Blonde Hair, Red China: National Inefficiency Holiday

Afternoon, many of you are sleeping right now, it is 3:30 am EST, meanwhile I am passing the time until I have dinner tonight with both of my parents and Susan/Sabrina Orlins. I would like to first apologize for the interminable delay between posts, I hope I have not lost many readers. It has been, for the past 2 weeks, a vacation of many sorts. For the period from Sept. 30 - Oct. 10 there was a holiday to celebrate the founding of the PRC on Oct. 1, 1949. I would like to note an interesting fact about Chinese holidays. There are times when you are given extra days off, say the Thursday before a Friday to extend the holiday, but in exchange you are forced to work that Sunday. Bizarre, I know. Us students are also subjected to this backwards logic and in vain tried to argue our case. Nonetheless, 'This is how we do it in our country'.

Otherwise, the vacation was quite nice. Sabrina Orlins and I made our way by of a 24-hour sleeper train to Guilin, Guangxi Province, China. The original plan was to train down Thursday night, stay in Guilin until Sunday at which point we would take a boat down the Li River to Yangshuo, Guangxi Province and enjoy ourselves until Wednesday when we would return to Guilin and catch a Wednesday evening train home. I emphasize, 'the original plan'. I later found out that at this time last year an estimated 57 million people travelled within China.

The day I went to buy the train tickets at the station, I was curtly informed that you cannot purchase train tickets until 11 days in advance. I patiently waited and at the appropriate time followed up. What I did not realize was that all of China was going to take a train this holiday. I waited in line for 30 minutes only to be told they had no tickets left. The next day I went back and found out that, in fact, there were Friday morning tickets available, but no sleepers. That same day, Sabrina asked near her apartment and purchased 2 sleeper tickets for Friday night. Makes no sense, I know. Friday we train down to Guilin, and when we get off, we immediately go to buy return tickets. Unfortunately Oct. 5, 6, 7 were all sold out of tickets completely. We tried to get a ticket agency to help us, but they replied it was too crazy during the holiday. Dejected, we decided to check into our hostel. We arrive to the news that they have overbooked and we have lost a room, regardless of the fact that I have already paid a deposit on my credit card..what can they do? kick out other guests who reserved rooms? Exasperated, we agree to let them room us at some other hostel owned by the same guy. Large room, mattress like a board, but good location. We book a trip to the LongJi Rice Terraces the next day (Dragon's Backbone, very famous) for 8 am. Our bus arrives at 845. We arrive at the terraces at 11, wait until 1215 to take one of their buses up the mountain. The bus takes....2 1/2 hours to go up the side of this mountain. On the way down we find that normally it takes a mere 20 minutes to drive down. The problem was that on this skinny mountainside road, people began to park their cars and walk because the lot was full and it turned a 2-lane road into a 3-lane road by necessity. But the road was only 2 1/2 cars wide. Chaos ensued. We proceeded to walk the last 1km or so. Once there we lost our guide in the large crowd and eventually had to convince them to let us in without a ticket. We searched this mountainside/alpine town for our group while taking some great photos of beautiful scenery. Eventually we turned into a random restaurant and voila! there they were. Unfortunately in 20 minutes time we had to turn down to not miss the bus. So we kept hiking up, never made it to the very top, but found some easily appreciable views from the path. Once we reached the bottom, promptly at 430, we waited for our bus. Somehow we waited 45 minutes and got onto the last bus possible. We transformed a 15 passenger bus into a 43-passenger bus. I counted 3 times because I couldn't believe myself.

That night, we give in a extend our vacation 2 days. I'm now leaving on Friday night, Sabrina Friday morning by plane. We had no other option. I was forced to ride a 27-hour train, no sleeper, just a hard seat that didn't recline, surrounded by tens of students who had purchased standing room only. That is a story for another time.

Finally we get to take our much anticipated boat down the Li River to Yangshuo. What could be more picturesque than rafting down a river surrounded by majestic limestone peaks? How about rafting down the river with maybe 100 other boats in sight at all times? If you guessed so you're absolutely right. It was packed, and in these 4 person boats, the slightest wave caused a spray to splash all over the deck. It looked like I pissed myself by the end. I was not happy. The bus from Xingping to Yangshuo was much nicer, it again was 43 people, but this time at least the bus was originally for 20 people, not 15..

Yangshuo was actually an amazing town, and things there were gorgeous. If anyone ever visits this side of the world, I recommend going. Its close to Thailand and Vietnam, so you can alwasy tack it on the side of your trip. However don't go during Chinese National Holiday. First of all, it was so packed that any direction you walk, it's like youre a salmon walking upstream. Fighting the current of Chinese people, you can easily see your destination over their mini-selves, but its so ahrd to reach it. They havne't evolved to the 'walk on the right side of the st' part yet. You walk straight, wherever you want to go, and stop wherever you want to stop. Maybe that is why the traffic in Asia is the way it is. Secondly, if you don't absolutely know where you are going, its a problem. People have never heard of certain street names besides the large ones (this applies to all over China), maps are not what they appear to be (this applies to all over China), they are not reliable with telling you the time or distance it takes to get somewhere (this is true all over China), and many of the phone numbers on websites are not up to date (this is common with all companies in China). In short, we couldn't find our hostel for maybe 45 minutes. Just holding our bags, walking upstream with a map out. God I hate having a map out. Although I did find a great cure for these horrible, pissy moods that China inefficiency Holiday put me into - Gin and Tonics.

All in all, Yangshuo and Guilin were a great trip. We rode our bikes into the countryside 20 km through rice paddies, sesame fields, cotton fields, etc., went rock climbing up some awesome crags, saw an agricultural wonder of the world, and met some cool people. But it is striking that I have, and have left out so much, detailed my trip through episodes of chaos and ineptitude. It makes sense seeing that China is a country of 1.3 billion people. But it is stark evidence of the lack of infrastructure that its evident in many places all over the country. One thing I did learn, however, is the ability to shrug it off and say 'Whatever, it's China'.

I leave you with some photos of my journey, not the best, but the ones I have on my computer for now: