Advertisement
Published: February 5th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Not counting Honk Kong of course...Pingyao
The train ride from Xi'an to Pingyao was only about 9 hours if I remember correctly and it was even overnight, but it was probably the second longest night of my life. First, since we didn't book our tickets properly and had to upgrade once we were on the train our beds weren't next to each other. We did get bottom bunks which was great, but mine was right at the end of the car next to the open doorway into the bathroom and coincidentally the smoking area as well. There were also extremely loud noises coming out from that area all night and the bright light coming from there was shining right into my bed. To be honest I cried myself to sleep wishing for my mom, not once but twice. First at 10pm when I was trying to get to sleep, and then again at 3am after I'd woken up to use the bathroom at 2am and couldn't get back to sleep due to everything above, as well as the awful memory of using that bathroom. It was a metal squatter right on the floor (no step like in many places, some
Rooftops
View from the city wall, notice the solar water heaters. of you may be aware of what I mean) and despite all the piss and water everywhere, someone had thrown up in there all over the floor, but I had to pee so bad I just had to use it. I apologise if any of you feel sick after reading that, but the visual memory makes me throw up in my mouth a little, sorry.
Despite the fact that we arrived super early in the morning, 6am or so, and it was still pitch black outside, we didn't take the offer from the "Harmony Guesthouse" that was offered to us by several aggressive Chinese, some even speaking great English. We had found a great place in our Lonely Planet that was a bit of a walk but we could handle it. We set off after we'd bought train tickets for the next day, and actually gotten sleeper tickets and everything. When we walked out to the street and tried to look at our book in the dark we were surrounded. Mostly just people looking at us and reading over our shoulders, as well as some taxi drivers and other people offering us the Harmony Guesthouse. As we tried to
Aaron on the city wall.
The greatest wall we saw in China. find the way, a young girl, maybe 16 or less, came over to us and asked if she could walk with us. She said she was just a student coming home for the holidays and wanted to walk with us. I thought it was dark and maybe unsafe for a young girl to walk alone so I didn't say no. Aaron immediately said "We're not paying you anything" haha. She chatted with us, saying that she likes to practice her english and she seemed real sweet. She then asked us where we were staying..."oh I think that place is very expensive..." Aaron replied with "we like expensive" and we stood firm on telling her that was where we were going to stay, she then told us how nice Harmony Guesthouse was, damn, we were fooled again. But she said she would take us to the center of town and we could decide where to stay and without realizing until it was too late she had taken us on a walk completely around the entire town, probably for 5km or 2 miles with our bags at friggin 6am! And mind you it was probably less than -5 deg Celsius. (sorry I
have completely converted to metric now) When we realized where we were on the map, I asked her why had she taken us this long way, and she made up some bullshit about the road not being paved. I said "you have taken us a very long way with our heavy bags, now our backs hurt and we are really tired" then she really sounded sorry and proceeded to apologise repeatedly and walk apart from us, it was so strange. Until we came upon the harmony guesthouse and a man outside promised us a great deal, and then yelled at the girl in Chinese. Luckily our actual hotel was not too much further and it was incredible. It was so nice and they even upgraded us for no charge to a real big room with a bathtub! The bed was probably bigger than a california king, it was awesome! After a good breakfast I went back to sleep til noon.
One redeeming fact about the long 6am walk was that we got to see the sunrise over the old city. It was a really old city dusty with the ancient city wall still intact and inside the wall was
That nights train ride was rough...
Aaron sipping cognac to help him sleep. a crumbling town mostly with the old buildings and architecture still intact or completely fallen down. As we walked on the outside of the wall when it was still completely pitch black and there were no street lights, the streets came alive. They were full of bicycles, every so often there would be a car or motorcycle with a light and it would illuminate the dozens of bikes flowing through the dusty streets. It was totally surreal, unreal, and incredible.
That day (January 11, for reference) after my long nap, we ventured out into the cold to see what this historical town had to offer. We saw lots of their restored houses and temples which were really cool. Lots of them had big yin yangs engraved into the floor, and neat old antique furniture. The temples we saw were Taoist and Confucian. The Taoist was the strangest, inside it had these painted wooden figures about 1/2 human size depicting scenes of hell that were so grotesque and terrible it was just awful. People being sawed in half, burning in flames, being tortured in every way. Yuck! And at the Confucian temple, the big statue of Confucius was painted with black skin, also very strange.
We could only stand the cold and the dusty air for a few hours before we had to retire back to our hotel where we met a great Australian couple who was struggling through China just as much as we were. We had dinner with them and hung out chatting until the staff turned out the lights on us. Getting to hang out with some other travelers was good for our souls.
The next morning the four of us had breakfast together (it was -5 deg Celsius on our thermometer at 11:45am) and then Aaron and I braved the cold again to see the city wall and wander around for a little while. I think it was then that someone actually started yelling Hello to us from their shop and then yelled "Who are you!" They really are aggressive everywhere. We just tried to ignore them all. We spent the afternoon in the hotel and hanging out with our new friends. We were hanging out in a little cafe type place when this Asian guy started video taping us! It was so strange, and the same guy started filming us as we were walking down the street! It was like we were famous or something. I think I've come up with a good analogy, that white people in a small town in china walking down the street is like a flamingo walking down the street in suburbia in the winter.
That night took another overnight train ride to Datong. Which was actually worse than the previous one...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.282s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 55; dbt: 0.0765s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb