On the Road Again, Just Can't Wait to Get On the Road Again..

The bus ride from Shangri-la to Lijiang was kind of enlightening.  It was a bit strange, knowing we had passed all of this scenery once before, but having been asleep prior, so seeing it anew for the second time.

There weren’t a lot of memories from the ride itself, I tried to doze off through as much of it as possible, using Christine’s shoulder and the window beside me alternatively as headrests, and mostly failing. The first memory I have, distinct, after getting on the bus, is getting off it at a terrible rest stop.

As was usually the case, this meant ice cream for me.  For once, it mean ice cream for people other than me, too, and a good amount of stretching for everyone.
Here’s a couple of pictures!

The restroom here was rather charming.  Of course it was just a ditch, that’s common enough, but there’s usually still some sort of primitive drainage system.  This time, there was an even more primitive drainage system, a natural brook running directly beneath.  It was almost like having a view at the same time or something, and actually put a smile on my face, in an absurd sort of way.

We got back on the bus after having some chocolate covered taro ice cream, and got rolling again. We got a pretty good view of a place called Tiger Leaping Gorge along the way, mostly without realizing that’s what it was at the time.  This place will be important in another blog entry or two.

I think the total transit time was about five hours.  The sun set by the time we got into Lijiang, and at first we could only see the outskirts, which looked like a pretty generic city.  What was odd was that in the last half hour, roughly, the bus we were on stopped acting like a long distance bus, and started making regular stops in the city, as though it were a city bus.  Even more odd given that no announcements were made about which stop they were at.  I guess people must make really regular trips between the two cities, but there definitely wasn’t regular stops before this, so it seems like an awfully long commute to me, but there you have it nevertheless.

We reached our final stop, and swarms of taxis floated around outside, quite happy to take us to our next destination, the hostel “Mama Naxi’s Guesthouse”.

For the umpteenth time, I ushered everyone into their respective taxis, and we all went to the vague destination of the Lijiang old town, lacking an exact address, which only mattered a little, since motor vehicles (theoretically all vehicles, actually, even bicycles) are not allowed to enter the old town area of Lijiang.

It was a few minutes away from the bus station, and as soon as I got out of the taxi, I called the guesthouse.  I had actually already made one call earlier on, to notify them we were arriving, and they told us it was pretty tricky to get where we wanted to go, so they were going to try to come find us.

As soon as everyone arrived from the taxis (some of us were tricked into paying more than we ought to have, twice as much as usual, but that still only amounted to about three dollars US), we started walking through the gate of the old town.  Within moments, a small Chinese man asked if we were the party of fourteen going to Mama Naxi’s, which of course we were.  He led us straight to the guesthouse, and boy was that a good thing, because the old town there really is pretty confusing upon first visit (and maybe second, even third).

The place was a madhouse from the get go, but it had a really good reputation online, and we were prepared for the hectic-ness, more or less.

There were dogs and cats seemingly everywhere, and soon a little old lady, Mama Naxi herself, came strolling through to deal with us.  I collected everyone’s passports, and we were slowly filtered into our respective rooms.  Three others with me actually had to go into another building; they had a weird setup where the hostel was actually technically three different buildings, each with plenty of rooms.

While the hostel was dealing with the paperwork, we were all to go to our rooms and get settled.  I dropped my things off, then went straight back, wanting to make sure I was present around the dealings with the passports.

It took way longer than it should have, but whatever.  There also seemed to be some problems with someone else, other than our group, and that might have slowed things down a bit.  I don’t really know what everyone else was doing in this time, this bit took well over an hour.

My friend Jing gave me a call, but not from her phone.  Instead, she was using someone else’s number, and it turns out she couldn’t find her phone, and wanted me to check at the front desk in case she had left it there while we were signing in.  I foolishly asked Mama Naxi if she had seen a cellphone left there (in Chinese, she speaks very little English), then got my ear harangued off as she described to me for fifteen minutes in rapid fire Chinese how she didn’t have time to look for stuff like that, mistakenly thinking I was asking her to help me find it, as opposed to just asking if she had seen it.

I told her fifteen times in those fifteen minutes what I was actually asking, but you don’t tell Mama Naxi stuff, she tells you stuff.  As she harangued me, she got out a flashlight and looked around in a variety of places as superficially and forcedly as she could affect, trying to appear as though she gave a shit, and finally I just walked away.

