Ten years ago Hu Jun, Lin’s cousin, was motorbiking through the border area between Hebei province and Inner Mongolia along with two of his friends. This area is a raised plateau (about 1900m high) of grasslands spotted by villages, and the population is partly Chinese and partly Mongolian. They had looked for a place to spend the night and ended up at a house belonging to a poor family which doubled as a guesthouse, where they were given food and a place to sleep. The next day, before leaving, they each handed the family 2 yuan (a modest sum) for their expenses, which the family refused to accept. Hu Jun and his friends thought that they had offended with too small an amount, but the family was stubbornly refusing the money and it was too late to try and give more. As they left the house and passed through the village center, they found all the villagers assembled and coming towards them. This scared them, as they had thought the villagers had gotten together to beat them up for not paying money for their stay, but as it turned out the villagers had simply assembled to “send them off” and wish them farewell.

Ten years later Hu Jun, Lin and I arrived to the same small village. Hu Jun had, since the first visit, been there several time and they had immediately recognized him and warmly welcomed us. During these last ten years local tourism has risen and the family had profited from it along with the rest, and had erected a new building housing several small guest rooms. Each room consists of a large (about king-sized) bed which is meant for four people, with not much room for anything else.

The beds themselves are quite unique (in my opinion): Each bed is hollow and actually serves as a sort of furnace. Firewood or coal is inserted through a hole in front and you sleep on top of all of the warm contraption, with the fire burning inside. Since the place is pretty far north and in a high altitude, a bed of this type is a necessity (or at least a luxary?) during winter. The fact that the room is small and four people sleep in the same bed also contributes to saving warmth.

After being given food - thrice as much as we could possibly eat - we asked if we could ride their horse. They gave us both their horse and a horse belonging to their neighbour, which we took to the wide open grasslands next to their village. There we just rode around until it became late (or in my case - until my muscle cramps were too painful). During Hun Jun’s past few visits they had never taken any money from him, and this time was no exception, so were had to literally force some money into their hands (apart from the expensive food I think that they had also paid their neighbour for use of her horse).

At some early point of our stay they had noticed that we had brought a camera. Since they have no camera of their own, they asked to have their picture taken with us and if we could later send them the picture (by mail, as they have no computers). We had also taken some pictures of our own, here are a few: