Midnight Express

So, Saturday morning we get up for our first full day together as a group of fourteen people. I’m pretty sure this whole entry is going to be dedicated to the clusterfuck of that day, so this isn’t going to progress the timeline too much, but it’s probably worth it.

Here was our itinerary for the day:

1) Eat

2) Get on a bus to go to a place called Jiuxiang

3) Come back, then get out stuff and go on a overnight bus to Shangri-la

And that was it.

See, here’s a map of Yunnan. You can see all the cities we were going to hit up marked clearly on it, Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, and Shangri-la (Xianggelila).

Its square area is about the same as California’s, approximately, although obviously its more square than rectangle. Kunming, the capital, lies roughly in the center, and we wanted to go to Shangri-la, in the very northwest. To do so, we were going to take an overnight bus. Originally, I was divided between city hopping towards Shangri-la, then making a straight shot back to catch a plane out of Kunming, and going straight to Shangri-la from Kunming, and city hopping back. I ended up choosing the latter. The idea was that we could save money on the cost of lodgings via this overnight bus, and since it’s a 12 hour ride, more or less, we could bypass the tedium of it through sleeping. Or at least, that was the idea. The last bus departed Kunming for Shangri-la that night at somewhere between 7:30pm and 8:30pm, we weren’t quite sure at the time. The other place we were going to this day, Jiuxiang, was about 2 hours away from Kunming, so, given a round trip transit time of 4 hours, we knew we didn’t have a lot of time to waste if we wanted to be back in time to catch the bus to Shangri-la.

So getting up was easy enough, and we sauntered over to a street food area to get some various little things to eat, then went back to our hostels to check out and put our bags aside, since we were certainly not going to carry them everywhere with us at Jiuxiang. Instead, we would come back later in the evening to pick the stuff up en route to the Shangri-la bus. From there, we all gathered together at one central spot, and split off into four taxis to get to the bus stations.

That’s where the trouble started.

I don’t remember the exact particulars of it. Basically, though, we gather at a bus station, to find out that that bus station had no buses departing from there to Jiuxiang, and that we’d have to go to the east bus station to find one. Figuring this out in and of itself was rather challenging. The problem at places like this is that they’re all mobbed by people offering private buses to go wherever you want, and they’re invariably giving you either misleading information or bad prices or both. Cutting through them to the core of the legitimate employees is challenging, and with Chenjing swiftly acting as our main intermediary with Chinese people, we had a few more issues, as Chenjing is overly trusting. Soon I realized that the lady she was talking to was leading us astray from the true bus stations, and I had to turn us around to get back towards the ticket offices, which are not particularly clearly marked.

It was inside that ticket office we were told that we’d have to go elsewhere, so, all 14 of us got into taxis again to go to that east bus station.

Only problem was, it turns out that there were 2 east bus stations (though we didn’t realize this until later). 2 taxis went to one of them, and the other 2 went to the other. At the time, we assumed that we were all at the same station, and just different sides of it, having trouble seeing each other, or something. It was raining, too, which added to the fun of it all. We spent the next hour trying to find each other, and utterly failing. The rain, combined with a series of questions from the people who actually were with me about the structure of our trip and the relative merit of visiting various points of interest that I had mapped out made the situation worse than I could possibly conceive, and aside from also suffering from a stroke at an extremely young age, I also snapped at Lauren, my roommate, and her friend Sarah. I felt kind of bad about it, but was in too much and too thick of a mood to really try to do anything about it to make up for it at the time. Other nice little touches, like John going off by himself because of some miscommunication at that very moment set me off even further, and I ended up lecturing everyone on group cohesion probably a lot more than I should have. While sprinting around this bizarre intersection that had a pedestrian bridge that I tried to use as a viewpoint to spot Tyler’s bright black and red striped backpack and Mindy’s bright blue sweater, I made a series of phone calls to them, continually trying to pinpoint their location, and we ultimately came up with a brilliant idea. After a few stressful games of very, very loud Marco Polo, we gave up, and as the stations we were each at both had buses to the city of Yiliang, which was the halfway and transfer spot towards Jiuxiang, we figured we’d just stick to our two groups, and hope that we meet up at Yiliang. Our buses left at about the same time, so we hope this would work out alright.

Of course, when we got to Yiliang, we had the same problem. Two different bus stations. It turned out that they were not too far apart, though, so my group took taxis to the station the others were at. It was a nice reunion, and one that was far more stressful than I’m able to relate. The part that was most worrisome for me was that Chenjing was with the other group, and at that time, she still didn’t really know anyone other than me, and I worried about her getting lost and separated from the only person she knew. I envisioned that as a pretty scary situation, personally.

