I had made a mad vow to travel only by land in China. I was at the farthest reach of China, and my plane home left from Hong Kong in two and a half weeks.
The bus from Kashgar to Urumchi was two days, lying on a pallet berth. Flat gravel desert on the right, dry brownish red fractal mountains on the left, for two days. The old woman in the berth next to mine was friendly and smiled at me, but in two days we did not manage to communicate one word.
I got off in the middle of the night in a desolate town of Toksun before Urumchi and negotiated with an unsavory cab driver to take me on a shortcut to Turpan. I stayed alert during this drive.
A day in Turpan seeing the ruins of ancient adobe desert ruins, looking more like strange geological formations, bizarre humps of mud.
Then a three-day train ride to Chengdu, in Sichuan. When the train stopped in Hami, I bought a bundle of three of the famous Hami melons on the platform, kept one for myself and gave the other two to my neighbors. As a result I spent the next three days fighting off or giving in to reciprocal offers of food. The old woman from the Kashgar bus was in the compartment next to mine, and for three more days we did not manage to communicate one word between us, try though we did. On the evening of the second day we were passing through the desert of the Hexi corridor, a sliver of the Gobi desert visible in the distant, broken fragments of the Great Wall and its towers running parallel to the track. On the morning of the third day we were in the steep green valleys of Sichuan, above the Jaliang Jiang, a tributary of the Yangtze, green-gray with copper-brown currents, people below carrying large loads on their backs as they forded the river on foot or rode on rowed ferries. The hills were steep with scattered attempts at terraces.
Near Chengdu, I went to Emeishan, where I spent two days hiking the steep, often staired, misty trails of mountains out of Chinese landscape paintings, spending the night in a frigid Buddhist monastery and scaring off marauding baboon-sized Tibetan macaques with a 5-yuan monkey stick.
On the two-day train ride to Kunming, I offered a tangerine to Lu Pan, a 28-year-old salesman for a medical electronics firm, and in Kunming he stood in line with me for an hour to make sure I got a good ticket for my next two-day train ride to Guilin. On that ride I talked with a young woman from Manchuria who spoke good English, although she made mistakes like ``barrier'' for ``barren'' and ``air conductored'' for ``air conditioned'', and earnestly wrote down all my corrections in her notebook of English phrases. She laughed at the speed of my recent travels and thought I should travel with a friend.
Guilin is an ugly Chinese city plunked down in an utterly beautiful natural setting. It is as though the Americans had taken the beautiful Yosemite valley and filled it with Fresno. I had bitten into a bad hard-boiled egg at a train station in the morning, and ate a dubious street dinner in the evening. Whatever the cause, I spent the night emptying out at both ends, and the morning lying utterly spent on my bed, barely able to move. I got up around noon to move slowly around town, drinking liters to fight dehydration in the heat. There was supposed to be a beautiful view from the roof of the Li Jiang Hotel, and indeed there was. When I went out, the guide was showing a tour group the view. When I went to leave, the tour group had already left and the guide had locked the door behind her. I had to shout down to the doorman thirteen stories below to get released. In the late afternoon I took the bus to the smaller town of Yangshuo, in an even more beautiful natural setting.
I wanted to arrange a river trip through the karst peaks, and arrange my bus and boat to Hong Kong. In the lobby of the Sihai hotel there was a CITS desk, and behind it was Uncle Bob. He spoke excellent English, but was very overbearing and tightly wound. He said the best part of the river was between Xingping and Yanti, but if I was only going to be here one day, he insisted I should get off at Xingping and bicycle back from there. He didn't like my idea of going all the way to Yanti and hiring a taxi to wait for me there. But when I insisted on doing that, he insisted on arranging the taxi. ``I can get my own taxi,'' I said. ``Of course you can!'' he shouted, almost vituperatively. ``But I can get it for you cheaper!''
For getting to Hong Kong, he strongly discouraged my plan of taking the six-hour night bus to Wuzhou and spending all day the following day taking a hydrofoil down the West River. The bus was unreliable and took a bad road, and you had to catch it at night out on the highway. He insisted I take a twelve-hour night bus to Guangzhou instead, missing the landscape of Guangdong province, and taking a three-hour high-speed ferry from there. He would sell me all the tickets here.
