Education in the wild

It was mid-September, so my first trip to the Sino-Russian border area in Heilongjiang province was taken during the right season, in comfortable temperatures.

But soldiers told me that the natural environment, combined with bad weather in Heilongjiang, made their patrol work very difficult. They said it would become very cold soon.

In Mohe, the northernmost county in China, frontier soldiers had even seen snow several days ago.