China 1-0 Travelers

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Chapter 3

China 1-0 Travelers

For our first weekend trip away we decided to go somewhere close so we didn’t have to do too much organisation or make it stressful. (Train tickets here get release 12 days in advance and seem to sell very quickly, so you have to arrive at the booking office bang on time and even then still don’t get the ones you want AND you have to go back two days later to book the returns.) I’m not sure how anyone gets anywhere but I’m sure it’s easier if you actually speak Chinese to book them. ) Because of this round-the-houses method of train travel we decided to head to Mulan Shan (Mulan Mountain) which is in Hubei province and only two hours away by bus. This meant that we had the option of heading home the same day or staying over, easy right?



Wrong.



So … the buses leave at 7, 8 or 9am or at 3pm. We decided to take the 3pm bus and stay the night then climb the mountain the next day. At 2.50pm on Saturday the 15^th of September I have just arrived at the bus station after battling the football traffic as the stadium is on the same road, Lauren and Dave are on their way and Ria and Aleks are still actually on the wrong side of the Yangtze so we didn’t make a very good start. (I would love to say that this was because we got our times mixed up and not because we went out partying all night but sadly I cannot.) When Lauren and Dave arrive we head over to the man guarding the gate of the bus station (which also seems to have an awful lot of cars in it) and begin attempting to ask which bus is for Mulan Shan or if we have missed it. The man finds our pitiful attempts at Chinese hilarious but is not unkind, he helpfully hands us a notepad and pen. I have no idea still what he wanted me to do as if he was attempting to get me to write the characters for Mulan mountain he was going to be waiting a hell of a long time, there is a certain art to writing Chinese characters and I feel he should have guessed from our lack of language skills that we would also struggle with the mammoth task of writing. Instead, I clearly printed the words ‘Mulan Mountain’ and Lauren, ever so helpfully, drew a smiley face. The man cracked up again so we decided it was time to whip the charades out. Instead, however, of pointing to one of the many buses around us, I acted out a form of transport that I was told by my friends looked more like a train than a bus and then put two hands together in a pointed shape to demonstrate mountain. This was getting us no where so I drew a little picture of a bus and an arrow to a mountain. More comedy. Anyway, very helpfully, a group of foreigners walked past on the way to the football and came to ask us where we were so deep into a game of charades with a car park attendant. One of the guys informed us that the bus station was no longer there, it had been knocked down and the area was just a car park now. Brilliant. One of the passing foreigners conversed for us in broken Chinese to ask how to get to the bus station, the reply was ‘go behind yourselves’ therefore we spent the next hour and a half wandering up and down the same road in the blazing heat and getting excited anytime we saw a bus, which there were hundreds of as there was a football match on. Eventually… we gave up and went to the pub. This ‘Public House’ (as it was advertised on the front) actually turned out to be a posh Chinese restaurant on the inside but the coffee was amazing and Aleks managed to ask our waitress where we should actually go to get the bus. We resolved that we should find the bus station by the end of the day and go next weekend after a Friday night in. So, we left the ‘Public House’ equipped with out POA and still spend the next two hours wandering up and down the same road looking for this station or a place to get a bus to the station. Then we took taxis. I’m sure most travelers will relate to those days when everything is highly stressful and nothing seems to go right but you think to yourself, ‘if I can just catch this one bit of public transport to the right place I will regain some of my dignity?’ the absolute worst thing to do in this situation is resort to taking a taxi, it is the mark of an ultimate fail. I hope this portrays how beaten we felt at the moment we got out of our taxis at the bus station, which was miles from where we had spent the day. We went for a beer and then got some food, by the time we left the restaurant it was 10pm, that is how long this day had taken us. Sunday Ria, Dave and I spend at Jiefang Park which was nice, but not quite enough of an achievement to compensate for the fails of the previous day.

The week passed as normal, school, Helen’s (a bar in Wuchang) on Wednesday, school but on the Friday instead of going out we decided to all stay at Lauren’s for the night, watch a movie (not Mean Girls…), get some food and have a beer so that we could get up for the early bus in the morning. We managed this week and got to the station with time spare to buy some re gan mein (hot dry noodles, a breakfast dish of Wuhan, basically egg noodles in a peanut and sesame sauce). Finally, we were en-route to Mulan Shan, it only took a week… Mulan Shan is the birthplace and training ground of the real Mulan (as opposed to the Disney Mulan) it is only since arriving in Wuhan that I realised she was actually a real person in history and I was quite impressed that she has a whole national park area devoted to her.

The mountain itself was beautiful; it wasn’t a particularly difficult climb, more like an uphill walk with lots of stops to take photos by waterfalls and rivers. The walk took along time but that was greatly due to the number of Chinese tourists wanting to have their photos taken with us. They were all friendly and most asked permission so I didn’t mind but it was very time consuming!

At the top there is an extremely beautiful lake which we crossed by boat to a tiny village on the other shore. The village was full of tourists and we got majorly harassed to eat in every restaurant and eventually stopped at one who didn’t harass us and had nice views of the lake. The restaurant we ate at was also a ‘hotel’; by this I mean they had two spare rooms with beds in them. The room had two double beds and there was five of us but we just pushed them together and shared, it all smelt and felt a bit damp and the window was broken putting us all at major mosquito risk but the food was good and the room only cost 80¥ for the night (£1.60/each).

After our very satisfying of tofu ad other things and arranging the ‘hotel’ we explored a bit. This area at the top of the mountain had Mulan’s training grounds and other random things. There were rope crossings over the bridge but by ‘rope’ I mean metal making it extremely painful for your feet, mine were hurting most at the middle of the crossing meaning it was pointless turning back. Even cooler than this painful metal wire though was ‘Granny’s Culture Park’ which looked like an army assault course, full of tyre obstacles and such, so we had a great time there!

When we returned to the village most of the tourists had gone which was nice, very peaceful so we ordered yet more food (more tofu) and some beers and chilled for the night. We met a Chinese student from Wuhan and he came and sat with us; of the people I was with Ria is from Bristol, Aleks from London, Dave from Preston, Lauren from Sheffield and obviously you’ve got me from County Durham and this guy said that Lauren and I had better accents for him to understand English. Aleks was very put out J.

After a err…lovely sleep in our crammed, damp room and yet more food (tofu. For anyone elsewhere in the world who thinks tofu is disgusting I recommend heading to China, I would never have eaten it at home but they actually know how to flavour it here!), we headed back down the mountain. Do you remember that I said the walk on the way up was nice and chilled? The way down was brutal, very steep steps and they were relentless; step, step, step, step, step… we reached a small platform and around the corner, live something out a Disney movie, was a slide. Yes, that’s right; a slide. The best 20¥ (£2) I have ever spent. It was so much fun too! Have you ever imagined what it would be like to actually be a rollercoaster? Not to ride one, but to actually BE the rollercoaster car/train? That was this slide. We got a few bruised body parts but completely worth it and it took us all the way to the bottom, which meant we could get the earlier bus home and chill for a bit before heading to the pub.

Maybe that slide was our 1-1, maybe not, but it certainly made my day.

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