Rach's Adventures in China

Here I am, back in London! My travels in China feel like a dream now.. It's hard to believe it actually happened!!

Right.. so I think I left off the blog at the Internet cafe in Jiujiang - that feels like ages ago! After leaving, we bought some Jasmine tea from a teahouse across the street and then hopped in a taxi to go home. The taxis in Jiujiang are unlike taxis I've seen anywhere else in the world - they were basically just tin boxes painted bright yellow and stuck on wheels! I got in the back and Liz hopped in the front. I can't repeat her words on the way home...there was a lot of cursing and swearing. Liz admits to being a bad backseat driver at the best of times but this guy's driving left a ridiculous amount to be desired. Apparently, the double yellow line in the middle of the road meant nothing to him - we spent most of the journey on the other side of the road passing cars - narrowly dodging the traffic coming towards us. I feel I should also mention that there are no seatbelts in these cabs..

So...the next day we got up really early to get ourselves prepared for our day at the adventure camp. The English-speaking Chinese girl knocked on our door at around 7:55 AM to see if we were ready and we followed her downstairs. Waiting for us, outside the hotel, was a beat-up Suzuki mini-bus thing. We climbed in, thinking that we'd probably be the only ones going, but low and behold, a Chinese man, his wife, and who I presume was there son all climb in the backseat behind us, and another girl gets in the front. The driver starts up the engine and we potter off on our way - we have no idea what to expect. We feared for our lives as the driver veered in and out of traffic, although I guess she was an amazing driver compared with the taxi the night before. We drove through some random villages and dropped and picked up people here and there - it was all very random and made no sense, since this was supposed to be a mini-bus going just to the mountain resort. We picked up a girl who was shocked by the two Western girls in the car but who fortunately spoke a bit of broken English - we had what had become a regular conversation of English/Chinese. She helped the woman in the back say 'Welcome to Jiujiang' - she was very pleased with herself and started chanting this! She started talking to me in Chinese, asking where I was from etc, and I was pretty chuffed that I understood and was able to reply. But, like every conversation in Chinese, it reached a point where I could no longer understand and that was the end of it.

We arrived at the mountain in one piece and climbed the steps to the entrance, walking past a sign which welcomed us to Stone Gate Ravine - also called Sho Men Gorge. We were left to our own devices from here on in and we entered the park (crossing a dodgy bridge) with open minds. I thought from the brochure that it was going to be like an adventure park - like one of those military places where you have assault courses. It turned out to just be a mountain trail and we climbed the mountain for hours - I'd say about 3 or 4 hours - in the pouring rain. We passed a random temple where the guy inside tried to get us to pray with him - we declined, since we're not Buddhist and had been advised by our Chinese students back in Beijing that it was rude to partake in religious activities if you're not of that sect. A random Chinese man stopped us on our way and started going off on one in Chinese - we didn't understand a word of what he was saying. It was a bit awkward - we couldn't understand so there was no point in staying there talking to him, yet he kept talking. I think he was trying to tell us something about the mountain or the best way to climb it...I'm sure whatever he was saying was helpful, but we couldn't get a word of it. Next we passed a random cave full of Chinese people! They had a fire going and everything. They were there to carry people up the mountain for a fee - which we saw them doing later. Lazy people, paying people to carry them up!! The steps on the mountain were rocky and treacherous so I have no idea how they did it without falling down or getting hurt.

We eventually reached the top - wahey! It wasn't actually the top of the mountain but it was as high as we were allowed to go on the trail. I believe it was Mount Lu Shan...but we'll never be sure. We were cold and soaking wet and decided to head back down to the beginning. The English-speaking girl back at the travel agents had told us we could leave whenever we wanted.......this turned out to not be the case. We found the woman who had driven us and she ushered us into a little shack out of the rain where we were sat on a couple of stools, while she returned to her game of Mah Jong with her friends. We were pretty much ignored for the next hour - apart from them asking us if we wanted to eat, to which we politely replied no. Liz and I were both shivering - while it was good to be out of the rain, sitting there in our wet clothes was not the best thing for us and we both felt awful. There were a few animals around - a dog, a puppy, a cat and a kitten. The kitten was grossly underfed and kept mewing for food, it was so sad. Liz and I ate some biscuits, dropping crumbs on the floor for the kitten. We were devastated when the woman who owned the shack kicked the kitten across the room on a few occasions - the poor little thing went flying, it broke my heart. Eventually food was brought out and we were once again offered some - this time we felt it was rude to decline and we also thought it might help to warm us up so we tucked in. I have no idea what we ate..... The rice was really nice. The rest of it? I don't know what was in those dishes but I am suspicious that it was cat or dog, and Liz suspected one of them was a small bird. We were made to pay at the end of it, 10Y each, which was a bit steep for a meal we didn't even want!! Fortunately, the end of the meal meant we were allowed to go home and we piled back into the mini-bus - the other people who had joined us for the ride there appeared out of nowhere and came along home with us, being dropped off in random places along the way. Back at the hotel, we jumped in the shower and then went to bed for a few hours, getting up only to go to the local shop to get some food for dinner. We were exhausted!

