Lee and Clare, The road home

More Adventures

16^th November 2003

We are in Songpan which is completely diabolical, even the monitor we are looking at is covered in dirt that is impossible to wipe off with a piece of toilet paper. Every single road in the whole town is under major construction, in the process of being dug up, with open drains everywhere to be fallen into by the walker. You have to walk over long planks over gaping holes in the ground to get into shops and everywhere is mud.

On a brighter note, the sheets in our hotel smelt like urine and haven't been cleaned since the Ming Dynasty. The toilet was so rank we had to hover over it with our eyes and nose closed. We changed hotels this morning, the new hotel has no water, let alone hot water - ever. The hotel we were in last night was so cold we had to sleep in all our thermals and our hat as well as 3 smelly duvets. It was colder than sleeping in Sweden's ice hotel above the Arctic Circle in January. We can't WAIT to get out of here, we can't wait to get out of here, we can't wait to get out of here.

But some brighter adventures have occurred since our last email from Xiahe, one of our favourite places of all our travels. We continued our travels south through Gansu province, taking a bus to an even smaller town called Langmusi.

The bus ride was a story in itself. Bus makers judge shoulder width at half the normal width and take the leg size of a 5 year old when making their designs. Add to this a bus full of people for whom spitting is the norm along with chucking the remains of any food they eat all over the floor and it ensures an exciting ride. Luckily for us most of the smokers were sitting at the front of the bus. We got the last seats right at the back of the bus (airborne at least a dozen times, no suspension!) with a Tibettan mother with a baby and young toddler squished in beside us. Kiddies here don't have nappies, just the crotch and bum cut out of their pants so we were well prepared for more excitement to unfold but the gods were looking down on us in that respect. It was an 8 hour journey and 6 hours of it was on dirt roads.

Not long before we arrived the bus stopped so the driver could chat to some chums. Lee took the opportunity to get out for a pit stop. He got lots of stares as he walked from the back of the bus to the front but nothing compared to when he actually got outside, walked to the back of the bus and unzipped. He didn't notice, but every single window on his side of the bus opened and heads craned out and all the people on the other side of the bus stood up and leaned over fighting for the best view.

We've been lucky enough to hook up with Liu (Leo) a Chinese backpacker from the east coast of China, south of Shanghai, who we've been travelling with for the past few days which has made life so much easier for us.

We both felt a bit dodgy on arrival in Langmusi and the next day was a bit of a write off. Lee was running to the toilet every 15 minutes (literally!) and I was suffering badly from altitude sickness. We were 3500 metres up on the eastern side of the Tibetan mountains, and 500m higher than our last stop. I felt so awful, headache, dizzy, just could not get out of bed and could not think about food, though I did manage some apple pie in the evening. Our book says to wait it out and luckily for us both of us were feeling a lot better by our second day there and we ventured out with Liu. Langmusi is a very small place, populated by Tibetans, Hui Musims, Han Chinese and loads of pigs! There is a fast flowing river that runs through the town. It comes from the mountains and along with Liu and a young local guy we walked up past the town, along some prayer wheels to find it's source.

There were some caves that we had to bend over double to get into and inside there were many pieces of white silky cloth tied and hanging from the roof of the cave and burning incence. You could tell that you were in a sacred place. We were told by the local guy, through Liu that each piece of cloth was for one of the local villagers who had died and who had undergone a Sky Burial. Luckily we had already read about this practice in our book. Apparently in this area, sometimes, when someone dies they are taken up to the top of a hill, where essence is burned while the body is chopped up attracting vultures who carry the pieces away to eat, hence returning the body to nature where it came from.

We walked up the gorge where a big river must've once run and it was pretty beautiful through there. It was so peaceful and quiet as we walked over the snow and rocks. Unlike anywhere we've visited in China so far. No honking horns!

Yesterday we arranged for a taxi to take us to this place, Songpan. Doing it by public bus would've taken us two days involving a stop in a town even higher than where we were (didn't want anymore altitude sickness), so we decided to fork out the extra money to share a taxi with Liu and a Chinese lady. We did it for ease and to save time but it turned out to be a bit of a pain in the but t, but a memorable experience.

All went well till we stopped for lunch in Zoige, and arranged to meet back at the van in half an hour. One and a half hours later the drivers still hadn't turned up back and we were pretty pi ss ed off. Our suspisions were raised, and sure enough when they finally arrived the two drivers were a bit unsteady on their feet, red faced and glazy eyed. We were not happy to say the least. We confronted them about how long they'd been and through Liu they said that they'd met some old friends in town but hadn't been drinking. YEAh right! We pulled all of our bags out of the van and said that we wouldn't be going with them (note the road is a dirt one, with barely enough room for 2 cars to pass, steep drop offs of 1000 feet or more and huge trucks hurtling past). The Chinese lady we were with thought it was funny that they were drunk and was trying to get us to get back in the van. We apologised to Liu and said that there was no way we would carry on. He was so good, we were so lucky that he was with us. There was no way that we were going to pay the taxi driver the full amount as here we were stuck in Zoige where we could have got a bus to for 9 yuan each - the taxi driver was asking for 250 yuan. He started getting a bit aggressive so we said that we'd sort it out at the police station.

Funilly enough a Dukes of Hazard police car happened to drive past and Liu waved him down. Liu explained everything to the policeman, with an audience of at least a hundred locals surrounding us. Eventually the seargant turned up in his paddy wagon with some soldiers who made a path for us through the crowd of fans to the paddy wagon so that 7 of us could pile into 4 seats - the soldiers on each others laps in the front, drunk taxi driver, Liu and me on Lee's lap in the back.

At the police station we enjoyed ourselves watching an English movie on a big wide screen tv while they all talked in Chinese in the background. We were even going to ask if they could put on the rugby for us. We were 100% sure that the guy was drunk (he even kept knocking things over in the police station) but the policemen said that they believed him when he promised he wasn't. We think the policemen were born yesterday. Whatever they said we were not getting in the car with the moron. Eventually it was solved by us giving what we were going to pay the driver to the police (DODGY!) and they found someone else to take us the rest of the way to Songpan. We did see the police giving the driver money though. He staggered back to his van and drove off.

We made it to Songpan in one piece though the new van had a window missing and we had to stop evey few kms to fill up the radiator with water (this actually brings back memories of many family holidays when young!)

We can't wait to get on a bus to Chengdu tomorrow, even though it's a long one.

Talk soon all
Us