Jing showed up, and she was a wreck.  I couldn’t tell what was wrong at first, but she could barely speak; it appeared she had fallen into a canal while walking back to the main Mama Naxi building; a car that wasn’t supposed to be there blinded her with its bright lights, so she didn’t realize she was about to step into what was probably a three foot canal, and hit her head and soiled her clothes, as well as breaking her watch.

I hugged her, and she sobbed.  I had ideas about a few things to do that night in Lijiang, but I gave up those ideas to stick around with her while she tried to recover her phone.  As I soon found out, the main reason she was sad about losing her phone was all the photos and videos she had taken on it, especially from this trip, but not only; the other bits were replaceable, but the memories weren’t.

We soon figured the only likely spot the watch could be in was on the bus that we had arrived in; Mama Naxi arranged for a driver to take us to the bus station to try our luck at it.

David came with the two of us; when we arrived, it took a bit of finagling, but the guards finally let us through to try to find the phone.  Of course it wasn’t in a lost and found; lost and founds don’t really exist in China. We still had our bus tickets from earlier on, which actually listed the license plate of the bus on it, so we went on a wild goose chase through this bus parking lot, which probably had a couple hundred buses in it, looking for it.  The lot was actually two parts, and the bus wasn’t in the first part, so we had to go through another gate to search some more, and a guard meekly said we weren’t supposed to; we ignored him and kept moving.

I don’t know for sure which one of us finally found the bus; I think it was me, but I could just be revising the experience for all I know.  Nevertheless, one of us did find it.  We all gathered over, and I lifted Jing up on my shoulders as I called her phone while we were standing next to where she had previously sat on the bus.

Sure enough, there it was, with her ridiculous Chinese ring tone and all.

Problem was, they didn’t have the keys for the bus at the station.  Apparently, at least in this part of China, the buses are sort of individually leased to the different drivers or something, so even though they’re all pooled at the same station, the individual buses are responsible for a specific bus.  So we were told we’d have to arrive the next morning to meet the driver before he leaves for his next journey.  We’d have to get up pretty early, 6am or so.

So we left in a taxi and got back to old town, already kind of exhausted from the latest hussling.  I called up Christine to find out where everyone was at the moment, and it seemed they were all eating at a noodle joint somewhere.  We went and crashed it; everyone else was already well into eating, so we sat at another table after briefly letting everyone know where we stood.

Got some crappy noodles and drinks; Jing actually opened her bottle of iced tea to find out on the bottle cap that she had “won” another, so went over to the convenience store to redeem it.  A peculiar but effective way to cheer her up a bit.

After that, it was already getting late. I don’t think anyone went to any bars this night, but to be honest I wasn’t paying attention.  The way the night had played out, I was totally detached from the main corpus of the group, and by that point I felt little compunction to reattach myself.

So I went back to my bed, and set the alarm to get myself up in a scant few hours.  Jing and David were in the same room anyway, so we all planned on doing the same. I don’t think I really slept, but whatever the case, the alarm seemed to go off immediately, even though five hours had passed or so.  This being fall, the sun rose pretty late, so it was still dark out when we got up. When I say we, this time I just mean Jing and I, David kept sleeping; I didn’t see any point in prying him up, as this should be a pretty simple task to accomplish with just the two of us.

Mama Naxi had promised to have a driver there for us when we got up to take us to the bus station again, but when we got up and went over to the main building, all the doors were (poorly) locked and the primitive alarm systems of stacks of boxes on top of chairs propped against the door were set. I went through all of them, and found no one awake within the main chambers of the hostel.

This made us despair a bit, as it meant we had to find our way to a taxi; at this point, we only sort of knew our way around old town, so it was quite the fumble out towards the clean streets that actually had taxis.  It took a while, but we did finally find one, still before sunrise, and managed to get to the bus station before opening time.  We were shown to an office, and a somewhat slimy bureaucrat welcomed us there and told us the driver was actually on his day off, and wouldn’t be coming to the station.

I couldn’t fully follow what was going on, but Jing had a back and forth with him for a while.  Apparently the punch line was that he agreed to call the bus driver and ask if he could make a visit to the station to unlock the bus and allow us in to get the phone.  He said that at best, a couple hours would be necessary for him to show up.  They’d call when the bus driver was there.

So we went back, still empty handed.  I think I laid down in bed again, I’m not sure.  A couple hours later, sure enough, the driver called, and Jing got me up so we could go to the station yet again.  They took us to the bus, slightly skeptical, but sure enough, we got into the bus and were allowed to get the phone, and Jing was ecstatic, and literally jumped for joy.

We returned to the hostel, and I took my first shower in five days.  This was my rip-roaring start to Lijiang.