Uncle Bob epitomized for me the coercive nature of the official Chinese tourist industry, in an extreme and naked form, trying to channel all tourists into a small number of options and demanding top dollar for everything.
I went out for dinner, and when I came back, I signed up for the boat trip all the way to Yanti, and paid him 80 yuan for a taxi to pick me up there. He pushed me to buy his Hong Kong package as well, but I postponed.
The next morning Uncle Bob walked me down to the river and showed me my boat, now trying to sell me the night bus to Wuzhou and the hydrofoil to Hong Kong, for a combined price of 500 yuan. I learned later the true cost was 340 yuan.
There were about fifteen tourists on the boat, including a young Dutch couple and two dour heavy-set French women. I spent the ride sitting on a small stool on the front deck. Once when I stood up to take a picture, one of the French women grabbed my seat. I quickly reclaimed it.
The Li River passes through magnificent jungle-covered steep karst peaks, and the river itself teems with life. Gangs of boys swam in swimsuits. Girls in twos and threes waded in shallow water in hiked-up skirts. Fishermen with cormorants stood on three-log boats barely above the level of the water. Water buffalo grazed with their heads underwater eating river weeds, and a woman pulled up weeds from the bottom and piled them onto her boat. People with bundles of grass at each end of a balanced pole walked along the bank.
At Yangti I got off, and so did the young Dutch couple and the dour French women. The taxi was waiting for me, a minivan. I asked the Dutch couple if they wanted a ride back to Yangshuo, rather than waiting for a chancey bus, and they said yes. The French women asked if they could come along, and I said yes. The driver was quite unhappy with this. He had wanted to fill up the minivan with his ``sister'' and two older Chinese women. My view was that I had paid for the taxi and I could take along anyone I wanted. I prevailed. His ``sister'' was able to squeeze into the back seat, but the two older women had to be left behind. My explanation to him: ``Wo de peng you. Ni de peng you.'' (``My friends. Your friends.'') He seemed to smile at this.
It was several kilometers to the main road, amidst karst peaks and irridescent green-yellow rice fields. Once on the main road the driver called Uncle Bob on his cell phone and complained that he was giving a ride to five people, not one. Then he handed the phone to me. Uncle Bob yelled at me, bawling me out for inviting the others along. I said I had paid for the taxi and could use it as I pleased. He said they should get out. I said I wasn't going to put them out on the highway. He said it was too much responsibility for the driver. To save face, he concluded by instructing the driver to drive slowly and carefully, and told me he had done so.
Back in Yangshuo the Dutch couple and the French women wanted to pay me their share of the taxi. I declined, but suggested they could tip the driver instead. The Dutch couple did; the French women didn't.
On the way back to the hotel, I ran into a man who the night before had asked if I wanted to change money--Mister Xu. I asked if he could arrange the night bus to Wuzhou for me. He made a phone call and said he could, and I paid him 80 yuan.
Uncle Bob was waiting for me when I got back to the hotel. He castigated me again for bringing the others back in the taxi. Then he wanted to know if I had decided to take the night bus to Wuzhou. I told him I didn't think we made a good team and that I wanted to work with someone else. Then he exploded. I should be happy that I got my own way. I shouldn't be mad at him. All Americans are like that--troublemakers who don't do things the right way. I replied that he had yelled at me in the taxi and now again at the hotel, and in addition he was insulting my country, and he wondered why I wouldn't work with him. I said the only reason he was angry was that he thought he could have gotten more money out of five people than just the 80 yuan.
I packed, and at eight I went to the street corner where Mr. Xu hung out. We took a pedicab to the edge of town by the highway, and waited there for more than an hour in the dark, by the busy highway, peering into the oncoming headlights at the Chinese characters on the buses that passed. I was grateful to have it his concern to stop the right bus, and not mine.
The bus he had contacted arrived. I boarded. On the Golmud-Lhasa bus I had thought of the metaphor of being in a bouncing lawn chair for the duration. Here it was not metaphor. A wooden lawn chair, too short for me, had been set up in the middle aisle right behind the driver, and that was my place. Mr. Xu had assured me the driver and conductor were friends of his and would take care of me. That was apparently true. The driver was surly and gruff, but as I lay there, he grabbed my ankle and placed it between him and the gear shift, so I would be more comfortable.