Wanderlust

Changsha, China.

I feel so behind on the blog! It’s Mongolia that did it. We were away from computers for so long, and then with traveling back to China and moving on from Beijing right away I didn’t have time to really sit at a computer until it’d been a week or so. A lot (but nothing terribly interesting) has happened since we left Beijing. The night train turned out to be one of the worst nights of my life. We got the soft seats, which sound pretty pleasant especially after so many night buses of dubious quality in South America. But it was terrible. We made sure to leave the hostel 2 1/2 hours before our train so that we had plenty of time to take the subway to the station and figure everything out. When it was our turn to board we confidentally walked down the platform starting from a car in its late teens and walking down the way towards the beginning of the train since our car was #1. We got to the end of the platform and we were at car #2. So logically we should get on this car and walk through it to car #1. Nope. Car #1 was at the exact other end of the tran. After car #20. What a bunch of crap. I still don’t understand it. It was completely ridiculous. So now we had to walk all the way back down to the other end of the platform with Chinese people running past us making us incredibly nervous. When you don’t understand what’s going on or being said people running is a bad sign. But we just walked quickly determined to just jump on any car if the stupid train started moving. But we got to our car safely and got on to find out seats. The next strange thing was that our seats weren’t beside each other but across the aisle from each other. The seats were arranged in pairs on each side of the aisle and every other pair had at least one person in it. We had no idea how to ask someone to switch us seats and we highly doubted anyone would trade their window seat (which you could lean against) or their two seats to themselves (which you could lie down on) for an aisle seat by someone else. The next bg surprise was that oru seats didn’t recline. Not at all. At first I thought this was because our seats had a sort of glass wall behind them, but when I looked around none of the seats reclined! What’s going on? It was ridiculous. How are you supposed to sleep in a seat that not only doesn’t recline but that is rigidly upright. I’ve never sat so upright in my life! I tried putting my neck pillow on, but it just pushed my head forward into my chest! It was miserable. I barely slept all night, and when I did manage to pass out I’d wake up shortly there after in some incredibly uncomfortable slumped over position with parts of my body I didn’t know existed throbbing! I’m getting older, I think. My body can no longer comfortably slump. What a horrible night. I remember waking up at one point thinking it had to be close to sunrise and asking Steve (who just accepted he wouldn’t be able to sleep and was reading–something I’ve never had to accept since I sleep so well) what time it was–3 a.m. 3 a.m.! We weren’t arriving in Shanghai until 7. I had four more hours of torture before we could get off. I was not happy. And to make things worse the guy across from me (who had two seats to himself) was happily downing a six pack and rocking out to his headphones in a wife beater t-shirt while staring at me. For hours. I knew before coming to China that it’s acceptable to stare and that people were going to stare at me, but this was a little too much. Every time I’d wake up, he’d be staring. And he was facing me with just a little table between us.  I was exhausted and angry and frustrated by the whole fact that crappy buses in S. America that were falling apart were more comfortable than ths brand new looking train in China when we weren’t even in the cheapest hard seats! And this man was staring at me. It was creeping me out. I tried to just keep my eye mask on so at least I wouldn’t see him. Miserable, miserable night.

And poor Shanghai, my train experience was not a good introduction for us. I really didn’t like Shanghai. I think in a way Beijing spoiled me. We were in such a nice hostel with a really friendly, helpful, English-speaking staff in a nice little hutong neighborhood that was small and cute and very comfortable. Shanghai was the opposite. I felt very much like the little country mouse (which is ironic since between my sister and I, I’ve always been the city mouse…Cara, you would get eaten alive in Shanghai!). There were crowds and giant streets and cars with crazy drivers who never followed the traffic signs and giant, giant buildings everywhere. I’ve been to big cities before. I’ve never particularly been fond of them, but I live(d–since I’m homeless now) across the bay from San Francisco and I like it there. It was a certain charm. Even the financial district with its towering buildings feels small and safe compared to any of the streets we walked down in Shanghai. The city (or the little, really, that we saw of it) felt crazy and crowded and huge. I think, too, that coming almost directly from Mongolia and the wide-open spaces had a lot to do with my dislike of Shanghai. (It was more than dislike, really. It sort of freaked me out. I felt unsafe and the people staring felt much more sinister than it ever did in Beijing. It just felt all wrong.) I think, too, that Shanghai was difficult because everything was so expensive. We had a hard time finding anything to eat that wasn’t noodles. I love noodles in any form, but Steve gets sick of noodly soup pretty quickly and not knowing what you’re ordering (we know the symbol for noodle) you never know what you’re going to get, so we didn’t want to play the noodle card too often. We ended up eating the first night in a little divey restaurant where an old woman with very few teeth stared at us while we ate. It was pretty good–meat, fungi, and green peppers–except that some of the green peppers (they all looked the same) were little, evil firey tongue-death bombs that I think the old woman purposefully hid in our food to watch our reactions! It was nuts. They all looked exactly the same, and sometimes even after you nibbled a little corner of a pepper and thought it was safe, you’d pop it in your mouth and would have to spit it right back out! It was evil.  The next night we just ate in our hostel, which was pretty cheap and fairly good (I had noodle soup). I also watched ‘Forest Gump’ in the little bar/restaurant which was much more cheesy than I remembered but nice in a comforting, home sort of way. Shanghai was also the first time in China I felt homesick. The not so good food and feeling sort of small and scared didn’t help much. We spent most of the second day making our way to the bus station to get a ticket out for the next morning. I’d had enough of Shanghai already, and we were just stopping there briefly, anyway, on our way to Huang Shan, one of China’s holy mountains.

