Nobody warns you about this, and it bit me on night one: I landed in Urumqi, took the train up to Altay, and by the time I reached the guesthouse the only ATM in the village was out of cash until morning. I had cards that did not work at the one shop that was open and exactly fourteen RMB in my pocket. I ate instant noodles for dinner. Learn from me.
The short version of the system
China runs on mobile payment. In the cities Alipay and WeChat Pay are king, and the ski resorts take them happily. But the smaller Altai towns, the guesthouses off the main road, and the morning market dumpling lady often want cash. So you need a small stack of paper RMB and a working card, not one or the other. This overlaps with the broader budget planning but the money mechanics deserve their own look.
Getting cash
Bring some RMB from home if you can — airports exchange at poor rates but they work. Once in Xinjiang, the ATMs inside bank branches in Altay city and Urumqi are reliable; the ones glued to the outside wall of a convenience store in a village are a coin toss. Withdraw in the city before you head to the mountains. I pull 1,500 to 2,000 RMB at a time, which covers a few days of food, market shopping, and the occasional banya. The travel permit guide is separate, but note some permit offices only take cash.
Which cards actually work
UnionPay is universal. Visa and Mastercard work at big hotels and resort tills but sputter at small shops. Tell your bank you are travelling or they will freeze the first foreign swipe. I carry one UnionPay-backed card and one international card and have never been stuck since that first night. The border checkpoint notes matter if you are crossing in from Kazakhstan, where you will also need local tenge.
Mobile pay without a Chinese bank
Tourist versions of Alipay and WeChat Pay now let you bind an international card, and they got me through most restaurant bills. They do not always work at the tiny operators, which is the whole reason to keep cash. If your trip includes a long-haul flight, the flight delay tips include a note on keeping enough cash for an unplanned airport night.
How much things cost, roughly
A guesthouse banya runs 60 to 120 RMB. A pelmeni bowl is 35 to 50. A taxi across Altay city is 15 to 30. Lift tickets and lessons are the big line items, and those are covered in the full budget guide. I keep a 100-RMB note and a few twenties separate from the rest so I am never fumbling for change in the cold with gloves off.
The mistakes I see
People arrive with only a foreign card and no cash and then panic when the one ATM is down. People flash a wad of 500s at a market that cannot make change. People assume the resort Wi-Fi will let them pay when the network is patchy. None of these are disasters, but they are the small frictions that eat an evening. The low-budget trip plan assumes you have solved this part first.
A sample day’s spend
To make the abstract concrete, here is a real rest-day in Altay city: 40 RMB guesthouse breakfast, 30 RMB taxi to the market, 60 RMB of snacks and a frozen pelmeni bag, 100 RMB pulled from the ATM for incidentals, 50 RMB banya in the evening. Call it 280 RMB, about 40 US dollars, and that is a comfortable day without lifts. The full budget guide scales this up to a ten-day trip, but the daily rhythm is what catches first-timers — small cash leaks add up when nothing takes a card.
Tipping and the awkward bits
China does not tip, and Xinjiang follows that. The one exception is the private driver who waits in the cold for you; a 20 to 50 RMB thank-you is welcome, never expected. The permit offices and small shrines to cash-only bureaucracy are where I keep a stack of small notes, because ‘no change’ is a real sentence here. None of this is stressful once you accept that cash is a tool, not a burden.
What if you are stranded without cash
It happened to me, and the fix was mundane: a convenience store with a UnionPay reader let me buy a token amount and get the rest as change against a card. Most towns have one such spot near the bus station. The lesson stuck: never let your cash hit zero between bank branches, and always know where the next ATM is before you leave the city. The border notes add a second currency wrinkle if your trip touches Kazakhstan, where you will need tenge on the other side.
Mobile pay, step roughly
Install the tourist version of the payment app, bind an international card, and verify a small test payment works before you rely on it. It will cover most restaurants and the resort tills; it will not cover the dumpling grandmother. That split — app for the modern, cash for the traditional — is the whole system in one sentence, and once it clicks the trip gets much easier.
Card trouble, solved in advance
The single most common money problem I see is a card frozen on the first foreign swipe. Call your bank before you fly, tell them the country and the dates, and ask them to whitelist ATM withdrawals. I do this for every trip and have not been frozen since. If it still happens, the bank’s international line works on Wi-Fi calling through the apps, which is one more reason the flight delay tips and a charged phone matter off the mountain too.
Cash versus card, by situation
Resorts, big hotels, and city restaurants: card or app, easy. Village guesthouses, market stalls, the banya, the dumpling lady: cash, always. I keep the two worlds separate in my head so I am never caught at the wrong one with the wrong tool. The full budget guide puts numbers on both, and once you see the split, the whole system stops feeling random.
The permit office cash trap
Some travel-permit and checkpoint offices take only cash, and they are often in places with no working ATM. I learned this the hard way and now pull extra small notes the day before any border or permit run. The border notes and the permit guide both assume you arrive cash-ready, and the people who ignore that are the ones stuck making awkward phone calls.
One number to remember
I keep a 100-RMB note and a few twenties separate from everything else, in an inside pocket, so I am never peeling wet gloves to dig through a wallet in the wind. It sounds trivial; it is the difference between a smooth small purchase and a cold, fumbling minute that holds up a queue. Small habits like this are most of what separates a smooth trip from a stressed one.
Get your cash in the city, keep a 100 handy, bind a card to mobile pay, and you will sail past the part of the trip that quietly ruins everyone’s first night. Everything else — the snow, the food, the long drives — is the fun part.