06/19/2007

Last Adventure in China Part II

When I left off, Amanda, Julia and I were about 3 hours into a longer-than-expected bus ride to Wutai Shan and had just learned that there were no buses back to Datong that night. Oh, and we'd just realized that we only had 220 yuan (about 25 dollars) between the three of us.
While we weighed our options, the bus continued to barrel headlong over roads of varying qualities and levels of completeness. Then suddenly we stopped. Our friend who had informed us of the lack of return buses came back to talk to us again and communicated that the bus was stopping for a while before continuing to Wutai Shan a bit later. Then he told us that we could get into this car - indicating said car - and this man - the one standing next to the car - would take us to Wutai Shan. Were we a little worried about getting into a small car with some anonymous Chinese man? Yes. Did we have a choice? Not really, no.
So the three of us got off the bus, bid the driver and his helpful friend goodbye, and got into the car. And we were off again. Presumably in the direction of Wutai Shan, where we already knew we didn't have time to stay.
Then after what couldn't have been more than 20 minutes, our driver slowed and flagged down a bus going the opposite direction. We stopped while he talked to the bus driver. Then he got back into the car, made a U-turn, and told us we were going to get on this bus instead.
What ensued was a good five minutes of near-argument in Chinese, in which I tried to get him to explain to me why we were getting on a bus going in the opposite direction than we had been traveling. Eventually he imparted that the bus was going to drop its passengers off at the nearby train station, turn around, and bring us to Wutai Shan. Ah.
Julia perked up at the words train station - well, when we told her that's what he said - and asked if we could take a train back to Datong. So we asked. Not surprisingly at this point in our journey, the answer was no. We were way past the point of anything good happening to us. There were trains to Beijing, but all our stuff - including the computer I'm typing this on - was back in Datong.
So we waited by the side of the road for the bus to return from the train station. When it did we dutifully switched vehicles again, and our driver handed some cash over to a woman on the bus - not the driver, but his friend. And we continued flying up, down and around the mountains toward Wutai Shan.
The scenery at this point of the trip was probably the best: totally remote, undeveloped farms and tiny villages. Flocks of sheep wandered the mountains, dotted with tiny ramshackle stone huts and carved into waves by terraced fields. We were so far away from anywhere, even the satellite dishes had tapered off to none. Possibly due to a lack of electricity.
Next comes the part where we become the laughing stock of Wutai Shan.
Wutai Shan, despite being in the middle of nowhere and barely accessible thanks to the massive mountains it's perched in, is apparently enough of a tourist destination that you have to buy tickets just to get into the village. My inch-and-a-half thick guidebook did not tell me this. My conclusion, in hindsight, is that many of our troubles stemmed from the fact that the Chinese tourist industry is geared toward travelers on organized tours. They expect you to be on bus, following a guide, wearing your tour-group issued baseball cap and generally acting like a sheep. The country isn’t set up for independent tourists, and the further away from the beaten path you get, the truer this is. Chinese tourists, in particular, enjoy travel of the sit-on-a-bus and follow-the-guide variety, and I think they're the majority of the clientele at remote attractions like Wutai Shan. Foreign tourists, who are more likely to be own their own, frequently don't have time to see much outside of Beijing and Shanghai. This explains why visitors at tourist attractions like the giant Buddhas in Datong were so eager to take pictures with us. (At least a dozen random Chinese people have photographs of me towering over them.)
Anyway, we had just gotten to the toll booth-type entrance to Wutai Shan and been informed by the woman on our bus that entry was 90 yuan per person. We exchanged concerned looks and told her that this was going to be a problem, because we didn’t have 90 yuan each. At first she looked doubtful, but we reassured her that we weren’t joking, and pulled out our 220 yuan to show her. And hilarity ensued. No, not really. But she thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. Americans aren't supposed to be poor.
We managed to get out of that one because there was a student rate - half price - and we'd all been clever enough to bring our student IDs. Of course, the dent this made in our funds left us with less than 100 yuan. We were slightly reassured by the bus lady's confidence that there would be ATMs inside the village.
We filed through the tollbooth behind a massive Chinese tour group and got back on our bus. After a quick descent, our bus stopped outside a lonely building on the hillside and the bus lady told us to get out. I asked why, and tried to figure out where we were, but she just kept repeating her command to get off the bus. So we did. I'm not sure when during this adventure we'd turned into tour-group type sheep, but I think by this point we'd decided it was best just to roll with the punches.
The building we'd stopped in front of turned out to be a hotel, where a very nice woman showed us two rooms we couldn't afford. When we explained our situation to her, she was equally shocked and entertained by our lack of funds. We explained that we could get more money if she would take us to an ATM. At this, she left the room and made a phone call. When she came back, I repeated that we needed to go to an ATM or a bank. She said to sit down and wait. Somewhat confused, but overall obedient, we did.
Ten minutes later (after the woman told me I looked Chinese because my nose is small) a man showed up with a minibus. The hotel owner said he would take us to an ATM, so we dutifully got into, accompanied by the hotel owner.
The main village, it turned out, was down the road a ways. It had a big temple in the center of it, and was swarming with Buddhist monks. Two more temples were visible in the surrounding mountains. It was beautiful and unique - and we had to catch a train out of Datong, five hours away, at noon the next day.
We stopped in the center of the village and the man driving the minibus led us to the China Post. Kind of a post office, kind of a bank - one whose ATMs don't accept foreign ATM cards. I knew this because earlier this semester I had tried to get money out of a China Post ATM, and the machine, for no apparent reason, ate my card. This same experience befell a friend of mine before the word about the China Post ATMs got around.
Disappointed, but by this point not surprised, I explained to the man that this ATM wouldn't do and asked him to take us to another. Not surprisingly, he said there weren't any others. What now? I’d noticed a tourist info center-type place near where we'd parked the minibus, so I decided to go ask them. The girl working confirmed that there were no other ATMs in Wutai Shan. Then she remembered some other banks down the road a bit further - then she remembered that at this hour (about 6:30) they would all be closed. So we were broke.
I went back to the hotel owner in the minibus and told her we were terribly sorry, but we couldn't afford to stay in her (already very cheap) hotel. She thought a moment, put her hand on my arm, and said, "Ok, 20 yuan per person."� That's about $2.50. Ok, I said. I told her we would come back but were going to go see if we could figure out how to get back to Datong.
We walked across the street to the bus station, where a large crowd of men was gathered around what appeared to be the ticket window, talking and smoking. They parted like the red sea as we walked up and watched intently as we approached the window. Amanda asked the uniformed guard inside about tickets to Datong, and he told her that tickets to Datong were sold at a different bus station, up the street. Although we were pretty sure there weren't actually any tickets to Datong that would get us back there in time for our train, we headed up the street anyway.
As we walked away from the window, a man stepped out of the crowd and approached us. He offered to drive us to Datong, and asked us to come see his car. Couldn't hurt. So we followed him to his car, a shiny new SUV, followed by the crowd of men. He said he would drive us back that night for 700 yuan. And this is the part where you can tell we'd been in China too long:
Broke, stranded and risking missing our train and therefore our flight, we started bargaining. Amanda offered him 400 yuan, which he laughed at. So we said we were going up the street to the bus station. And here's the part where you can tell that all that time in China actually taught us something:
As we walked away, a number of men broke away from the crowd to offer us lower prices. They started at 600, but we kept insisting on four, and didn't stop walking. As we kept going, they trickled off. But then men started pulling up next to us in their cars and quoting prices. A few waved five fingers at us from across the street. We waved four back.
Then comes my favorite part. A group of monks - shaved heads, orange robes - came up the hill behind us. One of them came up to me and very politely said that 400 was a good price, and not to go any higher. I was shocked and thanked him profusely. A few minutes later a black taxi pulled up next to us and the driver said he'd take us for 400 yuan. Deal.
