Road trips are best when they’re spontaneous, so when a friend offered me a seat in his jeep for a three-day jaunt to last month’s Gegentala Grassland Rock Festival (featuring a lineup of dozens of China’s best bands) on the plains of Inner Mongolia, I jumped at the chance. We met up early the next morning raring to go – that’s when, of course, we discovered that the stereo wasn’t working. The next hour was spent intermittently fiddling with the dashboard console and scanning the roadside for a store or gas station that sold 1.5-volt batteries (we had a portable boombox, but no juice).
By the time our power shortage problem was resolved, we had already ventured well into Hebei province. Two hours had passed and we were settled into cruise mode, anticipating just a few more leisurely hours on the fast road to rock (the organizers claimed that the drive would only take “about seven hours”). Little did we know what lay in store.
First came the trucks: Big ones, small ones, slow ones and fast ones – all of them driving like bats out of hell – hugging curves, straddling lanes and often nearly running us off the road. Outside of Datong we got in the wrong lane and ended up waiting more than half an hour at a truck weighing station. Then there were the multiple accidents (all of which seemed to involve overturned melon trucks) jamming up the road. We were semi-delirious by the time we crossed into the rolling grass hills of Inner Mongolia, where almost every blind hillside curve was an adventure in sheer terror as crazy drivers overtook cars with reckless abandon in the oncoming lane.
The rather vague SMS directions warned of a ‘slight detour’ at a railroad pass that was under repair. In reality, it turned out to be a treacherous off-road dirt obstacle course (which turned into a practically impassable mud pit from the rain on the trip back). Slowly and painfully, we limped our way along, and by the time we reached the festival site, over 12 hours had gone by. Apparently we were among the lucky ones – other caravans, particularly the buses, took up to 18 hours to get there.
But in the end, it was all worth it. The festival was a gloriously chaotic scene of rockers, journalists, Mongolians, horses and local police. The music ranged from stellar to the not-so-spectacular, and the endless rolling grass plains and star filled skies (complete with random bursts of lightning) were truly breathtaking. Our trip back to Beijing was just about as perilous as the one there, but we’re game to do it again – as long as we can decide on where to go next. Jerry Chan
