A trip through Ningxia by raft and camel

(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2007-09-12 11:21

The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in Northwest China has scenery worthy of a wilderness wonderland as Lu Rong finds when she floats down the Yellow River on a sheep-skin raft and ventures into the Tengger Desert on a camel.

When I told my foreign friends that I was going to Ningxia Hui Automous Region for holiday, the reply was: "Oh, that's great! But where is it?"

So I had to clarify first that I was not going to the moon and that Ningxia is actually a spindle-shaped region in Northwest China, bordering Inner Mongolia. What you can expect to find there is desert, the Yellow River, steep cordillera, mosques and other scenes that are beyond the imagination of a southern city dweller.

At the end of August, my parents and I took a flight of three hours from Shanghai to Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia. The trip was also to make a family visit to my aunt who 50 years ago left home at the age of 18 and like many people of her age had settled in Ningxia in answer to Chairman Mao Zedong's call to give support to China's western regions that were considered barren and remote. Since then great changes have taken place there and tourism has started to bring prosperity to the once wastelands.

Coming from a megacity filled with people, high-rises and cars, we found everything totally different. The air was extremely dry, smelling of earth. On the street, there were often men wearing white skullcaps, indicating they were Hui minority people.

As one of China's five autonomous regions for minorities, Ningxia is home to more than two million Hui people, accounting for 35.57 percent of the region's total population. The Muslim religion is also why you will never be served any pork in your meals but it is not a disaster for meat lovers, since the beef and mutton in Ningxia is supposed to be the best in China.

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