But before we got into the cab Amanda had to explain that we had no money and would pay him after he took us to an ATM in Datong. He said ok, so we climbed into the cab and... headed back the way we had just come.
If Chinese mountain roads under construction are scary in the daylight, they're drop-dead terrifying in the dark. The construction workers were gone by this time, but we were left to contend with all their bumps and holes, which of course were more difficult to see now. To top it all off, our driver appeared to be sleepy. Scared for our lives, we made it our personal mission to keep him awake. Besides shouting at him to turn left and right just before we went flying off of cliffs, we basically annoyed the heck out of him with unrelenting interrogation. Most of this responsibility fell to Amanda, who was sitting in the front seat. When she ran out of banal questions, she began spouting everything she could think of: Did he want his son to become a taxi driver like him? Did he tell his wife he loved her every time they hung up the phone? We tried singing, too, but he turned on the radio to drown us out. There's now one more Chinese person who thinks Americans are crazy.
Five hours of this later, we made it to Datong. We were almost out of the woods - the roads were flat and straight, there were buildings instead of sheep. Our plan was to get our driver to take us to our hotel, have him wait while we got money out of the ATM next to our hotel, pay the driver and go to bed. But things weren't about to start falling into place now, after everything had gone wrong all day.
Datong, despite being incredibly lame, is big enough that it took us a good half hour to find our hotel. Our driver seemed to have no idea where we were, and neither did we, but at this point everyone in the car felt the need to contribute to the being lost anyway. So while we shouted at him to go in the direction we felt was correct, he followed his own whims. Julia, who had just mastered the Chinese words for right and left, was especially adamant that every tall building we saw in the distance was our hotel. Despite the fact that we were all yelling at him, the driver chose this moment to give Amanda a carved wooden heart that had been hanging on his rearview mirror. Apparently we amused him enough that he liked us, probably in the way people like really dumb pets.
Eventually, one of the tall buildings in the distance did turn out to be our hotel. We all screamed for joy, much to the amusement of the driver. He happily waited while Amanda and I tumbled out of the car in the direction of the ATM next door. Her ATM card hadn't worked the last few times she'd tried it, but repeated calls to Bank of America hadn't turned up any reason for the rejections, so she tried it again. And it was rejected once again. So I tried my card and... it was also rejected.
We returned to the car ashamed to put our poor driver through more suffering. But while we'd been gone, he'd dug another Buddhist trinket out of some corner of his car and given it to Julia. He'd also just realized she didn't speak Chinese. Mystified by his kindness to what had to be his most annoying customers ever, we regretfully broke the news that we weren't finished yet, we had to go to a different ATM. Luckily we'd just passed one up the street, so we returned there. But, in keeping with the theme of the trip, it was out of service. Frustrated, we returned to the car, apologized again, and directed the driver toward another ATM we knew was only a couple blocks away. Unfortunately this was an Agricultural Bank of China ATM, and they often don't accept foreign cards. Once again, no luck. We returned to the car and told the driver we still had no money, and didn't know where there were any other ATMs. So he set off in what seemed to be a randomly chosen direction, and as we turned the corner, what should appear but the Bank of China!
This time Amanda and Julia hopped out of the car. While they were gone, our driver gave me a necklace of Buddhist prayer beads. Maybe his kindness brought us good luck - Amanda, optimistic about her ATM card since the machines had begun rejecting everyone else's too, tried it once again. And, in the most joyful moment since the birth of Christ, out came money! Amanda threw her hands in the air so quickly she hurt her elbow on the machine.
The two of them came dancing away from the ATM and we all rejoiced again. The driver returned us to our hotel, and we gave him his 400 yuan plus a hundred yuan tip. We could not have been more overjoyed to be back in Datong. In fact, it's unlikely anyone has ever been that happy to be in Datong. The next day, we made our train to Beijing, and our flight home the day after that. Although more could hardly have gone wrong, we nevertheless escaped unscathed. If our trip to and from Wutai Shan was anything but a massive waste of time and money, it was a really good story.

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