Francesca and Henk-Jan's Backpacking Trip!
Friday, July 30, 2010
Journey Into Nothingness
The morning of July 28th we had to get up super early for our flight to the border town of Erlian in Northern China in order to make our extremely annoying border crossing into Mongolia. We discovered from a local Mongolian who was on his way home that if we wanted to try and see a bit of Mongolia from the border town, we would have had to travel 24 hours by train to get to Ulan Bator! We also heard from a fellow traveler coming into China from Mongolia that it was insanely hot in the grasslands (which are the main thing to see) … we are talking 130 degrees F (that’s 50+ degrees C ) – that didn’t sound appealing to us at all. Plus we had plans to go to Tibet while our China visa was still running. No Mongolia for us this time!
Anyways, our flight landed in Erlian just before 9:00 am and we made our way to a surprisingly decent bus that would take us into the city. However, we ended up being the last people on the bus and had to communicate to the non-English speaking bus driver/attendants that we were trying to cross the border to Mongolia. They managed to find someone who helped us get in a vehicle (after some chasing after him as he ran all over the place/driving in circles with him/worrying he would run off with our money!) jam-packed with 5 other people all heading to the border as well. Henk and I squeezed in the back area with all of the bags and tried to get comfortable as the drive commenced… which was pretty much impossible. But we were quickly out of the car again after a couple minutes to go through Chinese ‘exit’ immigration and get our exit stamps.
Which went shockingly smooth! First we filled out departure cards and handed them over along with our passports. We held our breath as the Chinese immigration officer looked at our passports and stamped Henk’s Mongolia visa. He didn’t even indicate to us that we had overstayed our visa by a couple days, nor did he request that we pay anything in fines for it. Yes! Something finally works out in our favor! Once this was settled we were back in the car heading into Mongolia. We weren’t exactly sure if we actually had to physically cross the border into Mongolia or if we just needed a China exit stamp, but to cover all our bases we went along for the ride… after making sure our driver knew we needed to go back into China afterwards. All of us then piled out at the Mongolian entry building, stood in line there and got our stamps, and then went straight back into the car again! The border crossing itself turned out to be so much more simple than everything (all the hassle of preparing for it!) leading up to the border crossing!
So now we were ready to go back into China. Here is where some of the issues started. First, the car we had taken started to have trouble. It was stalling a lot, and our driver had to constantly jump out of the vehicle and wind some life back into it. Secondly he needed people to help him push the car as well. We managed to get the car to the re-entry point to China using this method. However turns out – like everything in China – there was a massive queue of cars waiting to cross the border back over. We were supposed to line up in that queue! Since our car was almost dead, our driver decided he didn’t want to do that and instead we made our way right up to the Chinese border control guards. He tried to explain the situation to them (in fact they witnessed us struggling to start/move the car a few times) but they didn’t want to hear any of it. He tried multiple times to speak to various people at the border hoping someone would take pity on us and let us jump the queue but alas no one cared!
Then we had some more luck. All of the sudden I noticed there was a guy standing in front of a couple of the Chinese guards. I’m not sure exactly what he did but he did something that really got their attention. So much so that when the guy took off running (in the opposite direction of the border) the guards all went chasing after him! When all of the queued cars and their drivers noticed this, we all seized this opportune moment to start racing across the border into China in a ‘free-for-all’ dash that I never imagined could happen! It was actually really funny to watch. Obviously our own driver jumped on this chance and yelled for us to help him get the car across. Henk and one of the other girls from our car (although Henk insists he did all the actual work!) were behind the car pushing it across as we yelled for them to hurry… it looked like the guards might be coming back and we were one of the slowest cars since we could barely move to begin with! When we crossed and made it close enough to the immigration building our driver yelled at us to grab our luggage make a run for the building – it seemed we would be fine as long as we got inside.