We soon got on a bus to go to Jiuxiang, though, and all was right with the world again, we were just about 30-45 minutes behind from where I had originally envisioned our schedule. Man that bus was shitty. Well, the bus was just middling, but the road was ripped up everywhere, so there were plenty of times when we went airborne in our seats.

The place we were headed, Jiuxiang, is so named because of the nine scenic spots in this particular area. Jiu is Chinese for “nine”, and xiang in this context means something I’m not totally clear on. I heard it was supposed to mean something like dragon, maybe, but the idea was that there was nine points of interest. From Kunming, there’s two scenic locations worth mentioning, this one, and Stone Forest. I kind of wanted to see both, as Stone Forest is pretty famous also, but I heard that comparatively, Jiuxiang was a better place to see, and that Stone Forest was weighted down with Chinese tourist industry practices. I have yet to see Stone Forest, so I can’t really attest to that.

Jiuxiang was pretty cool, though, once we actually got there. Basically, it was a long trail that you take through this big ravine that cut through rocks and caves and contained a lot of interesting geological formations, with hilarious names like Husband and Wife waterfalls, or Pixie Plains, especially made out of a special kind of geological wunderstuff called karst. Here’s a series of pictures from the location:

For the way back, we took a nice ski lift, which was actually one of the highlights of the entire time there, as we were treated to spectacular views from above of the area. Those views weren’t all that photogenic, so I won’t include photos of that, but here’s a couple pictures of us on that lift:

It dropped us off at a place to buy souvenirs and food, and boy was that food good. We ate our fill of potatoes doused in spicy sauce, corn, and meat skewers . . . to date, those were some of the best meat skewers I have ever eaten.

We finished the whole loop in a surprisingly short period of time, having finished by maybe 3:30 or so ( I could be totally making that up). Thus, we felt confident that we’d have enough time to get back from Jiuxiang to Yiliang, and from there on to Kunming so that we could hail the last overnight bus of the day to get to Shangri-La. We took our time, going back for seconds (or even thirds, as I myself was guilty of) of that meat and potatoes, and just hung out and relaxed after having scrambled all day. Unfortunately, we didn’t check out the bus situation before relaxing, and instead waited about an hour, only to find out that buses back to where we came from are first come, first serve, and that there was no schedule to which it stuck to.

So we sat for some time on the curb, waiting for another bus to come. We happened to be sitting next to two guys from Paris who were studying in Beijing, doing a similar travel plan to ours, but who had a much more manageable group size, and so I talked with them for some time, probably dripping with envy at the details of what they were doing and what little they had to worry about in the process, given that it was just the two of them hitting the road, like Kerouac meets China.

Finally a bus rolled up. It happened to roll up while my pants were rolled down, though, as I was using the restroom just about 100 meters from the curb. This restroom, it must be said, was the first squatter toilet I ever had to use, and will be remembered forever just for that experience. To this day, I’m not exactly sure what good squatting form is, but for those of you who’ve never tried it, or for those of you who can set me straight, let me just say this: with your pants around your ankles, it sure is hard to get the kind of width in your stance that I feel is necessary to balance well for this kind of shit (no pun intended, but immediately recognized and loved). Also, for those of you men who haven’t tried it, if you make a habit of squatting for your number two needs, you might end up with birthing hips. That sure is how I feel, though.

So it was that when I rolled out of this restroom, having avoided squatter toilets for almost two months and finally breaking down, and thus being broken down in spirit myself, that I noticed none of my friends were sitting on the curb anymore, but were instead mostly packed into two small buses. So I put aside my frustrations with finally having succumbed to the eastern way of waste disposal, and sprinted over to the buses. For some reason that is still totally lost on me, my friends had split between these two buses, but when I counted the number of open seats in the second bus, it was clear that we could all fit in to that one, so I jumped into the first and corralled everyone out, to the dismay of the driver; I just ignored him and continued on, as I wasn’t about to have the lot of us get split up on the way back yet again.

We made it back to Yiliang from this point uneventfully. The time when we got to town was sometime around 5, maybe 5:20. The information we had prior was that buses would depart very, very regularly from this station back to Kunming, so that we shouldn’t have much trouble hopping on to one immediately. That turned out to not be true, though, and the two Mandarin speakers in my group, Jing and David, plus myself, wrestled with the ticket booth to try and get a straight answer as to how soon we could get back to Kunming. Turned out that the soonest bus we would be able to get on would be a 6pm bus, and given how long it takes to reach Kunming from there, that would put us right up against the rail for getting on to the Shangri-la bus. We wanted to get back to Kunming quick as we can in any event, so we booked those buses, though I had a roundhouse discussion or three first anyhow with all of the rest of my fellow travelers about the situation. After we had the tickets, though, I had to level with all of them that we probably wouldn’t be able to make it onto the Shangri-la bus.

