(Warning: This post involves a lot of venting. More happy stories to come!)
Yesterday (location: Lanzhou, Gansu Province) was one of those days when it seems that China is trying to tell me that “you shouldn’t be here.” The day was all about transportation: buying tickets for the rest of our trip and then taking an excursion to Bingling Si. It was one frustration after another.
- We are going back to Lanzhou as a transit point to Langmusi. By all accounts, Langmusi and Xiahe are now open to foreigners. (They were closed after the Tibetan protests last year.) But this information has not yet trickled down to the Lanzhou bus station, which is still refusing to sell tickets to those places. We’re going to have to go three hours out of our way to Xining just to backtrack to Langmusi.
- To get to Bingling Si, a collection of Buddhist cave paintings and carvings outside of Lanzhou, you have to take a bus first to Liujiaxia. Buses run every 20 minutes, but when I showed up at 10:30, I was told I couldn’t buy a ticket until 12 because I had to wait for a foreigner bus. Of course, having wasted 90 minutes, I ended up on a bus full of Chinese people. I still don’t understand…
- On my way back from Bingling Si, the bus attendant tried to charge me 80 kuai for a ticket that costs 17 kuai. I knew this because I bought the same ticket in the other direction earlier the same day. He claimed that I needed to pay some kind of “insurance,” which was of course not required of all the other passengers. When he realized I wasn’t going to back down, he started lowering the supposed “price.” Would I pay 47 kuai? 37 kuai? No, I would pay 17 kuai, the same as everyone else.
It was definitely a tough day, especially without anyone to laugh about it with. That is, I think, the worst part of traveling solo, which I otherwise enjoy. But good things did happen — the weather was sunny and not too hot, I ate some delicious peaches, and I shared a speedboat with a very funny group from Qinghai on a work-unit jaunt. The highlight of that was actually when our speedboat broke down (briefly) in the middle of the reservoir. It was a Yamaha motor, which inspired the inevitable crack about how it was all Japan’s fault. You should have seen them stare when I laughed with everyone else — they certainly didn’t expect the foreigner to be in on the joke!
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