We did just that and lined up for the next mandatory queue. This one mandated that we open up our backpacks and show the guards our goods. Henk was even told to turn on our laptop and show them the videos and photos we had stored. Thankfully we didn’t have anything that worried the guards so they let us pass through and get our re-entry stamps back into China. We ended up on the other side quite smoothly and waited by the side of the road for our driver (whom we hoped was still alive after disobeying the guards so blatantly!) to find us. I was extremely thirsty at this point… it was sweltering hot the entire time we were doing all of this and Henk ran off to find me some water. He came back with a bottle of water plus an extra person! This guy loaned us some of his water – which tasted a bit like pool water, as he said it would, since he purified it himself with tablets – which was really nice of him! He joined our group for the ride back to the main part of the city as well since his traveling partners had strangely disappeared!
We were dropped off at the bus station where we attempted to get the next tickets to Datong in Northern China. Unfortunately, the next time that direct bus left wouldn’t be until the next morning. Rather than spend the night in Erlian or pay an arm and a leg for a private taxi to drive us to Datong we did some investigating (OK, Henk investigated while I bought us frozen ice water!) and discovered a few other foreigners with the same problem. They informed us that we could take another bus to Jining and then take the train from there to Datong. This entire process should have us arriving in Datong by 9:00 PM that evening. Didn’t sound bad to us! We enjoyed our long journey in the nice A/C bus talking and reading through the Lonely Planet.
Eventually we ended up at the bus station where after meeting up with the other foreigners again, we started to walk to the train station to see when the earliest tickets to Datong were available. On the way the road was very uneven (completely crushed gravel with chunks of rock everywhere) and I ended up falling and scraping my knee up pretty badly yet again. The skin was all torn off and it was quite bloody! Luckily one of the Polish girls with us had some bandages and disinfectant and we were able to clean it up somewhat and make it to the train station.
I found a freestanding chair to rest on (all of the actual seats were already taken) and we put all our bags in the corner. Henk and the Polish couple we had met tried to get some take-away out in the city but came back pretty quickly having concluded that there was literally nothing (not even fast food) for us to get. While we waited around for the train to depart every so often a really angry Chinese trash/cleaning lady would come by and yell at me to get off of the chair (even though there was another one just a couple feet away and it was obvious I had fallen pretty badly.) We tried to explain to her we would put the chair back once the train came and that I really needed to sit right then. But she didn’t care one bit… she even had the audacity to slap my already busted-up knee while yelling at us! (If you didn’t believe us from everything else we’ve said that in general Chinese people are mean and nasty, this example should prove it yet again!)
The train finally came and Henk and I struggled with the bags (I couldn’t carry mine anymore because of my knee so he had to try and carry everything) while the Polish couple ran off without a care to help us. This pissed us off quite a bit since we had been nice enough to write them out a four page list of hints/tips to help them with their travel plans for the Philippines and Henk had talked to them for a while giving them advice while on the bus… pretty **** move on their part! Guess it isn’t just the Chinese who decided to be nasty that day. It took a while for us to get to the train and once we did we jumped in the first train car we saw. Henk was worried the train was going to leave without us if we didn’t.
There were also no seat numbers on our tickets, and this turned out to be an extremely gross non-AC train where people lying all over the place and smoking everywhere possible. We found a small corner by the door to sit near since we couldn’t stand to be in the smoke-clogged train cars. Many of the Chinese train attendants saw us there and proceeded to yell at us, but since they had failed to find us a seat since the train was so crowded we tried to ignore them and just point to my bandaged knee hoping they would leave us alone. It didn’t really work (every time one of them would pass us they would start yelling in Chinese yet again) so we had to deal with that for the next couple hours while we were on the train… so completely horrible! We vowed never to take the ‘old’ trains in China again – but due to flight prices being rather high we knew we would sometimes have little choice.
Unfortunately our troubles didn’t end once we arrived in Datong either. The hostels listed in the Lonely Planet were all either completely full or under construction (or out of our price range) – remember it was now around midnight – so we had no choice but to follow around a dodgy guy who claimed he knew the place we were looking for. Of course he led us somewhere else that only had fan rooms (it is 100+ F degrees outside while we are doing this) and wasn’t helpful. Frustrated we walked down the street and I spotted some Westerners (FINALLY!!) who Henk ran over to ask for help. It turned out that they were from the Netherlands and Henk spoke to them in Dutch while they led us to their hotel near the train station that we all hoped would have a room for us. They did have a room! But it wasn’t an A/C room… grrr! We really had no choice at this point though so we took the room. This led to a really horrible, hot and sticky night of sleep trying to remain sane by just using a fan to keep the mosquitoes away… which also really didn’t work!
