travelling in the twenty-first century
Thursday, February 26th, 2009by a tired Mama
Yangshuo to Guangzhou, China
Take a red plastic bag that’s hanging beside the door to put your shoes in before you creep along to the end where you are going to spend the rest of the night. Go quietly, because it’s almost full and even though it’s only 8:30 most other passengers are snuggled up, already asleep.
Are you in an aeroplane? No, it’s more comfortable than that.
On a train? Negative again; definitely less room than a train sleeper, and ever-so-much-more bumpy once you get going.
You’re on an overnight sleeper bus, not that there’ll be a lot of sleeping! Across the width of the bus there are three rows of berths and two aisles, all of which are narrow. Along the length of the bus, the berths are cleverly sandwiched together, heads raised above the person-behind-you’s feet. This slight incline is just enough to ensure you spend the night slipping down the bed – that is, unless your legs are big enough to NOT allow you to actually fit in the designated leg space. That would be Rob. Thankfully, among others, we had the lower berths at the very back of the bus, which were essentially mattresses on the floor and he was able to let his non-pygmy legs stretch down the aisle. We giggle to think what a night he’d have had if he had been given an upper berth. As it was, we had ER2 squeezed on the floor between us and she had a restless night – having fallen off a swing a few hours before, she was sporting an egg on the back of her head the size of a….well, a good-sized chicken’s egg….and every time she rolled onto it she stirred. Then there were the bumps we flew over aeroplane-style….and the oncoming traffic, whose lane we shared and retreated hastily from far too often. As if these factors were not enough to keep one from sleeping, there were televisions showing Chinese war movies complete with slashing swords and galloping horses and endless rounds of gunfire. Soon after midnight we were treated to a Chinaman-goes-to-rescue-princess-from-Nevada-desert Western. Halfway through this gripping tale it was lightning quick pitstop time. Poor ol’ Mboy6 was not exactly awake, and lacking the time to tuck shoelaces into his shoes, managed to fall flat on his face – twice! Better on the road than anywhere near the toilets themselves – that would have been messy, smelly and totally disgusting. Overflowing as they were.
The Western continued and I began to despair of getting ANY sleep. But it was the last movie for the night, and unlike the daytime Thai busses, it was not followed with studio-shot reality shows with hordes of screaming schoolgirls. Small mercy.
“Guangzhou. Guangzhou.”
What? It’s still dark. It’s only 5:30 – we’re not meant to arrive for another half hour. We were just about to start gathering our belongings together. But the bus has stopped and we have been gestured at to remove ourselves right now. Hurriedly we wake sleeping children, collect socks and water bottles and daypacks and jackets and boots and emergency breakfast supplies, hoping wildly that nothing has been left behind – in the darkness we can’t see a thing.
We disembark, but where is the bus station? We have been dropped at the side of the road, and not just any road. This is a major expressway, with a spaghetti-like tangle of roads snaking around us and towering over us, bridges above and beside.
Maybe we are at the right place, after all. Someone’s expecting us! Half a dozen taxi drivers are all waiting to take us wherever we want to go for the handsome sum of one red hundred yuan note. We wave the GPS unit under their noses, inform them they will use the metre and everyone laughs heartily. But first we need to find our destination. So there on the side of a humming Guangzhou highway before dawn with a background murmur of I-still-want-to-be-sleeping-grizzle from the smallest choristers, we crank up the laptop. It’s what you do when a printer didn’t make it to the list of essential travel items. And it contains directions in Chinese characters to our destination, which mean nothing to us, but enough to our chauffeurs to enable them to get us there for well under half their first-suggested price.
We are reminded later in the afternoon that we are travelling in modern times. Happily settled in our apartment, it seems prudent to catch up on a little of the lost night’s sleep. However, there’s a pneumatic drill woodpeckering away at the concrete floor directly above us. So loud it is, we cannot hear each other, even if we shout.
Children are so exhausted they all slumber despite the racket…..Rob texts (I bet Marco Polo didn’t do that!) the apartment oversee-er, and we are shifted to a new one within an hour. Seriously good service. Especially as we are now in a larger suite with city and park views depending where you look, in-room internet, daily washing and cleaning service, and best of all a shower with a door so it does not splash all over the bathroom floor and toilet seat. Modern luxury, modern travelling.
No matter how hard I watched, I couldn't work out how he did it. This man at the front of a little shop on the street started with a ball of dough ... 
rayres