What to do in Erlian when you’re unable to get out
Hong Kong to UK by train: Day 7 continued
I spent the afternoon after my failure to negotiate the Erlian border crossing trying to forget about my predicament. There was nothing I could do but wait. I took a walk around Erlian town but found nothing but wide dusty roads stretching into the distance. The buildings were built big but seemingly oversize. It was a town of not much more than unpopulated space.
There was a park a straight twenty minute walk down the road from the train station, but when I reached it, it was in the process of being ripped up and I presume, re-landscaped. It looked like a building site. There was a new Nissan dealership that looked just opened. Balloons and banners were hanging proudly amongst the shiny new hatchbacks on the forecourt. But there were no customers around looking to buy these things and there were no dealers around looking to sell them.
I did, however, find another park on my walk back into town at the aptly named Dinosaur Square where I spent a pleasant few hours. The Erlian municipal council are obviously big dinosaur fans. There were statues of dinosaurs and sculptures of dinosaurs all over town. Quite why, I never found out. There was certainly no paleontological connection that I knew of. (Though I later found out that there kind of is). But the town needed livening up somehow. And who doesn’t love dinosaurs? The park seemed the only place in town where people could gather to spend a relaxing Sunday afternoon at their leisure. I took a seat next to the fountains to watch the local kids playing in the water, eating my grapes and taking photographs.
Some of those kids, when they reached the fountains, were stripping off their clothes in a frenzy. They couldn’t get undressed quickly enough to get amongst the spray and cool off from the day’s heat. Most of them just plunged in fully clothed without a care for visas, train schedules or the quickest way to get to Ulaanbaatar. They were just happy getting as soaked as possible and making sure everybody else around got just as soaked as them.
Later, as I explored the rest of the park, I got talking to a guy called Hogji, or rather, he got talking to me. He was Mongolian but worked in Hohhot as a translator for the Mongolians that came to China to trade there. He didn’t like Erlian and he didn’t like the Chinese. They treated Mongolians badly, he said. “We are not treated fairly here.” Though he did like English football, proceeding to list every team and every player he knew and thus, it seemed, liked. I sensed a conflict of interest when he told me he liked Man Utd and Liverpool, and though I tried to explain the errors of his ways with reference to his China-Mongolia problem, I thought it best not to press the issue or, as much as I wanted, force him to choose his favourite shade of red
I had imagined Erlian to be a slightly more modern version of the sort of border town seen in American Westerns – a single street of wooden shacks with a train station, saloon and sherrif’s office somewhere within sight. But though it was more substantial than I’d thought, at the same time, it seemed the town was dead. I began to think of it as a kind of purgatory through which the lucky ones were passing and the damned were here to stay, a place of transience in which no one ever quite belonged or wanted to belong, with roads that no one drove on and buildings which may or may not have served a purpose. I felt stranded on the banks of the Styx. I prayed that tomorrow I’d be gone, through the gates and crossing over.
