Asian Tour 2000
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ARCHIVES: Notes from the Asian Tour...Yes, I was on one of these buses.
A BIT ABOUT CHINA I NEED to preface this by saying CHINA is wonderful. The people, the food, the everything has been a blast. That said, here are a couple of funny, weird things that have happened. The few things that haven't been the best. August 20th, 2000 We're in Dali now. This is nice and relaxing. We went hiking around a mountain today on THE CLOUD ROAD. But we did have one MAJORLY difficult experience. We are quite alright and nothing bad happened to us but it was a tremendous hassle. BUS TRIP TO DALI FROM KUNMING: Supposed to leave at 9:30pm, left at 11:00pm. But we had problems before that. Someone put us on the wrong bus as a scam. Luckily we got off before anything really was a problem but I was SO PISSED (I'm not sure why, it wasn't a big deal and we'd had a great day. I was just mad at being lied to). So as we departed that bus a yelled "TA MA DA!" in the guy's face, essentially "Fuck you!" Which I had not planned on using except with dire cause but I was SO angry. Saying that here is MUCH worse than in the states. First he looked shocked then he was mad (maybe embarrassed) and another tout just shook her head and back out of my way. So we got on the "correct" bus only to be hassled by the ticket collector about or seats being changed because I am tall, etc (too much to go in to it was just a hassle and I was flustered from the other bus). The bus was okay once we got moving. Only 8 hours to Dali. Then at 4:00am the bus stopped, men yelled and men ran! Four guys had stolen some things from five passengers, NOT ME! Apparently they took some stuff then THE BUS STOPPED FOR THEM, on a highway in the middle of nowhere and they got off and ran. This happened just as a Chinese guy was either waking up or had just gotten his bag snatched. He ran off the bus but couldn't catch them. Obviously the bus driver was in on this scam. He stopped the bus! So the Chinese passenger is yelling at the driver. Making calls on his cell-phone. Meanwhile two British guys looked through their bags to discover one had been slashed and two cameras had been taken! Also another bag had been opened and a cell-phone and radio were stolen. I have no idea what the Chinese people had stolen. SO the bus went to a toll booth to find police. We spent an hour there. We had NO idea what was going on NO one spoke English. But the gist was the Chinese guy was blaming the driver and ticket collector for the robbery. But they were saying "No they jumped off the bus!" They were OBVIOUSLY lying. They looked guilty as sin! So after the hour at the toll booth we drove to a police station. We were there for 3 hours. We gave statements but no one seemed to care. One very nice and helpful female officer spoke a little English. After 3 hours of waiting I got fed up, made sure the police understood that the driver was lying, and asked for another way to Dali. Immediately an ambulance drove by and we hopped on and they drove us the remaining (get this) 40 minutes!!! We waited 4 hours when we could have been in Dali in less than an hour! The people in the ambulance were VERY cool. They drove us all over Dali looking for our hotel, only to discover it was in "Old Dali" 8 km up the road! Then they drove us there and the driver helped carry our bags in! And here we are. I'm sure I've left some out but I think you get the point. Dali has been nice ever since we arrived and we even got to watch an AWESOME Kung Fu movie on TV, in our $6.00 hotel room, IN ENGLISH. August 18th, 2000 "Cheng Du. Tomorrow. Two hard sleepers," I managed in pigeon Chinese. "No hard sleeper, sold out. Only hard seat," was the agent's reply in English only slightly better than my Chinese. This was not good. Hard seat was supposed to very bad. "Don't do it," said a girl in line behind me. "How do I get there then?" "Fly." "How much?" "A hundred dollars." Hard seat costs eight bucks. "Okay two hard seats," I said thinking it couldn't be worse than the train to Krakow, when we were pinned in a compartment with one other person, with no a/c, no fan and the window shut...It was worse. Apparently we missed the boarding show, as we arrived 10 minutes before the train departed, but rumor has it the Chinese leap through open windows, with luggage, babies and what-have-you to grab a seat. Most poor Chinese can't afford to even reserve a seat. First come, first serve. As it turned out we were the only ones with reserved seats. And