One Day in China -- A Traveler's Tale

Way back in the mid 1990s, I took a long trip to China. I spent close to 3 months traveling all around the country. The following is an account I wrote some years later (but still close to a decade ago) of one relatively eventful day during that trip.

The sky was overcast as I stepped out of the hotel and walked to the bus station. This was a small, rather unimpressive building next to the train station. I managed to find my bus among the various vehicles that were scattered about the parking lot behind the station. It was properly speaking a minibus, and it was not blessed with leg room suitable for a foreign devil, especially one loaded with bags. Though fortunately it wasn't stuffed to its roof with passengers like buses in and around bigger cities, I didn't anticipate a particularly comfortable ride. On other hand, for the price I was paying I had no right to expect luxury, and, anyway, a little discomfort once in a while keeps life interesting.

Safely (more or less) crammed into my seat, I watched as the bus driver piloted us through the streets of Kaifeng. It was rush hour and the streets were filled with bicycles. They took up the whole road, so the occasional larger vehicles (generally buses and trucks, though there were also a fair number of private cars) had to push their way through, driving right in the center of the road. Though most Western drivers would no doubt have quickly lost their tempers trying to drive in such conditions, our driver was not perturbed in the least, though he used his horn more often than necessary.

Despite the slow pace, we eventually managed to make it out of the city into the less crowded countryside. Here the main obstruction, other than the less then perfect condition of the roads themselves, was grain. In villages all along the way, locals had spread their grain out on the road to sort and dry in the sun. Fortunately they always left enough space for vehicles to get by, though as in the city it was often necessary to drive in the middle of the road.

Throughout our journey we took on and off loaded passengers on the side of the road deep in the countryside. Most people seemed to take the bus for fairly short distances; in fact I believe I was the only one on the bus who traveled all the way from Kaifeng to its final destination. I was also one of the only passengers with a printed ticket, since all the people we picked up on the side of the road just paid the driver whatever he told them was the price for wherever they wanted to go. One or two did argue briefly about prices they considered too high, but they paid up in the end rather than stay on the roadside waiting for the next bus.

We crossed into Shandong province a couple of hours out of Kaifeng. In Heze, the first major town we came to, I moved up to a seat at the front of the bus at the driver's insistence. He, and the woman who took turns driving with him and was presumably his wife, appeared to be in his fifties. Both of them were friendly and talkative, though unfortunately I couldn't understand much of what they said, in part due to their accents and in part to due to my own language deficiencies.

My new seat was decidedly more comfortable than my old one, since there was more room to put my bags, though the road conditions sometimes negated any comfort gained by the move. At one point we left the paved road we had been following and drove along a dirt road which stretched along a ridge overlooking farm houses. Children playing in front of the houses stopped to gaze at our bus as it passed, but it was impossible to gauge from their reactions how often buses passed this way. It was presumably a short cut of some sort, though not surprisingly we didn't travel along at a great speed, and even at the speed we were going my teeth rattled and my bones shook. Fortunately we got back on a paved road before long.

Towards the end of our journey the bus broke down. As the driver and his wife worked to get it started again, I had visions of spending the night sitting there in a bus on the side of a country road in the middle of rural China. In the space between my seat and the driver's was a hatch of sorts which could be lifted to work on the engine, so it wasn't necessary to get out of the bus to do whatever repairs were necessary. The driver and his wife took turns trying to get the engine started while the other one fiddled with it. Apparently the oil wasn't flowing properly, because while one of them worked the gas pedal, the other sucked on a tube to try to get the oil flowing. Whatever they were doing, it was effective -- after ten minutes or so they got the bus started again.

We pulled into Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, at around four o'clock, some eight hours after our departure from Kaifeng. As soon as I exited the bus station I was accosted by a middle aged woman who offered to take me to a cheap hotel. It was cheap all right, the room was a stuffy (but reasonably roomy) cell in the basement furnished with a bed, a little wooden table and a fan, and the toilet was an outhouse. Despite the less than luxurious accommodations, I decided to take it, on the general principal that as long as there was a bed to sleep in and no obvious signs of rat or insect infestations, it would do for a night (though I would have preferred nicer toilets).

Though it was late afternoon, I hadn't had anything to eat all day other than some bread I had had for breakfast before leaving Kaifeng, so I decided to get a very late lunch. I found a small restaurant where I got some fried rice. As I ate the woman who ran the place talked to me, for the most part asking the standard questions ("Where are you from?", "What do you do?", "Are you married?") . At one point she suddenly asked me how many millions of dollars I had. I tried to explain that I didn't even have one million, that in fact the appropriate question would be how many thousands of dollars I had, but she didn't seem to believe me (perhaps she meant renminbi, the Chinese currency, but even one million renminbi is more than US$100,000). This was borne out by the fact that she charged me the outrageous sum of 25 RMB for my plate of fried rice -- well over ten times what I'd paid for a large bowl of noodles in Kaifeng the night before.

Upon my return to the hotel I met the landlady, who told me her last name was Kong, i.e. that she was a member of Confucius's extensive clan, and warned me to watch out for rip-offs, a warning I hardly needed after my experience at lunch. Nevertheless I survived the rest of the day without any significant holes being made in my wallet.

Sometime after midnight I was awakened by a knock on the door. Two uniformed men came into my room. One asked if I could understand Chinese and I indicated that I could, though I refrained from revealing that I could speak it as well, not wishing to prolong the conversation. They lectured me on the safety (or rather lack of the same) of cheap hotels such as the one I was in, and said I should stay in better hotels. I was tempted to point out that the only disturbance I had thus far encountered in this type of hotel was them but I thought better of it. After they had finished dispensing advice on accommodation choices, they left and knocked on other doors. Several hours later I was awakened once more by a hotel employee who took my passport to be checked (by whom I never found out). It was not clear whether this second disturbance was related to the first (though I presume it was) nor whether this was a random inspection, one inspired by word of a foreign devil in the hotel, or rather inspired by an overindulgence in Qingdao (Tsingtao) beer by the policemen on the night shift. In any case, I was left undisturbed for the rest of the night.