Catching a bus and going to school - Easy?

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[youtube=jG-edSE3vGk]

Chengdu to Lijiang is a 22 hour bus journey.

The bus winds its way up, down and around all of the mountains in between the two places and it should be a relatively easy journey except in monsoon weathers, where there can be land slides and in the winter where the roads become impassable.

Our journey started normally but five hours into it, we were stopped behind a traffic jam. We could see traffic also tailing back curling around the mountain in the opposite direction so the problem was somewhere in between. Everyone got off the bus and started walking forwards to see what the problem was. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A flat back lorry that originally had two huge rocks on, had lost its load whilst struggling up the mountain road. One of the great rocks had slid off completely, the other was resting on it and had tilted the lorry - rising the cab to a sharp 45 degree angle. The accident had caused a tail back on either side of hundreds of vehicles, some of which beeped their horns and squeezed past in between the tiny gap of the fallen rock and mountain side wall. I’d read about landslides on these mountain roads and that people eventually walk as it takes days to remove the rocks. This problem was different but had no solution. Hundreds of people gathered around the lorry and the rocks but no one knew what was going to happen. Men smoked and rolled their tee shirts up over their stomachs, kids ran around and women squatted aroung the edge. The police arrived but did nothing. About an hour later a digger arrived and tried to shunt the enormous rocks and I couldn’t believe that people were standing either side of it. As the rocks were shuffled, the lorry remained at its sharp angle. The whole place seemed to have turned into a circus.

One man had a great time out of the truck hold up. A noodle seller set up his stall, put on load music to let everyone know he was there and then cooked everything on his little cart at a ‘truck hold up inflated price’ It looked like he was macheteying huge hunks of liver to me and dousing it in noodles. My thoughts turned to the tin of sardines we had in our bag.

The digger toiled away for over an hour until eventually, it moved the rocks and the lorry bounced back to earth, the driver got in, moved it and parked it up near his expensive lost load. It was just getting dark and we had been held up for about 3 hours. Somehow our bus had managed to wangle its way to the front of our queue and was the first to pass the lost load. I counted (sad - I know ) 145 parked vehicles in the queue behind the rocks and there were as many as that behind us. It’s odd but when I came to China 2 years ago, I used to talk English to everyone even though they didn’t understand and I got by. Now that I can speak a little Mandarin (very badly) and still cannot be understood, I now say very little because I make such a mess of it and it renders me speechless. It’s true that we could not understand a word of what people were saying and that they could not understand us which left us completely in the dark and in quite a vulnerable position. When the bus stopped on the journey, we didn’t understand why and for how long and when we neared places, we had no idea where we were. Our trust was completely in the two bus drivers and following people when the bus stopped. It says in the book that this route separates the traveller from the tourist. In the end, we reached Lijiang 6 hours late, caught a taxi to the language school where we will be learning Mandarin for the next three weeks, just in time to see our host leaving with her friend for dinner. She brought us to our hostel which is in the same residential area to the learning school and I asked where the shared accommodation with kitchen was and Chris just declared, ‘Where’s the double bed?’


We were left in the room which was almost like small hotel with a tiny kettle, endless bags and no information on the area or where to eat or how to get about. When we were left alone, we found that there was no internet access or washing machine and no access to a kitchen to cook for ourselves which meant that eating out for every meal for 4 weeks would be expensive. The next day we walked into Lijiang old town to look at an alternative hostel where there would be more life. We looked around 4 and finally settled on the Chinese International Youth Hostel. It promised washing machines and wifi as well as a garden and a more interesting location even though old Lijiang is very touristy, it has a soul.

Sunday 24 Aug


After staying in Lijiang now for 2 full days, we realise that the whole place is an entirely Chinese made tourist trap made and maintained mainly for Chinese people on holiday. Everything here is geared towards the tourist. Everything is expensive and it’s not even really real. The women wear local costumes but it is all for the tourist’s benefit. The young girls wear fake pink costumes, fake hair pieces and sell photographs with tourists. The older ladies in traditional costume are real but are on show on the hour, every hour in Sifang Square until late into the night. They all dance in a circle with and for the tourists in the square and tourists on the outside of the circle take photos of tourists on the inside and vise versa. The lanes are absolutely full of groups being led by tour guides holding flags. They follow like lambs. I have long wanted to see and stay in Lijiang but I’m sorry to say that I am disappointed with my choice because I didn’t realise that it would be entirely about tourism. We’re here for 4 weeks because we start Mandarin school tomorrow and we’ve already moved from the suburbs to be where there is life but this life in Lijiang is like a show town and it’s certainly does not feel real. We’re in a lovely hostel but we’re thinking of moving out into Shuhe old town next week. It’ll be less touristy and hopefully offer more opportunity to engage with the community.

