the journey is half the adventure
Saturday, February 14th, 2009by Rachael
Nanning to Yangmei, China
Yesterday’s ticketing saga was good preparation for today….and Rob observes how cool-as-a-cucumber our kids are with turning up at a station having no idea how to get where we’re going and just waiting patiently until something is sorted out! Same with finding a bed….or food…..though if the latter takes too long they can get a bit antsy!
We leave most of our bags at the hotel and head out to get a taxi. We now know how to cross the road and we have a map of where we’re going. We can even say the name of the bus station. But we do not get *too* confident – and rightly so. At the bus station I say our destination, Yangmei, and the attendant behind the counter shakes her head. She also says a lot, but I only understand the headshake. Her colleague types something in to the computer, they confer and then talk at me again. To aid my understanding, they scrawl Chinese characters on paper, and even underline one of them. Finally accepting that I am not going to enter the conversation, one girl signals for us to follow. We end up at a ticket booth where (I think) she asks how many tickets we need. Hoping the little two are free, I answer with the only number I know – eight 😉 Thankfully we’ve picked up the Chinese equivalent of the dollar sign and so I know the next scribble offered to me is a price. We must be going somewhere after all! The tickets probably tell us where, but all I can work out is we’re leaving at 11:10. It is currently 11:05. And two children need the toilet. The toilets are a story in themselves, but we’ve got a bus to catch in this one. We are escorted across the grounds and after a lightning toilet stop, we leave.
Here we are on a local bus, thinking this is a good way to meet local people, and there’s only one other passenger.
We are soon out of the city and driving through acres of gently terraced vegetable gardens. Planting, watering, weeding, staking…..it all flashes by. After an hour we grind to a halt, a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere. Mr GPS assures us there is a bridge up ahead. I disembark and go for a wander, discovering we are about to wait a long while for a barge to be tug-boated back and forth across the river a few times before it will be our turn.
After the river, we start bouncing our way along, until suddenly we meet a bus coming the other way. I cannot see how these two are going to pass on this narrow rural road. Ours pulls over, and taking a very conservative approach, our driver stops altogether. He signals us to get off. It would appear we are supposed to board the other bus going back the way we have just come from, and in the ruckus that follows I fail to see how the busses pass each other.
Positioned across the doorway of the new bus is a very nice wooden desk. Getting past it proves to be a challenge, and manoeuvring three backpacks, an impossibility. One goes on top of the desk, one underneath and the third is somehow balanced by Rob on the stairs. Kids squeeze their way through and some find plastic stools to sit on. We are spread along the entire length of the very full and friendly bus. Goodbye disappointment at not travelling with locals! Parallel “conversations” are carried out at both ends of the bus as it takes off. FAST. Hanging on for dear life, stomachs almost flying out our open mouths, we swerve around corners and fly over rolller-coaster-like hillocks. What an adventure for only four yuan (just over a NZ dollar).
And what’s more, the bus actually goes to Yangmei!
It stops inside the city gates where a gaggle of brochure-wavers vie for our attention. We manage to convince one of them we do not want an ox-cart ride right now, but would prefer to find somewhere to sleep. We can even tell her where there are two places with beds that we know of – none of the crowd seems to understand. Helpful Lady indicates she knows a place, so we follow her. We pass a very hotel-ish-looking building, which we would have enquired at if we were on our own, and end up at a small residence with only one bed. The next one has three. After half an hour of wandering around town we return at the original hotel, which “surprisingly” has plenty of beds. With no common language (do YOU know what two fingers placed across each other in an X shape means?), it takes quite some time to even be shown the rooms and then to choose two and work out a price. On our travels we have seen many people sleep on bamboo mats on wooden-slatted frames. Tonight we are going to join them. (We’re a wee bit soft; even though it’s supposed to be ten degrees winter here, it is easily sweat-drips-thirty so we won’t be needing the provided duvets – they can go UNDER us!)
But first we need dinner. At this late afternoon hour, stalls are being set up around the square with noodles, meat and fresh vegetables – mothers emerge from houses to buy the evening meal provisions, but we have no means of cooking so this fresh locally-produced food is of no help to us. Most tourists leave by 4:30, last bus time. Correspondingly, there are few restaurants. We find some that will slaughter a chicken and cook it up for us, but the bird flu threat prevails in these parts, ruling out that option. We buy a bunch of bananas to nibble on and provide us with some change to give to Helpful Lady, who is telling us a big story about how difficult it was to find us somewhere to sleep. Clutching her wages, she scurries away.
Down by the river some women tend woks over fires…they are selling fish and chips, a quintessentially-kiwi meal – with a twist. The fish are small, whole, still staring at us, fried in batter, and require an inordinate amount of work to get any flesh. The chips are more like potato fritters, only they’re made from taro and kumara. We devour one each (buying out three ladies in the process!) and a small bag of fish. Everyone is still hungry, so we wander. After half an hour we spot a lady carrying two baskets on a stick across her shoulders. It might be fill-you-up rice, so we sprint after her. Unable to ask what she is selling (or even IF she is selling), we look interested and she untangles herself from the baskets and sets up shop right there on the stone-paved street. After arranging bottles and jars of famous-in-Yangmei-fermented-vegetables, and offering us a stool to crouch on, she peels back the muslin cloth from a shallow pan of White Something. It would seem rude at this point to refuse to try any, so we order one bowl. She pours oil over a strip of the White and proceeds to slice it into smaller pieces. These she flips into a plastic bowl, pours on soy sauce and some other unidentifiable sauce and offers for us to choose fermented vegetables to go with it. I nibble the White (with the consistency of thick jelly and tasting of nothing, it is not objectionable), offer it around and we decide that, if nothing else, it will fill us up. We order four more bowls. And then another five, which pleases her so much she offers a sixth for free!
We finish dinner down by the river, enjoying another glorious sunset.
rayres