06/06/2007

Last Adventure in China

I’m home! Just barely made it, but we’ll get to that in a second. Still very jetlagged, sleepy at three o’clock in the afternoon and awake at 3 a.m. Other than that, the “reverse culture shock” doesn’t seem too severe, although I still have to make a conscious effort to throw toilet paper in the toilet (rather than the trashcan.)
Even though this will be the last entry on my time in China, I’ve decided, in response to popular demand, to keep writing. I’m not sure about what – I’ll probably start with some of the more interesting aspects of the overall China experience. We’ll just have to see where it goes from there.
For now though, I’ve promised the story of my last adventure in China – which luckily did not wind up being my last on this earth, although that seemed like a possibility for a while. It wasn’t all bad though – at the very least it makes a good story. So here it is:

Sunday night, after packing up and storing some of our stuff at the hostel, Julia, Amanda and I boarded an overnight train to Datong, an ancient dynastic capital Northwest of Beijing, near Inner Mongolia. The plan was to visit three Buddhist sites in the area before heading back to Beijing Wednesday afternoon, collecting my stuff I’d stored at school, and spending our last night in the Beijing hostel before a noon flight back to America on Thursday. It seemed like a good plan.
The major flaw in the plan was probably that I’d made it using my inch-thick Eyewitness guide to China – the whole country. Which meant limited information on the places we planned to visit and a map of the area about 2 inches wide. The same book got us to, around and back from Xi’an just fine, but Datong is significantly less used to tourists, especially those traveling without a guide and a tour bus, so finding reliable information – even once we were there – proved a bit more difficult. The first indication that this might be a problem came when we tried to book a hostel – I say tried because we were forced to give up when we discovered that there are no hostels in Datong. Our backup plan – booking a hotel online – was also aborted when the only hotels we found in our price range provided neither addresses nor phone numbers. Plan C was to show up in Datong at 6 a.m. and find a hotel on foot.
So we got off the train, hopped in a cab, and asked the taxi driver to take us downtown. The fact that he knew exactly where to go – didn’t even ask us where downtown – tells you something about the size of Datong. What it doesn’t tell you about is the lameness of Datong. Datong is the lamest city I have ever been to. Its proximity to some cool Buddhist sites can’t even begin to compensate for the utter lameness and complete lack of character that afflict Datong. There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. And all the clothes are ugly. Really – the best-dressed people in Datong are the KFC employees. Which there are plenty of, because despite a lack of absolutely everything else, Datong has three KFCs. They also have plenty of stores selling ugly clothing. The confluence of KFCs and stores selling ugly clothes means Datong’s residents are generally overweight – for Chinese people – and poorly dressed. Fun city.
But, like I said, close to some cool stuff. Our first day there, I redeemed myself for bringing my friends to Datong by taking them to the Yungang caves, easily one of the most amazing things I saw in China. The caves were carved into a huge sandstone cliff in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. They’re still awesome today. Most are shallow but some stretch far back and even up into the rock. Inside each of the more than 40 caves are carved Buddhas from the minuscule to the monstrous. And tons of other carvings and statues of course, some still bearing traces of their original colorful paint. Looking up at a Buddha the size of an office building is simply overwhelming. Something about that huge peaceful face gazing at you from so high up… it’s awe-inspiring and a little terrifying at the same time. I’m neither Buddhist nor Christian, but if anything were going to convert me, these would probably work better than even the spires of Notre Dame.
My pictures don’t quite do them justice, but I’ve tried:

























The caves weren’t too far away, and since we’d had such an early start, we were back in beautiful Datong by 1 p.m. Nevertheless, when we asked the woman at our hotel’s front desk how to get to The Hanging Temple – next tourist attraction on my itinerary – she said we wouldn’t have enough time to get there and back before the buses stopped running. Same for Wutai Shan, which was even further away – a 3 hour bus ride, she said. We were somewhat discouraged, especially since we only had one more day in Datong and would have to skip one of the destinations, but we didn’t seem to have much of a choice. Wherever we were going, we wouldn’t be going until the next day.
We decided that Wutai Shan seemed cooler – it’s a mountain village surrounded by Buddhist temples and teeming with monks. I figured a day would give us plenty of time to do a little hiking and visit a few temples. So we woke up early and headed to the bus station. Unfortunately, the woman at the ticket window informed us that the only bus to Wutai Shan didn’t leave until 2 p.m. I asked when the bus came back to Datong, and she said 8:30. Three hours was a little less than we’d hoped to spend in Wutai Shan, but that seemed like the only option. So we bought the tickets, which she assured me, when I asked, were also our return tickets. No matter how many times I review this exchange in my head, I can’t figure out whether my poor Chinese or her general unhelpfulness was more to blame for the debacle that was about to ensue. I’m guessing that some of both made her answer my questions in the affirmative despite the fact that she didn’t know what I was asking. I’ve been guilty of the same on many occasions. But never when someone was buying bus tickets from me.
The fact that the bus didn’t leave until 2 was probably the first indication our plan was not the best. The second came hours later, when we returned to the train station to get on the bus. We boarded the bus, a tin can with 30 seats or so. But aside from 4 men who seemed to be friends of the driver, we were the only passengers. When it was time to leave – about 10 minutes behind schedule – the four friends got out of the bus and… started pushing. That was the second sign.
The bus started, the friends got back on, and we were on our way to Wutai Shan. Within the first two hours, we had dropped all but one of the friends off at locations along the road, and started our ascent into the mountains. Where the road was under construction. Construction in China does not mean road closings, traffic cones or policemen. It does mean workers, rocks, piles of dirt, and holes in the middle of the road. It means shrinking roads that were barely two lanes to begin with to half their original size and letting the drivers decide who has the right of way for themselves – which is generally done by getting the two vehicles as close to each other as possible before the smaller one gives in and either stops or backs up, if necessary. We played this game with everything from backhoes to Mack trucks, which I could have told the driver were bigger than us before we got an five inches away from them. But our driver had his own special style of driving, one that seemed to stem from a pathological aversion to the right side of the road. (Note: China is not one of those countries where they drive on the left side of the road.) Once we made it past the worst of the construction, we were still faced with the constant onslaught of oncoming traffic and occasional pairs of women standing in the middle of the road sweeping it. At one point we knocked a motorcycle off the edge of the road. We didn’t stop, but the motorcyclist looked ok as I watched him pick himself up through the back windshield.
After about two hours and 40 minutes, we passed a sign for Wutai Shan: 66 kilometers. I’m no metric system expert, but even I knew that meant it was more than 20 minutes away. It was at about this point that the last remaining friend of the driver asked us how long we were staying in Wutai Shan. It was also around this point that we began to realize we might be a little bit screwed. We told him we were going back to Datong later that night, which elicited a look of amused confusion and pity that even Julia, who couldn’t understand the conversation, knew wasn’t good. There were no buses, he told us. I insisted that we had tickets for the bus back at 8:30. He asked to see them, so I showed him the tickets that the woman at the bus station had given me, and which had been punched when we got on this bus. I think he laughed at us. Then he told me that these tickets were for this bus. And only this bus. Then – and this is when we became sure that we were screwed – he showed me the “bus schedule” (actually a business card) on which was printed:
Datong to Wutai Shan – 2 p.m.
Wutai Shan to Datong – 7:30 and 8:30 a.m.
Oops.
I explained to him why this was a problem for us: we had to be in Datong before noon the next day so we could catch a train to Beijing because we had a flight back to America at noon the day after that. He understood, and said maybe we could hire a taxi to take us back to Datong very early the next morning, for about 500 yuan. This was about when we realized that we had another problem we hadn’t anticipated: because we were leaving soon, neither Julia nor I had much cash on us, and Amanda had none because her ATM card had stopped working – or so she thought. I may have explained before that China is an entirely cash-based economy – credit cards aren’t accepted most places in Beijing, never mind five hours away from the middle of nowhere.
Believe it or not, this story gets worse before it gets better.
It does, however, eventually get better. I’m in America now, after all. But you’ll have to wait to hear how – I’ll be back soon.

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