so i decided to try and save some money. the airfare from lhasa to chengdu is a steep $200, a bus trip is $60. being that i had time (or i thought i did) i went with the bus. i knew it was a long trip, but it turned out to be a lot longer than it was supposed to be.
first, the bus. its a double decker sleeper bus. sean, al, and i took one similar for 9 hours from kunming to lijang. that was the bus ride where we had to buy Al an extra bed in the back of the bus because he wouldn't fit in one. so, the beds are small. they're actually metal boxes about 4'5" in length where you have a metal box for a pillow. they're rough. i knew this. i also knew that the trip was supposed to take "3 days" - whatever that means.
i was mainly excited to travel by bus to see the scenery. it did not disappoint. the first night we drove through high altitude and a snow storm. i could tell we were high because of my pounding headache. i saw glaciers and prairies, and beautiful gorges and a powerful river (that after the rafting trip made me want to kayak it). plenty of lush, beautiful scenery in sichuan, and i saw part of the three gorges dam project where they were relocating entire villages above the flood line. impressive.
i also wanted a taste of chinese travel. the bus did not disappoint on that front either. i was the only non-chinese on the bus, and the other passengers loved the fact that i was there. i went by laowai, which literally means "outside person." the man sleeping in the bin next to me was particularly fond of calling me laowai and once he learned i spoke literally no chinese, he kept trying to tease me. it was fun, for the first 12 hours, but eventually got annoying because even though i didn't understand what he was saying, i knew he kept saying the same thing. some younger chinese on the bus befriended me, but because they spoke about as much english as i spoke chinese, we could hardly communicate anything more than pointing and saying if something was good or not.
the chinese smoke like chimneys at all hours. that was the worst. waking up in the middle of the night because the guy below my bunk was smoking is very unpleasant. a boy sleeping next to me had the most raunchiest of smells emanating from his feet, so i couldn't turn my head to the right. there was also a significant amount of hacking up lung butter and spitting. the women even do this - often. they are also incredibly loud, talking on their cellphones - loudly - at all hours. but they're great to travel with because they're always having fun. they didn't care that the bus was stopped, or broken, or that we weren't eating. they were constantly deriding either me (which i didn't care cause i didn't understand them) or the sifu (the bus driver, literally "master" a holdover from communist days) or each other (i think). we ate sporadically. my friends ordered food for me and we ate nearly every part of the pig (pig ears, intestines, and tails).
the bus meandered on its way. i'm pretty sure the route the driver took was a little more than irregular - we often drove off-road (hard to sleep with your head banging against the window). the bus broke down no less than 3 times. we stopped often for no apparent reason, and no one on the bus seemed to care when or if we would actually ever get to chengdu. at one point, when we were about 100 km from chengdu, we were stopped by police and told that the road was closed. at first i thought what they were saying was that we couldn't go through at all, and we would have to drive another day to get around the construction. in the end though, we just waited adding another 8 hours, and another night of trying to sleep, on the bus. a heartbreaker at that point.
it was definitely an experience. but after 90 hours of being in that metal bin, i had had enough. lucky me, a train is providing much of my descent toward laos. onward.
No comments:
Post a Comment