believe me we needed them. The car was built to hold 120 people sitting in picnic table style seats (picnic table is only 2ft by 1 ft.) BUT this car, along with the other 15 hard seat cars, had well over 240 people in it! This is NOT an exaggeration. Within a 8 X 10 area there were 18 to 20 people! Now here is the worst part. This train trip took 19 hours! I was cool at first. "This is the REAL China", I was thinking. And for this first 9 hours I was okay with that. It was like watching BRAVEHEART 3 times in a row, only instead of English and Scottish fighting, you had Chinese smoking, littering and spitting. And instead of stuff happening, like action and adventure, NOTHING HAPPENED! No one moved for fear of losing there seat! How did they do it? Super evolved bladders?!?! Not for the 10 year old across from us. He peed in a plastic grocery bag three times. Said bags were then tossed carelessly out of the window at a speed of 60 MPH. Like I said I was doing fine. Sort of like a Standing Room Only Grateful Dead concert taking place in a mobile home. But without music and instead of dancing and frolicking hippies, you had Chinese smoking, littering and spitting. But then something happened. Or rather nothing happened, and I started to lose it. We still had 10 more hours to go! It was only 9pm, we still had the entire evening to go. And here were these Chinese people STANDING! Then slouching, then sitting on the floor with the cigarette butts, litter and spit! The rest is a blur of smoke, litter and spit. I should add this though. The scenery was AMAZING! Mountains just like in all those Chinese scroll paintings! The people were friendly and it was only $8.00 to go 400 miles. That is the only bad thing that has happened on this trip. We've done a lot and it's been great. The Wall, Forbidden City (known as the Palace Museum), The Summer Palace (which you don't hear too much about, but it's wonderful). I guess that's it for now. China is really great and I would recommend it to anyone. It's easy to get around and fairly inexpensive. I wish we had another month or two here, one is not enough. A BIT ABOUT INDIA OCT. 2nd, 2000 The trip to Udiapur from Jodpur. We took the bus (you have to, no trains). The bus left at 8:00am, went about 2 kilometers stopped for 10 minutes and then we were off. I was pretty tired so I started to cat nap. At 8:50am I opened my eyes to the sounds of horns honking (horns honk all the time here, though not as much as China, but these seemed particularly poignant honks). Two seconds later another bus SMASHED into the side of us! Slammed us straight into a tree at about 30-40 mph, then the other bus flipped over and skidded across the road! This, somehow came as no shock. One second before this bus hit us I thought, "That bus is going to hit us and flip over...Welcome to India." Everyone on our bus was fine. You'd have thought we'd just finished a very short amusement park ride. We stood up, tried the door, but there as a tree blocking our way, noticed that the engine of our bus was in the driver's seat and then proceeded to climb out the window. The people in the other bus scrambled out over top one another, some bleeding and looking shocked but most seemed relatively okay. Somehow there was an ambulance right there (perhaps it follows the buses in expectation) and a few of the bleeding people got into those. Then the real fun began. Instead of making sure no one was dead, the passengers decided to start beating on the driver of the responsible bus! Three of his friends walked with him, trying to keep about 30 Indians from lynching him. This game sort of petered out after about 10 minutes and we were left to stand around, take photos and wonder, "What now?" A half hour later the police showed up. Two minutes after that another bus came and we all got on, as if this was a scheduled break and crashing was simply another form of stopping! And that was that. I know I'm making light of this but to be honest this was a VERY nasty accident. People could have easily been killed (and apparently people are on a DAILY basis!) If this had happened in the US or anywhere in Europe there would have been lawsuits and settlements, here we weren't even given complimentary sodas (heck you even get those when you shop for souvenirs! I suppose there is more money in selling rugs and tapestries than in bus crashes.) Six and a half hours later we arrived in Udiapur, tired and dirty but alive. Then we watched "Octopussy"...It turned out to be more painful than the accident. THE END |