It should be no shock to anyone that we were both totally exhausted the next morning and really eager to leave Datong as soon as possible. There were a few sites I was eager to see but we were simply way too tired. Plus we had to plan for Tibet! Our deposit was yet to be sent to the company we planned on using to travel through Tibet and we knew we had to do that right away or risk not getting our mandatory travel permits in time and perhaps not end up going at all! There was an agent in the hotel who had a computer I used to book a couple of flights for us to Xi'an and from Xi'an… we really didn’t want any more trains so we decided to splurge a little for our own sanity. The agent booked our sleeper train tickets to Pingyao (yes, there were no flights to Pingyao so no choice!) for 4:00 PM later that afternoon, along with our hotel booking at Harmony Guesthouse for 3 nights. We then went to an Internet Café/Photo Shop where with the assistance of a nice Chinese kid we scanned in all our documents for Tibet. We also did get our deposit paid that day as Henk ran to a Bank of China to handle that while I continued scanning things.
The two of us finished all of our work with some relaxation and a bite to eat at a nearby (much nicer and fancier hotel than where we were staying) hotel restaurant where the food was actually decently priced. After a quick trip to a China Mobile (where we failed to recharge our phone since it wasn’t a re-charge shop) we helped some Westerners find a hotel by leading them back to the place we were staying since we needed to pick-up our bags anyways. (Thus paying back the nice deed we received from the Dutchies!) We waited around for a while working on some blog posts before it was time to leave for the train station. This trip was supposed to be slightly more comfortable since we had sleeper ‘bunks’ which are usually almost always sold out on other train trips we’ve taken. However since there was no A/C again on the train we were still completely covered in sweat, sticking to the sheets!
We kept ourselves sane by reading the Lonely Planet and using the laptop until its battery ran out. The train trip took longer than expected (it was supposed to leave at 4:40 PM and get in before 11:00 PM but we didn’t arrive until after midnight) but thankfully the people from Harmony Guesthouse were there to meet us (along with another couple who hoped they could catch a ride with us and crash there) and we went first to the main lobby and then to our room in a separate courtyard. This room had a traditional Qing bed which means there is no ‘real’ mattress. The ‘mattress’ is actually a bunch of bamboo mats piled one on top of another on top of a wooden board with a thin sheet over the whole thing, making for a very hard sleep. But at least there was finally A/C! We fell asleep exhausted and were thankful for a chance to sleep in the next morning. Finally we could relax!
Francesca
Anyways, our flight landed in Erlian just before 9:00 am and we made our way to a surprisingly decent bus that would take us into the city. However, we ended up being the last people on the bus and had to communicate to the non-English speaking bus driver/attendants that we were trying to cross the border to Mongolia. They managed to find someone who helped us get in a vehicle (after some chasing after him as he ran all over the place/driving in circles with him/worrying he would run off with our money!) jam-packed with 5 other people all heading to the border as well. Henk and I squeezed in the back area with all of the bags and tried to get comfortable as the drive commenced… which was pretty much impossible. But we were quickly out of the car again after a couple minutes to go through Chinese ‘exit’ immigration and get our exit stamps.
Which went shockingly smooth! First we filled out departure cards and handed them over along with our passports. We held our breath as the Chinese immigration officer looked at our passports and stamped Henk’s Mongolia visa. He didn’t even indicate to us that we had overstayed our visa by a couple days, nor did he request that we pay anything in fines for it. Yes! Something finally works out in our favor! Once this was settled we were back in the car heading into Mongolia. We weren’t exactly sure if we actually had to physically cross the border into Mongolia or if we just needed a China exit stamp, but to cover all our bases we went along for the ride… after making sure our driver knew we needed to go back into China afterwards. All of us then piled out at the Mongolian entry building, stood in line there and got our stamps, and then went straight back into the car again! The border crossing itself turned out to be so much more simple than everything (all the hassle of preparing for it!) leading up to the border crossing!