One big problem with China’s National Day messing up our well-laid plans is that we had to quickly make a new plan on the train from Mongolia. We knew we didn’t want to stay long in Beijing and we also knew that we had less time to do everything we wanted in China before getting to Guilin to volunteer by the beginning of November. So we decided to cut out Pingyao (sadly, for me, but there’s a similar old-style town in Yunnan Provence that maybe we can go to), Xi’an (no Terracotta Warriors–we’d heard around that they were pretty disappointing), and no Longmen Caves. Instead we were going to go straight to Huang Shan via a short stop off in Shanghai since it was on the way and would break up the trip. But we didn’t really look at all the details about Huang Shan until we were on the bus from Shanghai to Tunxi, the town just outside the mountain. By the time we’d gotten to Tunxi, we’d realized that it was way over our budget to do Huang Shan. It was going to cost almost $100 just for us to get onto the mountain and then we were going to have to stay at least one night up there in the incredibly over-priced lodgings (not to mention staying a couple of nights in the surrounding towns which also had inflated prices for all of the tourists). One thing about China that we didn’t encounter in S. America is that it’s hard to find a hotel if it’s not mentioned in the guide book. First, we can’t usually tell if something is a hotel unless it’s in English and then it’s usually a giant hotel that’s way over our budget. Second, a lot of places aren’t allowed to accept foreign visitors, so we couldn’t just wander into any old place and get a room. So we’re pretty limited about our lodging choices. We decided just to grab some snacks and move on from Tunxi right away. We had read about a cute sounding town in our guidebook while we were on the bus that sounded like a lovely place to relax for a few days and (hopefully) get away from all of the skyscrapers (it seems like every town in China has more skyscrapers than the States’ biggest cities. It’s amazing and a little sad). So for the past two days (I think…I’ve lost track) we’ve been making our way to that town (Fenghuang in Hunan province). And we’re almost there! It’s been a crazy few days of buses and trains. We took a bus from Shanghai, then an overnight sleeper train, then another bus. Last night we spent the night in a shabby motel in Changsha (which smelled, temptingly–and confusingly–like French Toast, which was tortuous–hence the blog title), which has some Communist and Mao sites since he used to live here when the Communist party was starting up (and he was born nearby). This area is also known for its spicy food, which so far we’ve been able to avoid. Tonight we’re taking a hard seat overnight train (even though I swore I wouldn’t take a non-sleeping train China again, we had little choice since the trains were all booked up) to Jishou where we can take a 1 1/2 hour bus to Fenghuang. This has been a very time consuming (and expensive!) detour, but hopefully the town will be a nice place to relax for a while and walk around in the countryside (which we’ve seen bits of from bus windows–including rice paddes and water buffalo!–but otherwise haven’t seen any except for when we were in Mongolia). There’s a park/reserve nearby that we might check out, but otherwise I hope for a nice, cheap place to stay with no skyscrapers and yummy food where I can feel like I’m in China and not some random, giant city.

Our plans for the next few weeks are to take a riverboat trip up the Yangze, through the 3 Gorges Dam. We’re going to do it upriver instead of down since we’re headed that way. We’ll probably get off the boat and walk around various sites along the way, too, but who knows. We’re finding it hard to plan too far in advance in China since things are never what we expect. After the river cruise, it’s on to Chengdu where we want to see the giant Buddha and the panda reserve among a few other things. Then, I think, it’s down to Guilin. We have more time still then we thought, so we might throw some more stuff in there or change our minds completely (maybe go to Guilin earlier, who knows?!). We’re going to try to see Hong Kong on a long weekend trip while we’re volunteering. And we both really want to see Yunnan province which is in the far S.W. so maybe we’ll do that after volunteering? China is a giant country and even with all our jumping around we really haven’t seen much yet. Beijing, Shanghai, and now Changsha (which isn’t really much of anything. Although for lunch we had a yummy eggplant dish that came in a sizzling pot of oil and some strange white vegetable that was crunchy but otherwise sort of tasteless. It had lots of holes and was roundish–I think it might have been lotus root…). So I’m looking forward to actually seeing some more of China instead of just from train and bus windows. And maybe having some small town experiences since everything has been so overwhelmingly tall.

I feel like I didn’t quite give my Mongolian trip blog enough time and attention. Writing about it again brought up my annoyance with the guy who ran the Tseren Tours. It’s a shame to let his rudeness affect our experience, and in my mind I’ve already started to forget about him and all of the money unpleasantness. It really was a wonderful adventure and I’m really glad we did it. Something I forgot to mention in that post is how I realized during that trip that I’ve already changed a lot during this world tour. A good example is that when I was around ten my mom moved us from Pennsylvania to Iowa and at least twice a year we’d make the 15 hour (or something like that) drive across the States to visit our family. When I was younger I’d just sleep and read the whole trip (and even as recently as my drive with my mom from Alabama to Pennsylvania before flying to Peru I mostly just read and slept and chatted). I never looked out the window at anything and my mom used to give me a hard time about it. But during the trip to Mongolia, I just stared out the window for hours, thinking and looking, and it was really nice and beautiful and calming. I still sleep a lot on buses and trains but I also look around a lot more than I ever used to. Maybe it’s because I’m in more interesting places (usually) than Interstate 80 going through Ohio (arguably the most boring stretch of road in the world) or maybe I’m just learning to appreciate my surroundings a little more. Who knows. It’s probably a little bit of both (with the sheer amount of time I’m spending in transit thrown in for good measure!).

Tags: Changsha, China, chinese train, Shanghai, soft seat

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 1:57 am and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.