Hailar to Manzhouli (从海拉尔到满洲里)

          I had heard that Manzhouli was right on the Russian border. From this travel experience I did notice that it was much harder to get a place to stay when I was visiting border town areas. Some hoteliers  would tell me that their hotel is not of a high enough standard to allow foreigners to stay at the hotel. So, I wanted to get to Manzhouli early in the day before finding a plce.

         I gave DanBa and his wife a call to tell them that I was going to grab a train as early as possible and his wife told me that she could drop me off at the local Mongolian restaurant before going to buy some vegetables.

        That was cool and I got the chance to taste some Borsch before grabbing a train.

Milk Tea , rice +  beef and some Borsch (俄式汤)

       I took a slow train to Manzhouli  and had no problems getting out of the station. I had the usual taxi drivers asking me where I wanted to go (despite not knowing where I wanted to go). I decided to head in the the direction of a certain hotel in hope that they would allow me to stay there.

Sun setting on Manzhouli station

A bird enjoying the road that encircles the city

   

      I was able to find the hotel quite quickly and I asked the owner of the place if it was OK to stay there. She said OK so I proceeded to get the vaccine report, the Nucleic acid report, My visa stamp, my passport stamp and my money out. Then she noticed that I was not from China (To be honest, I don't think I look THAT Chinese. Maybe she had lost her glasses.) So, she thought that there might be a problem considering I am a foreigner. She rang a few people and they all told her that foreigners are not allowed in her hotel under any circumstances. 

         To be fair to her, she rang around asking other hotels if they accepted foreigners. I told her to stop ringing after she rand a third hotel! I told her that I had a tent with me and I would sleep there for the night. She told me that I could come back in the morning to use the showering facilities if I wanted.  This was kind of her but I did think that I better find a place to throw up the tent before nightfall.

            After a good period of time, I was able to find one of the local parks and itch up the tent there. I could still hear the cars on the street but it was a place to put the head down for the night, anyway. 

Wow, this place really lights up at night

Eiffel tower (with a Chinese / Russian influence)

Setting up the tent at night is a tricky business.

Thank God for the moon

Morning time arrives quite early in the north of China!

Nice decor at the front of this building

The sun seems strong over here.

Now where is my sunscreen...

      I decided to try to find the famous area near the border which housed a lot of Russian style hotels and traditional buildings. 

Signposts with 4 languages. 

I guess quite a few people here could read all the languages.

Really fancy toilets

Symbolic religious pictures on the front.

Like  a Russian fairground

This is one of the most unique hotels I have ever seen.

It looks huge from any angle.

 It is nice to see a different style of building in this part of the country.

            While I was walking arounnd the place, I kept seeing something on the ground. It looked like there were tiny insects jumping all over the pavement. I scooched down to look a bit close and saw that they were some kind of small frog / newt! 

They were jumping all the way to the border.

Maybe the taste of food for frogs is tastier across the border?

Old school transport

The shop sold the traditional trinkets.

                    I thought about staying a bit longer here but word was filtering through that I needed to get back to Zhejiang before there was a full on lockdown up here. If that happened, I would have to have a 14 day quarantine up here before going back to Yiwu and possibly doing the same thing back there.

                    I got a bus back to the station. As I got off the bus, a woman shouted at me and asked if I wanted to stay at her hostel. It seemed fine to me as I just needed a place to rest for a while so I paid her the money and showed her the usual stuff.

                     Around 5 P.M (about 2 hours after deciding to stay there), I asked the woman if I could hang up my laundry out the front of the building. She told me that she would do it for me. I thought this was a bit odd but OK.  Then, another 10 minutes passed and she told me that I needed to go as I was not allowed to stay at her place.  AAArrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhh! So, she put my wet clothes in a bag and told me to walk out the back of the building as if I walked out the front, she might get a huge fine for letting foreigners in her place (as apparently she did the previous year.) I was starting to feel like I was on the run but I was still not sure what I was on the run from! 

              So, I decided to head back to Hailar , then have a quick train journey to Dayan (大雁)  to see what the biggest Ewenke town looked like before heading back to Hailar and getting a plane back to Beijing and then another plane back to Hangzhou.

              I had hoped that there might not be many troubles doing this.