We were up at 6am and went into the town of Yichang to figure out a way to get to the southwest. Turns out, there wasn't much leaving from there to where we wanted to go. You either had to take a bus to a city 3 hours away, then a train or a heady mix of trains and buses and even the travel guy didn't know the places we were going. Furthermore, the guy at the travel agency would keep saying there were seats on this train or that train and when we tried to book it, he would say, "No, full." What are we supposed to do? We finally pinned down a two leg plan, taking the night train (11hours later that night) to Hua Hua, then onto Kaali and figure out our exact route to the Vietnamese border from there.
Today was also our 1 year anniversary, September 5. We had a lot to be thankful for in the last year and it was hard to imagine this time last year that we'd be celebrating it looking for a place to do laundry in Yichang, China! We made the most of it and had an amazing dinner and Andy even got imported wine, from France (You don't even want to know about Chinese wine). Then a walk along the lovely river that we had just cruised down. We also didn't know we'd be spending the night on the train, but we had to get to where we were going when we needed to get there. It was scheduled to leave at 11pm.
At that hour, the Yichang train station was creepy at best. And we tried to read a little, but everyone seemed to keep staring at us as the only Westerners in the city, much less the station! Combined with the overall dinginess and the wafting of air from the open restroom inside, it was downright distracting. Then we learned the train was at least an hour late! It did give us a chance to try to communicate with the drunk locals though, one of whom was especially intrigued with Andy's copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life."
When we boarded, it was actually quite pleasant. We had an entire sleeping compartment to ourselves with no conductors knocking in the night. We got into Hua Hua an hour late, but had met a nice Chinese man, former military guy who was now a teacher of "Politics" at the University there (mostly the political philosophy of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx, he said). Luckily, he cut into the front of the line and bought his and our tickets (as he was on the same train) to Kaali, the 'small' city to the west.
His former military service, and now ID card, allowed him a discount on the ticket and to be let through to the platform before everyone else. Luckily, he took us with him! Although it didn't end up making any difference as the entire train was packed to the gills. He had said we'd be able to find a seat in the restaurant car, but that didn't happen as they said no one could sit in there. So we had to take our full gear inside the train, fighting for space in the aisles with people, while trying to upgrade our non-reserved "seat," to either a reserved seat or sleeper spot on the 'black market,' which we found out is just a way for conductors to make extra money -- and they make a lot of it. As if that wasn't enough, in the standing room only aisle with people constantly trying to jostle past us and our huge packs here comes a little restaurant cart trying to get through. We were thinking, are the boiled eggs THAT important at this moment in standing room only train with people fighting for black market tickets?!! We finally got ours, a hard sleeper, the only problem was it was 9 carriages ahead down the way. We fought our way, car after car with our stuff, and at this point Sarah was about to lose it. She was so upset at bumping every person's head we walked by she was forgetting the words for 'excuse me' and instead saying 'how much is it?'! We finally found our place in the middle of constant chatter, eating, and a TV blaring a dubbed version of "The Fifth Element" and still were able to fall asleep for an hour and a half. When we woke, all the same noises were going on, and the same family of girls were playing with each others hair, talking small talk, and picking at their noodles.
When we got to Kaali, we needed to get to the bank before it closed as we had heard there were no other banks or ATMs where we were going.
We needed to go to an actual bank branch because, unbelievably, we were still having ATM problems. For some reason, both of our cards were now being denied on "technical problems." We would later find out from Citibank that there were no more problems on their end. No more security flags. Nothing. This Chinese "glitch" would plague us for the rest of our time in the country. Luckily, we reached in and pulled out a last resort: Kathleen Ku had given us a wedding gift of American Express Travler's Cheques in time for our trip. We had to wait until the next business day for the Bank of China to cash them though, so we used the very last of our American cash just to make it through the night.
After cashing the cheques the next day, we planed our next steps and were a little exhausted so we decided to just stay in Kaali and not do any day trips. Andy got his jeans repaired. Amazingly, the woman refused to take the money (only 30 cents) because her sewing machine was acting up and she didn't feel she had been able to do a proper job, even though it was still a functional one. Sarah got some time on the Net and we figured out the plan: public busses over the mountains and passes through rice paddies traversing the back door between the provinces of Guizhou and Guangxi. We would leave at 7:30am the next day.
Thanks: to Kathleen Ku for a gift that couldn't have come at a better time. Also, thanks to those who have been giving to Teak Foundation, whose link is at the top right of this blog.