Day 385 - The Adlibers hitch it back to Hailaer

After trying (and failing) to get our taxi driver to come back to pick us up for the same price she brought us out for, we decided to talk to some of the tour buses that were parked in the lot and waiting for their tour groups to come back from their explorations. Unfortunately all the buses were headed to a different destination than us, but then after a little bit of friendly chatter with a group of men, we ended up in a car with a man heading back to Hailaer. His friend even gave us a map of the area to help us out, and the driver gave us all sorts of interesting info on the way back - he showed us a bridge that was built during the Japanese occupation - and dropped us directly outside the bus station. He then preceded to come into the station, push into the front of the line (in the typical Chinese way), and help us buy our onwards tickets to Manzhouli. This just goes to show how helpful and friendly the Chinese people are - he even refused to take some money to pay for the toll-gate charges.

We got on our bus at midday, and were soon in Manzhouli - a Russian border town only 9kms away from the border, where we set about finding cheap accommodation. This time we were successful - thank goodness as we didn't have a plan B this time!

Our first port of call was at a nearby restaurant where we filled up on enough lunch to make up for the previous days of 2-minute noodles and peanuts - plus because we were eating at 3pm we didn't need dinner either! The restaurant owners were so friendly they even helped us in plotting our trip to Dalai lake tomorrow - the ticket officers at the bus station told us there was no bus to the town nearest to the lake, but after talking to the restaurant owners they told us there was a public bus there.

After lunch we made our way to the train station where we bought our train tickets from Hailaer to Hohhot - a lovely 39 hour train ride which we'll begin on Sunday afternoon.

As there are so many Russians here (this may be the most white faces we've seen in over a year) everyone spoke to us in Russian but few people stared at us - and so instead of being frustrated at being mistaken for Russians we welcomed the break from being in the spotlight and enjoyed walking around a town that had a blue sky above us and is relatively organised!

Adlibing another border town.