small bus. He demanded 100 yuan which I paid, wondering what we were going to get for it. In fact the bus took us, after a few false starts when the bus returned to the train station for more passengers, through the Mongolian border and then through the Chinese border where the passport control lady was a bit surprised to see my visa in the old passport before it was changed for the new one. The bus took us to the border town of Erenhot and stopped opposite the Ay Khya hotel. All the other passengers paid 100 yuan, so we weren’t cheated, The hotel had an excellent room for 168 yuan (less than £20). We went a few doors away for a meal. I had an excellent Mongolia pizza while Jennifer chose badly and had a crap meal. Erenhot is in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, and all the names of shops and streets were written in Chinese and Mongolian. The only words of English that we saw were “public toilet”. Erenhot is a bit of a dump with long streets full of small shops selling just about everything. Surprisingly for China, there was a lot of rubbish about in the dusty streets. Most of the people are big fat men and equally fat women with charming children. One little girl, who was just 8 years old, came up to us and started speaking to us in perfect English.
Erenhot Main Street
Our hotel
Trading street
