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Published: August 15th 2007
Today was quite disastrous. Poor Carly had dramas trying to pick up our train tickets to Ulaanbaatar and the rest of us got worried when she didn’t turn up at our meeting spot (the bus station) for ages. When she arrived, still without the tickets, she and Chrisy decided to skip the Wall in order to sort out the ticket issues while Hero and I went on ahead. So Hero and I ventured out on our own, having decided to travel there independently rather than with a tour. Naturally, we had picked an obscure section of the Wall to visit rather than the touristy but much closer and easily accessible sections (eg Badaling)… and we didn’t have a phrasebook or map either. Just a possible bus number. So we bought tickets and hopped on, without knowing how long it would take or, indeed, whether it would take us where we wanted to go.
After a couple of hours travel and still no sight of a mountain, let alone the Wall, we were beginning to wonder if we were on the right track. In my quest to find out I tried to ask a fellow passenger what time the bus would arrive at Simatai, and so began a long and sometimes frustrating attempt at dialogue with a very friendly young guy called Qiu who knew only a couple more words of English than we did of Mandarin. He was a great help to us, particularly as, although it was headed in the right direction, the bus didn’t take us all the way to Simatai - we were told by the bus driver to hop off at some town, from which we deduced that we had to find a taxi/minibus to take us the rest of the way. It turns out the road up to Simatai is too narrow and dodgy to allow a bus to travel it. Luckily for us, this was Qiu’s stop too so he helped to hook us up with a driver (there was no evidence of any English anywhere in this town, and definitely no ‘information’ booths, so we were very grateful for Qiu’s help!) who agreed to take us to Simatai and back again, and not for cheap!
This drive turned out to be the scariest of our lives, and unfortunately much longer than we had anticipated. For the next hour and a half Hero and I genuinely believed that we might die at any moment. Our driver was a maniac and sped along the road and up the mountains at crazy speeds… 100 was pretty common but he approached 130 on several occasions; overtaking up hills, around blind corners, and almost always across double lines, whether or not there was comfortable space for him to do so… on numerous occasions we found ourselves face-on to scarily close oncoming traffic as he zoomed past two or three vehicles at a time… in fact, twice we were (on a road with just two lanes and no shoulders) sandwiched in between two beeping cars as we overtook one and were passed by the other going the opposite way… at other times he used a different strategy and we went speeding and sliding on the loose gravel off-road to overtake on the right side, sliding in the loose gravel of the roadside. Whether there were cars to overtake or not, we travelled for the most part on the wrong side of the road, or in the middle of both lanes… our driver seemed to have an aversion to driving in the correct lane.
Although somehow arriving at Simatai unscathed should have been a cause for celebration, Hero and I were so worried about the prospect of having to get back in the car again for our long descent and return to the bus stop that we couldn’t really relax. Combined with this, it had taken us so long just to make it to Simatai that we had a mere twenty minutes with which to see the Wall before having to leave again so that we could make it back in time to meet Qiu so he could help us back on the bus to Beijing. The entrance to Simatai is so far from the Wall that we simply didn’t have time to even get close to it. The cable ride alone, which stops a few kilometres from the Wall, takes twenty minutes one way, so we couldn’t even do that. By this stage we were so frustrated with the day’s experiences (and it’s lack of success), and anxious about the return journey, that we couldn’t find much enjoyment in the experience of being were we were and having to content ourselves with our still distant view. Still, we tried to make the most of it, and forced some smiles for a few photos before reluctantly heading back to the car for our inevitable return journey.
We drew a picture of an odometer on some paper and pointed the arrow at 70km/hr, trying to indicate that that was the maximum speed we wanted to travel. We also attempted some acting to communicate that we didn’t like overtaking and although I initially thought our driver had understood, we soon found ourselves screeching and fishtailing across the road in an attempt to dodge both the car next to us and the oncoming traffic that we were once again facing as we sped along on the wrong side of the road while overtaking the car that had been in front of us. Apparently our driver thought that this was a better alternative to abandoning the overtaking attempt, slowing down, and returning to the right side of the road. Before now, if anyone else had told me this story about their car trip, I would have thought they were exaggerating. With grim faces but much relief Hero and I finally emerged from the car physically unscathed and dreaming of the safety of our hostel. With Qiu’s help once again, we did get back to Beijing safely, though the trip back from the Wall took us four hours in total. All in all it has not been a fun day - all that time and danger for a relatively fruitless attempt to get the Great Wall, which we saw only briefly and from a great distance anyway. Probably the best thing that has happened today is that Carly and Chrisy managed to pick up our train tickets so we are all set to leave China (very happily) and move on to Mongolia. Bring it on.
To see the photos we have taken in China, go to our
Flickr site.
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DocPetron
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Your ride sounds like my ride from the Thai border to Angkor Wat. Except that my ride included having the car towed by a tractor across a flooded road and one runned overed sqealing pig. Otherwise, quite similar. At the moment it sucked, but now I got the story about my scariest car ride.