a doozy

We woke up to the rain pouring outside. Is this the day to go we thought? We believed it would lift eventually and set out in a torrential, but warm, downpour. Sarah was pulling luggage out the back of the cab in 2 foot-deep gullies only to find out they didn't have tickets for the train they said they would. Only the one the next hour. So we waitied in the dimly-lit station and even saw a man with a tumor hanging from his face that was half the size of his face. Wondered what the health insurace situation there was in the town.

When we boarded and left on our bus, it was a doozy. Rice Paddy levels stretching for miles above with a raging river below, we traveled for 4 hours, had lunch, and then it seemed the bus driver was starting to doze off. He almost hit a Semi on a mountain pass, then Andy gave him some candy in hopes that he might perk himself up. He also lit a cigarette which we think helped. Then, it seemed like there was one spectacular mountain and valley of rice paddy and village after another. A funny thing was that the older lady that had feigned being too elderly in the beginning, now not only wanted to drink out of Sarah's water bottle to take a pill (which Sarah refused and she got it from the girl in front of her). Resigned, she sat quitely munching on sunflower seeds and spitting the hulls directly into the aisles. A classy gesture but one which would win her no points.

We arrived in Conjiang. Found our hotel, and Andy checked out a local high school nearby whose students were still out playing soccer and basketball on their court. They invited Andy to join, but having no shoes but sandals, had to play barefoot, as many of the others were as were as well. The first quick, agile team beat his 3-on-3 team handily but the next ones got a routing as Andy passed to his quicker Chinese counterparts and even did a layup himself, which prompted a spontaneous burst of applause from sideline students because of the height he got. Yet, in reality it was just a normal layup and perhaps he was just taller than everyone else. Everyone shook hands afterwards and invited Andy to dinner, but we were exhausted and just wanted to crash at the hotel. Perhaps the most ironic thing was that the guy that invited him to play was wearing a Memphis Grizzlies jersey, and, when pressed, Andy found out that few of the Chinese felt any allegiance to Yao at all.


The next day, we took a bus to a little town, from where we hiked two hours with full packs along the road to our next destination along the border. We spent a day there, saw the indiginous indigo-dying tribes, mountains of rice paddies and saw how they harvested the rice in a simple gasoline powered thresher.

Up at 7 am the next morning, we left with a group of Chinese Art Students from Tianjin University -- where we stayed in Tianjin -- and took the 8 hour journey to Sanjiang. It didn't disappoint. Spectacular rice terraces seeming to stretch to heaven and the occasional scary washed out road. At one point, the attendant on the bus had to get out and place rocks on the shouler to ensure the bus didn't fall over the cliff!

A couple of towns later and we were in Cheng Yang Bridge just outside Sanjiang. But our mistake of not eating would catch up with us. Unlike the rest of China, there were no places to eat throughout the entire series of villages. Nothing except little village stores with stale chips. Everyone seemed to cook for themselves. Starving, we finally found a place with food, 10 hours later and pretty much gorged ourselves for the night.


The next morning we were up and at 'em at 7 taking a minibus to Sanjiang. Not making the same mistake the day before, Andy got three bowls of noodles at a nearby stand before the next bus was supposed to leave. The attendant woman actually found him and said he had to get on the bus (Sarah was already on it). Willing to risk the bus leaving and taking the next one at least with noodles in hand, he asked the woman to hurry the noodle person up and carry the rest to the bus, which she easily obliged. Apparently, the all important thing is to GET ON THE BUS.



We left for Nanning stopping in a way station where we had to change buses and buy tickets. Andy's broken Chinese allowed for the purchase of the tickets but not in time for the next departing bus. In the mass confusion, he was pushing in with the rest of the Chinese and never really knew what the grand total of the tickets was (He knew the first half of the number but not the last -- but enough to know that he got too little change from the attendant) -- and when he pressed back on her, got a sheepish delivery of more change from her (much to the approval of all the other Chinese in the line who had seen the whole thing and supported Andy wholeheartedly). We missed the bus we wanted but had no idea the next bus left in only five minutes. And since we were the first ones on the next bus to buy tickets, somehow she had given us seats #1 and 2, the best ones right behind the driver.