It wasn’t that it was impossible, just really, really improbable. I used the phrase “snowball’s chance in hell” liberally throughout the next hour or two. Although I was really the leader of this whole expedition, I never feel entirely comfortable with making decisions without consulting the group, so I tried to ask everyone’s opinion about what step we were going to take next. Were we going to put our mental efforts entirely towards the pursuit of Shangri-la? Or were we going to try and start figuring out over the course of the next hour plus on a bus what we were going to do in lieu of Shangri-la, as, if we weren’t going there, we still wouldn’t exactly want to waste any time while travelling, not to mention we’d need to figure out how not going to Shangri-la would impact the rest of the trip.

Now, to be honest, almost no one in my group really knew what to expect in the town of Shangri-la. Mostly, I think, they were just going off the impression they had from the name and the vague awareness everyone has about this concept of some fabled city, as opposed to having done research about the town that actually exists and merely re-branded itself as Shangri-la a couple years ago. So, although it was like pulling teeth, eventually I got a basic consensus that we still wanted to try to do Shangri-la.

For the next two hours, both during the time that we were waiting for a bus to arrive to take us back to Kunming, as well as while we were on the bus in route to Kunming, I tried to brainstorm with the few people who were willing to join me in the process in figuring out how exactly we could do this. There was no sure thing that we’d be in town in time to get to the other bus station.

Jing in particular was absolutely critical, and I don’t know that we could’ve gotten to Shangri-la without her. The poor thing, I instructed her to call the bus station in Kunming about the sleeper bus to Shangri-la probably at least a half dozen times, each time trying to figure out what our options were. We had the option of buying tickets over the phone, if anyone was willing to proffer their card to cover the whole bill, which someone was, but we didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the process, so we ultimately ruled it out. We checked how many open seats there were, also, to make sure that there was a point in us worrying about this at all, and there was. With an 18 seat availability, the fourteen of us could reliably count on finding a place upon this bus no matter what for the rest of the hour or so at that point that we had until arrival in Kunming. The bus driver who was currently driving us, though, estimated that we’d be back in Kunming at about 7:30pm. This was just early enough to give us a frantic hope, as the last sleeper bus left at 8pm. However, arriving in Kunming, getting out, grabbing a taxi back to our hostels, grabbing our things, and making it clear across town to the sleeper bus station in thirty minutes would be one tall order.

We tried to twist their arms a bit. I had Jing ask about delaying the bus thirty minutes so that we could actually board it, even with promises of fourteen tickets each valued at about a little less than 200 RMB, or close to $30 US, they didn’t sound particularly interested. Their stated reason was that the office we were calling wasn’t connected to the bus station, so they wouldn’t be able to communicate the decision to delay the bus. Jing was convinced by this, but I told her it was hogwash, as they could just as easily call the actual bus station and tell the driver to just hold up a bit, but even though Jing called again, they didn’t waver.

Our final decision was to try to hit the ground running. We were certainly getting into Kunming before that bus was going to leave, so we had a shot. I organized for the group to split up into four groups. Group A was Jing, Varun, Lauren and David. Their mission was to head straight to the appropriate bus station after we got off of the bus we were currently on (Kunming has three or four major long distance bus stations), and do whatever they could to delay the bus. We gave them money to cover all of our ticket fares, and I gave Varun another 500 RMB to bribe the driver if necessary, and a couple other people chipped in some bribe money too. Group B was Christine, Sarah, Jill, and myself, and we were headed back to our hostel to grab the things of the eight of us that were staying there. The Kansas Kids, otherwise known as Tyler, Mindy, and Julie, were going to go back to theirs as group C and get their things, and John and Yong were going to form group D and do the same, but eventually we decided that having half of us at the bus station immediately might be a better idea, so group C was redirected to join group A. I made sure that the assorted responsibilities were well communicated and understood; before we did try our ridiculous plan, we called our hostels to see if they could deliver our things to the bus station, and while it seemed at first like it might be sort of possible to get them to work with us, it ultimately ended up being that they were unwilling to help us, so we had no choice but to stick to our plan.

Just after 7:30, we arrive in Kunming, but the traffic wasn’t very good. Mercifully, the bus station we would disembark from was right at the outskirts of town, so we didn’t have to sit in this ridiculous traffic for very long at all. As soon as we got out, we realized we had forgotten to factor in any idea of where the hell we were to begin with when getting off of the bus. The group that I had been split from on the way to Jiuxiang earlier in the day commented that this was the bus station they had originally been taken to, and so recommended going a certain direction around the building to find taxis. We hustled over there, and found a dead street that stretched on for blocks with no taxis in sight. Having made the decision to go this way, though, we had to stick to it, or at least, I did. At this point, I didn’t look behind me, and hoped that my friends would stick to what they were supposed to do, and I booked it down the street, running at a fair clip without taxing myself too much. Jill seemed to actually get a kick out of this, and Christine kept up pretty well, too, with Sarah lagging behind just a bit. There were a couple other guys, probably John and Yong, that were behind her, but since they wouldn’t be in my taxi, I kept them out of my mind for the time being.