Monday 24 Aug

1st day of our 3week course at Mandarin School went interestingly and thought provokingly well.


We arrived at the school and immediately had a test. This test was either right or wrong, bearing in mind that most of it was in Hanzi characters. As some of the test was about filling gaps and I couldn’t fill them because I didn’t know all of the characters (which can take years to learn) I wrote the translations alongside the characters that I knew. This showed that although I did not know the answer to the gaps, I did know some characters and some meaning. A bit like a maths test with the working out shown but it was wrong because I didn’t fill the gaps. In my mind, this showed the teacher that I did know something though not the thing she needed - this doesn’t mean that I know nothing. Chris did better at the test but the lesson became interesting when the test was cast aside and we were asked to open the text and exercise books provided by the teacher. The first lesson was how to say hello. We did this same lesson one year ago with our English instructor, Ping, at Sheffield College and we’ve come a long way since then. Chris has additionally put in up to 5 hours a day (mostly every day) extra personal study, I put in between 1 and 2, so, when the teacher asked us to read and repeat for the fourth time; “hello, what is your name”, Chris couldn’t bear it and the open discussion began about how our abilities had not been taken into consideration, what we needed to learn, how we could learn it and a way forward which resulted in the teacher being very defensive about previous students thinking that they know it all, raising her voice and Chris needing to leave the room to walk out and calm down. Course, it’s usually me raising my voice and I agreed with everything Chris had said so when he had gone walk about, a secondary conversation began between myself and the teacher about how we need to be stimulated and challenged. Her answer was that maybe she should she speak entirely in Chinese to us then? And I answered that this was not teaching. I feel that being taught is about being stimulated, challenged, understood and encouraged and not starting backwards. The way here seems to be to stick to the book, right from the beginning whatever level you are at. BUT as we have travelled 14,000 miles to this learning centre in the South of China and Chris has done solid 12 hour shifts to save money to come and I took 2 jobs, as well as learning additionally to our college course, then we feel that we have a right to say that the level of teaching is below our standard and that sticking to a book learning every detail about how to say hello perfectly will only teach us a small amount of information perfectly when we need to learn about survival - how to order food, what happens if we are ill - how to communicate that we need help, we need correcting on how we would buy tickets for travel and so on. The communication between both parties is key and if we cannot learn more in these 3 weeks than we already know then it is a waste of very valuable time and money.


In the end, we left after 2 hours and have agreed that we go back tomorrow and find a balanced way forward. She still wants us to either do all the exercises as home work or bring our own books into her school but we can do this ourselves - we need to be able to communicate in a real manner.


After we left school, it was really raining, my credit card had been stopped by the bank because they think it is being used by someone else (even though I had logged that I am in China) and we had no idea what to do next about the school but in a way, I felt we had won a small battle (but not the war) because we have the choice to go where we want, get the best out of the learning facilities available that there is to offer and the freedom to move around. The thing is, I’m not good at drifting and neither is Chris - so drifting is not an option. But, what we are learning to do in this country is stand up for ourselves and get to where we would like to be and it is not about fluffing around sight-seeing or just learning a bit of stuff on the way. Every day is a learning curve and it should be steep and we want to get it right.


Oh, and on a much lighter note - HOW GOOD WAS THE CLOSING CEREMONY of the Olympics and how do we stand up to that? The answer is David Beckham, Leona Lewis and a double decker bus. Though, Jimmy Page was very good. We watched the whole thing in a bar and the sheer power and strength from that closing ceremony was very loud and clear to all.


TAKE A LOOK AT CHRIS' VIDEO OF THE BUS JOURNEY FROM CHENGDU TO LIJIANG - HERE'S THE LINK - give it time - it's only 5 mins.

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