Made it comfortably to Nanning by 4pm, took the bus to the train station (as aided by an Israeli traveler who had the scoop), found a hotel, secured a hard-seat train ticket (relatively easily amazingly enough - the line was only 4 people deep as compared to 200 in X'ian) to the border, Piaxing, had dinner, got our first seductive taste of jackfruit and called Sprint to revise Andy's vacation plan to keep his mobile number.


In the morning, we boarded the 8am hard-seat (our first of the trip) and proceeded screaming through the limestone karsts all the way to the Vietnam border.

No, full.

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.

"1st Class"

For the rest of Chengdu, we saw the Giant Pandas at the National Breeding Center, enjoyed bottomless cups of Chrysanthemum and Jasmine tea (gave a shout out to Jesmine Choi), and toured a bizarre mechanical dinosaur dungeon for kids in a dank basement at the edge of People's Park. It was admittedly kinda scary when they would let out a pre-recorded roar, but the ferocity was, in the end, mitigated by the occasional decaying plaster and exposed steel rods.

Sarah got her funds transferred, finding the phone easier than the Internet. Go figure. And we booked a "1st Class" cabin aboard a boat to tour the Yangtze River and the Three-Gorges before the river is flooded in a couple of years from the massive new Three-Gorges dam in Yichang. The guy John we booked the tickets with said, "You know this is a Chinese tour don't you." "Yeah," we said, thinking it would of course be a little rough around the edges. Little did we know just how rough.

Took a bus from Chengdu to the concrete-riddled, hot-house of Chongqing (CHON-CHING), where our boat was leaving from. There wasn't much there (even the hot pots they are supposedly famous for were really hard to find and when we did were nothing special). Even the Chinese we talked to said even they hated Chongqing! It would also turn out that we were arriving on the hottest day they had in 50 years. Man, you talk about an oven, that place was crazy!

A guide was walking us to our boat and the one in front of us looked a little dinged, but we thought, 'ok, we can live with it.' Then he turned to the left and we saw our real boat. Pretty much a rusted hunk, that was trying to be salvaged as a tourist boat for its last few runs. And the first class room? Let's just say we didn't even want to think what 2nd class was like. The bathroom was dirty, floors missing tiles, a/c barely blowing a breeze. In hindsight, we would have carried our packs all the way up and demanded something else, but we had a back door trip through southern China already timed out with our Visa entry into Vietnam. And all the boats are supposed to be booked and so then we'd have to recheck into a hotel, and so on. Plus, they say you're supposed to see the boat before you buy the tickets, but what an enormous pain getting down to the dock in searing heat and you have to do it within the couple of hours you're leaving because the boats are continually rotating in and out. Even then, you can never be sure that the boat you bought the ticket for is the one you'll be on!

But then of course we thought this trip IS mostly about seeing the Yangtze and the Three Gorges, which didn't disappoint and were magnificent. But we definitely had a quick education of what a "Chinese tour" was. They also had funny little charges and fees for everything. 50 Yuan to go to the upper deck and cafe, which did have two huge air conditioners blasting. Attractions at each stop was all extra fees, and there were fees sometimes just to leave the boat. A deposit for your key. Even a deposit for the cheap, laminated paper ticket you had to pay 50 Yuan for in the first place. Apparently, they either couldn't build in the cost into the ticket price, or laminated printouts are quite expensive.



The first night was searing hot, so we couldn't wait to leave and get the air moving. When we did, we went up to the cafe to just sit in the blasting A/C for a few minutes, play some cards, bide our time to go back to the room and then silently pray.


The scenery was spectacular, however. Perhaps even the most spectacular was ironically the LITTLE Three Gorges. Named so because the passage is more narrow here, but the height of the cliffs is roughly the same, making for an even more dramatic juxtaposition. We also visited the Three-Gorges Dam, which is really only worth it just to stand in the middle on top of it while they are doing construction. The security is tighter than an airline, though. You can only bring a camera and a passport. We left everything else on the bus.

Later that night an enormous rain storm broke out with lighting flashing all around us and the two other Westerners we met on the boat, Tim and Sara from England. At about 10pm, our boat itself went through the locks, being lowered about 20m to the other side and finishing our journey. All in all it was a great trip, the magnificent scenery better than the experience.

The next day, we would begin a truly adventurous, "backdoor" journey through some really random places in southwest China, continuing to book it south and make it in time for our Visa entry into Vietnam.