China – Partying with Dark Wing Duck
Our taxi drive from the pier was terrible. We were dropped off on the corner of some street in Yichang, the closest town to the stopping point of the gorge tour. We wanted the bus station, but of course this guy has a friend who has a bus who’s leaving right NOW! So we pay our money and get in. Of course this guy drives around all hell and creation waiting for other passengers. Even the bus has touts. We have 2 touts on our bus each with 2 cell phones. They’re in connection with more of the taxi driver friends who pick up more people being dropped off here and there, but these people seem ok with this…..anyhow, after about 1.5hours and 3 circles of the town later, we were on our way to Wuhan. What DO WE DO WRONG!!! This shit keeps happening to us! We ask for a bus station and we get a street corner. Maybe they think they’re doing us a favor and getting us a cheaper ticket?
hmm
We get to Wuhan and again we’re getting dropped off on the side of the street. We WANT the bus station!!!! He refuses to take us and at this time, Andre has to pee so bad that we don’t bother arguing anymore. We just get out and walk in the direction he’s pointing. And it’s raining and it’s dark and it’s REALLY cold!. Wuhan HOT POT my ass! Andre finds a favorite bush and we finally find the bus station 30 minutes later. We suspect that they weren’t aloud to go to the bus station as they were a fly-by-night bus company. And if that’s not enough, we were on the other side of town than what we thought we were paying for!
Eventually we arrive at the hotel we were looking for via a cab, very weird place with the restuarant patrons spitting on the floor next to us. We ate quickly, stayed one night, bought train tickets to Guilin the next day. This time we’re travelling in hard sleeper……..and we weren’t able to get bunks in the same cabin so the girl wrote me a note in Chinese asking that we be put in the same cabin. I have held onto this note for later use!
The note turned out handy and the attendant asked one of the Chinese locals to change with me, no problem! Great note!! The ride turned out to be one of the best trips we’ve had in China. ALhtough people were smoking everywhere all the time, we were sharing a cabin/hallway (hard sleepers have 6 beds in a doorless compartment) with an American dude from Minnesota named Douglas, we totalled the only 3 white people in the entire car – and we were a site to be seen apparently. Every person took a turn to poke their head around a corner and watched us white people drink beer!
Eventually we got to know another person in our compartment – a tour guide for about 20 Chinese people on board. She spoke just a small amount of English but this made the conversation alot easier. As soon as we asked one person to sit with us, everyone sat with us, took turns trying to talk to us and then they all wanted to feed us! This was where and when we knew we would never die of bird flu. We were eating hard boiled eggs that looked like they had been boiled in soya sauce 10 years ago, duck bits and parts that already looked like they had been eaten, and duck intestine. We know it was intestine because my little handy phrase book from Berlitz actually has the word intestine in it – NICE! We started calling them Dark-Wing duck wings – since they were duck and the meat was dark! We had had a lot to drink at this point, I think. Then some old dude, who was also sleeping in our compartment passed us this crazy bottle of stuff. It was opened and then it was drank! The old guy didn’t want any of it, he just preferred to watch us all drink it as he looked on from his very top bunk! The other local guys drank it, so at least we knew it wasn’t poison….although it tasted like it. At every stop the train made, Andre and Doug jumped off the train to buy beer from the vendors. We shared with everyone and we think that made them feel they should share more. Before we knew it, a canteen was passed around. Now this canteen looked like it was from WWII, but this didn’t stop anyone from tasting it……. and it definitely tasted like hooch!! (moonshine!). It’s not as good as yours Scotty! Needless to say that Andre had quite the shine on the next morning when we arrived at 6am in Guilin!
Notes: bus from Yichang to Wuhan 70yuan each, train from Wuhan to Guilin hard sleeper 198 yuan each, the CITS location has changed from the Lonely PLanet 2002 edition.
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