So now we were ready to go back into China. Here is where some of the issues started. First, the car we had taken started to have trouble. It was stalling a lot, and our driver had to constantly jump out of the vehicle and wind some life back into it. Secondly he needed people to help him push the car as well. We managed to get the car to the re-entry point to China using this method. However turns out – like everything in China – there was a massive queue of cars waiting to cross the border back over. We were supposed to line up in that queue! Since our car was almost dead, our driver decided he didn’t want to do that and instead we made our way right up to the Chinese border control guards. He tried to explain the situation to them (in fact they witnessed us struggling to start/move the car a few times) but they didn’t want to hear any of it. He tried multiple times to speak to various people at the border hoping someone would take pity on us and let us jump the queue but alas no one cared!
Then we had some more luck. All of the sudden I noticed there was a guy standing in front of a couple of the Chinese guards. I’m not sure exactly what he did but he did something that really got their attention. So much so that when the guy took off running (in the opposite direction of the border) the guards all went chasing after him! When all of the queued cars and their drivers noticed this, we all seized this opportune moment to start racing across the border into China in a ‘free-for-all’ dash that I never imagined could happen! It was actually really funny to watch. Obviously our own driver jumped on this chance and yelled for us to help him get the car across. Henk and one of the other girls from our car (although Henk insists he did all the actual work!) were behind the car pushing it across as we yelled for them to hurry… it looked like the guards might be coming back and we were one of the slowest cars since we could barely move to begin with! When we crossed and made it close enough to the immigration building our driver yelled at us to grab our luggage make a run for the building – it seemed we would be fine as long as we got inside.
We did just that and lined up for the next mandatory queue. This one mandated that we open up our backpacks and show the guards our goods. Henk was even told to turn on our laptop and show them the videos and photos we had stored. Thankfully we didn’t have anything that worried the guards so they let us pass through and get our re-entry stamps back into China. We ended up on the other side quite smoothly and waited by the side of the road for our driver (whom we hoped was still alive after disobeying the guards so blatantly!) to find us. I was extremely thirsty at this point… it was sweltering hot the entire time we were doing all of this and Henk ran off to find me some water. He came back with a bottle of water plus an extra person! This guy loaned us some of his water – which tasted a bit like pool water, as he said it would, since he purified it himself with tablets – which was really nice of him! He joined our group for the ride back to the main part of the city as well since his traveling partners had strangely disappeared!
We were dropped off at the bus station where we attempted to get the next tickets to Datong in Northern China. Unfortunately, the next time that direct bus left wouldn’t be until the next morning. Rather than spend the night in Erlian or pay an arm and a leg for a private taxi to drive us to Datong we did some investigating (OK, Henk investigated while I bought us frozen ice water!) and discovered a few other foreigners with the same problem. They informed us that we could take another bus to Jining and then take the train from there to Datong. This entire process should have us arriving in Datong by 9:00 PM that evening. Didn’t sound bad to us! We enjoyed our long journey in the nice A/C bus talking and reading through the Lonely Planet.
Eventually we ended up at the bus station where after meeting up with the other foreigners again, we started to walk to the train station to see when the earliest tickets to Datong were available. On the way the road was very uneven (completely crushed gravel with chunks of rock everywhere) and I ended up falling and scraping my knee up pretty badly yet again. The skin was all torn off and it was quite bloody! Luckily one of the Polish girls with us had some bandages and disinfectant and we were able to clean it up somewhat and make it to the train station.
I found a freestanding chair to rest on (all of the actual seats were already taken) and we put all our bags in the corner. Henk and the Polish couple we had met tried to get some take-away out in the city but came back pretty quickly having concluded that there was literally nothing (not even fast food) for us to get. While we waited around for the train to depart every so often a really angry Chinese trash/cleaning lady would come by and yell at me to get off of the chair (even though there was another one just a couple feet away and it was obvious I had fallen pretty badly.) We tried to explain to her we would put the chair back once the train came and that I really needed to sit right then. But she didn’t care one bit… she even had the audacity to slap my already busted-up knee while yelling at us! (If you didn’t believe us from everything else we’ve said that in general Chinese people are mean and nasty, this example should prove it yet again!)
