The prairie near Manzhouli, Hulun Buir.Photo By Tang Yue / China Daily

A break from the city - just a few hours away from Beijing - delivers a surprising highlight

As people in Beijing raved about how blue the sky was just before the big commemorative parade on Sept 3, I was setting off for Hulun Buir in Inner Mongolia to escape from the hubbub and to get a taste of more authentic clean air.

However, for a while at least that escape from Beijing was not so clearcut, because in Manzhouli, a city in western Hulun Buir prefecture, as in cities, towns and villages across the nation, people were transfixed to their televisions watching the parade. With other tourists there, I was no exception, gathered around the TV in the lobby of the youth hostel where I was staying.

After lunch, the real journey started. Manzhouli sits on the border of Russia and Mongolia, and one of the big tourist attractions is the border post between China and Russia and, as with that TV viewing, we just went along with the crowd.

With this visit I was able to scratch a third notch on my belt for Chinese border posts I have visited, the first being the China-Vietnam post in Fangchenggang, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, and the other the China-Democratic People's Republic of Korea post in Tumen, Jilin province.

Given that President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin seemed to have conversed cordially during the parade a few hours earlier, my friend and I reckoned there was no diplomatic work or fence-bending to be done, so we opted not to pay 80 yuan ($12.60) for the privilege of entering Russia.

After a brief stop near the border post we traveled to Hulun Lake, which with Buir Lake are the two biggest lakes in the region and which lend their names to Hulun Buir. Both words mean otter in Mongolian apparently, and it is said that many otters used to live in the lakes.