The street that we were on was very urban and modern, with high rise office buildings all around. If we were going to find a taxi, this certainly seemed like a likely enough place to do it. Life just wanted to give us a few thousand hurdles for the day, though, so we ran a few blocks before even seeing any taxis at all; the first ones we came across were all full anyhow. Then, at one point, a taxi swings right by that’s empty, and somehow doesn’t come to a stop for us. Not knowing when next we’d have the chance to find such a taxi, I let loose all the energy I had, and sprinted for well over a city block after this taxi. I had no awareness of anything behind me at this point. My life was solely centered on keeping up with this car that was probably going between 15 and 20 miles per hour, and I did a pretty good job. However, they paid no heed, and the gap between us finally started to increase, so my hopes waned on getting a grip on them, when suddenly they decided to make a left turn. Knowing that that would slow it down substantially, I changed my vector to intercept them, and ignored the heavy throbbing ache in my legs and my lungs and picked up the pace again, when all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I spotted another taxi that was fully stopped, with a lit up lantern on top of it announcing its current lack of occupants. Seeing this, and being not particularly masochistic, I stopped sprinting, and hopped quickly over to this car, opening the door, and yelling at the other three girls to hurry their asses over. This mostly meant yelling at Sarah, as she’s pretty much always the last one in.

Shortly they piled in, and we were off like a rocket back to Kunming Cloudland International Youth Hostel to grab our stuff. I explained our situation, huffing and puffing all the way, to our erstwhile driver, and he laughed and told us that we were in a pretty tight spot, or at least that’s what it sounded like through my knowledge of Chinese. He told us that it sounded like we were basically helpless (I assure you this was more sympathetic than it sounds in English), but that he’d do his best to help us get to each spot as quick as possible.

At this point all we could do was recoup our energy, and rush into the hostel when we arrived and grab all our things, while spitting out a “thanks for nothing” to the staff in my absolutely bitter state of mind. The reason that our hostel in particular had said that they couldn’t help us was because our things were not clearly marked as ours, so they didn’t want to bring things to the bus station that might not belong to us. However, just as I suspected, our stuff was all right where we left it, in an office off to the side, with absolutely no other luggage around it. I know they were just doing their job, but we were in dire circumstances, and we had offered to give a completely accurate description of all of our things over the phone to try and facilitate it and convince them that it was really ours, but they just never would agree.

We got in and out of the hostel in less than two minutes, literally. It made me think of something I had learned about at the DMZ in South Korea, which hopefully I’ll be able to write about one day, so, I’ll leave that mysteriously open ended. The next twenty minutes or so was an absolute blur in my mind, a frenzy of phone tag and miscommunications and passing of phones to the driver and to everyone else to make sure that we were all headed to the same place.

Somehow, we ended up in a bus station. Somehow, Varun and co. were all gathered there. The taxi dropped us off at the mouth of the station, so I was rushing 6 bags over to where I hoped I’d find them, and I swear I’ve never seen a better sight for sore eyes than my friends on that evening. The only people that were missing, at that moment, from our crew, were John and Yong. What no one had bothered to tell me at any point earlier in the evening is that the two of them don’t get along very well, so to put the two of them in a high pressure situation where they had to work together as a team was like setting a pressure cooker to high going through a power surge with a grenade in it to boot.

Apparently their taxi driver didn’t understand what was going on, and while Varun was trying to talk to them via cell phone, they apparently had a hard time reaching a common ground of understanding directions and such. I’ve heard stories, but I wasn’t there for it, so I don’t want to lay down too much gossip. I save that just for my own experiences.

Nevertheless, they showed up sure enough ten minutes later, and there we all were, gathered at the bus station at 8:20. The bus driver had been more than happy to wait for us, without needing any bribe at all. After all, it was a 12 to 14 hour ride, so what difference would thirty minutes make? That’s the logic I had looked at it to begin with when trying to struggle with the ticket office, and so it seems sort of fitting that though the bureaucracy didn’t see it that way, the actual guy working did. Frickin’ bureaucracy.

We threw our things under the cabin of this huge bus, bought a few drinks and snacks to last us through the trip, as we had never had the chance to have a proper dinner, and got aboard.

Much to all of our surprise, this snowball made it through hell.

We were headed to Shangri-la.