The next day, we got up early and packed our bags up. We discovered an Internet cafe in our hotel so we went up there to look at hostels for our next destination, Hong Kong. Looking through the options on Hostelworld, we discovered that the majority seemed to be located either in Chungking Mansion or Mirador Mansion, both on Nathan Road. That in itself made me a little bit nervous, and then reading the reviews for the hostel, my suspicions grew. Most of them were from people in England, Australia or Canada but the English was not what you'd expect from native English speakers - they all sounded like foreigners, and the reviews seemed a bit too good to be true. But, since we were running out of time, we agree to book the first night in one of them so that we would at least have somewhere to stay upon our arrival and then we could always extend it when we got there.

We got back to our room at 11:55 am, ready for checkout at 12. Our bags were gone!!!!! We freaked out a little bit. All I had on me was my purse - no passport or anything!! We rushed downstairs and ran into the travel agents - apparently they'd taken it upon themselves to move our stuff out for us since it was getting so close to checkout time. Another example of the overwhelming kindness of Chinese people....but on this occasion, we were a little bit freaked out since all of our valuables had been taken!!! We checked our bags and luckily everything was still there.. My backpack had been left open from when I'd taken my purse out and my passport and camera were pretty much hanging out...I'm just grateful they were all still there!!

The travel agent directed us to the bus for Nanchang and we boarded it - once again getting a lot of funny looks. The buses vary so much over there - there's no companies or anything, it's just random people who own coaches and drive these random journeys for a living. From what I can gather anyway!! We got back to Nanchang and went to the same cafe that had entertained us the day we got there. Most of the family weren't there but one woman recognised us and brought us in. Everyone in there had a good chuckle as we ordered our food and drinks in Chinese. I think our pronunciation is fine (otherwise they wouldn't have understood us), they just find it funny to hear us speaking their language.

We headed to the waiting lounge for our train and it was absolutely packed, we sat down on our bags and waited in the steaming hot room under the watchful eyes of hundreds of locals. We nearly had our tickets nicked and other people tried to sell us better tickets than what we had. About 5 minutes before we were due to depart, they finally let us through to the platform. What a mad scramble!!!!!!!! We barely made it on to the train. Our tickets for this journey were hardseats....that's all they had available when we booked it. After experiencing the luxury of the soft sleeper and hard sleepers, we were certainly not prepared for what we were about to face. I cannot believe I complained about the hard sleeper!!

I struggled to get to my seat - I got knocked over twice by a man who get pushing his way through the aisles. THey oversell the hardseat carriages so there are loads of people standing, who will often try to steal other people's seats. By the time we managed to get to our seats, all of the overhead storage was full so we managed to get one of our packs under our seat and then had to sit on the other one in an obscure balancing act. We went on like that for about an hour and then asked the people across from us if we could put it under their seat - there was no way we could have carried on for a 14 hour train journey like that! The stares were quite horrendous - it was nonstop. I know most people will think that we should have been used to it by now - and we were - but in our condition of complete exhaustion come the evening, it was more than tiresome. We played games (like Hangman) to make the time pass and even made lists of 100 things we want to do before we die. I got to around 73, I think. We were both so tired and by about 12 am (about 6 hours into our train journey) we were both feeling delusional and dreaming back to the days of the hard sleeper. The seats on this train were HARD and very uncomfortable. My butt fell asleep within 10 minutes of being on it and didn't wake up until about an hour after we'd got off the next day!! Anyway.. we both managed to sleep a little bit - although it was more like drifting in and out of consciousness!!

We were ridiculously grateful to arrive in Shenzhen the next morning. We had debated spending a night there but Liz's guide gave a very unappealing view of it, with very high levels of crime, so we gave it a miss and headed straight for customs to leave China and enter Hong Kong.. I'll leave the rest of this story to be told another day as it's late here in London and I need to go to bed!