The train finally came and Henk and I struggled with the bags (I couldn’t carry mine anymore because of my knee so he had to try and carry everything) while the Polish couple ran off without a care to help us. This pissed us off quite a bit since we had been nice enough to write them out a four page list of hints/tips to help them with their travel plans for the Philippines and Henk had talked to them for a while giving them advice while on the bus… pretty **** move on their part! Guess it isn’t just the Chinese who decided to be nasty that day. It took a while for us to get to the train and once we did we jumped in the first train car we saw. Henk was worried the train was going to leave without us if we didn’t.
There were also no seat numbers on our tickets, and this turned out to be an extremely gross non-AC train where people lying all over the place and smoking everywhere possible. We found a small corner by the door to sit near since we couldn’t stand to be in the smoke-clogged train cars. Many of the Chinese train attendants saw us there and proceeded to yell at us, but since they had failed to find us a seat since the train was so crowded we tried to ignore them and just point to my bandaged knee hoping they would leave us alone. It didn’t really work (every time one of them would pass us they would start yelling in Chinese yet again) so we had to deal with that for the next couple hours while we were on the train… so completely horrible! We vowed never to take the ‘old’ trains in China again – but due to flight prices being rather high we knew we would sometimes have little choice.
Unfortunately our troubles didn’t end once we arrived in Datong either. The hostels listed in the Lonely Planet were all either completely full or under construction (or out of our price range) – remember it was now around midnight – so we had no choice but to follow around a dodgy guy who claimed he knew the place we were looking for. Of course he led us somewhere else that only had fan rooms (it is 100+ F degrees outside while we are doing this) and wasn’t helpful. Frustrated we walked down the street and I spotted some Westerners (FINALLY!!) who Henk ran over to ask for help. It turned out that they were from the Netherlands and Henk spoke to them in Dutch while they led us to their hotel near the train station that we all hoped would have a room for us. They did have a room! But it wasn’t an A/C room… grrr! We really had no choice at this point though so we took the room. This led to a really horrible, hot and sticky night of sleep trying to remain sane by just using a fan to keep the mosquitoes away… which also really didn’t work!
It should be no shock to anyone that we were both totally exhausted the next morning and really eager to leave Datong as soon as possible. There were a few sites I was eager to see but we were simply way too tired. Plus we had to plan for Tibet! Our deposit was yet to be sent to the company we planned on using to travel through Tibet and we knew we had to do that right away or risk not getting our mandatory travel permits in time and perhaps not end up going at all! There was an agent in the hotel who had a computer I used to book a couple of flights for us to Xi'an and from Xi'an… we really didn’t want any more trains so we decided to splurge a little for our own sanity. The agent booked our sleeper train tickets to Pingyao (yes, there were no flights to Pingyao so no choice!) for 4:00 PM later that afternoon, along with our hotel booking at Harmony Guesthouse for 3 nights. We then went to an Internet Café/Photo Shop where with the assistance of a nice Chinese kid we scanned in all our documents for Tibet. We also did get our deposit paid that day as Henk ran to a Bank of China to handle that while I continued scanning things.
The two of us finished all of our work with some relaxation and a bite to eat at a nearby (much nicer and fancier hotel than where we were staying) hotel restaurant where the food was actually decently priced. After a quick trip to a China Mobile (where we failed to recharge our phone since it wasn’t a re-charge shop) we helped some Westerners find a hotel by leading them back to the place we were staying since we needed to pick-up our bags anyways. (Thus paying back the nice deed we received from the Dutchies!) We waited around for a while working on some blog posts before it was time to leave for the train station. This trip was supposed to be slightly more comfortable since we had sleeper ‘bunks’ which are usually almost always sold out on other train trips we’ve taken. However since there was no A/C again on the train we were still completely covered in sweat, sticking to the sheets!
We kept ourselves sane by reading the Lonely Planet and using the laptop until its battery ran out. The train trip took longer than expected (it was supposed to leave at 4:40 PM and get in before 11:00 PM but we didn’t arrive until after midnight) but thankfully the people from Harmony Guesthouse were there to meet us (along with another couple who hoped they could catch a ride with us and crash there) and we went first to the main lobby and then to our room in a separate courtyard. This room had a traditional Qing bed which means there is no ‘real’ mattress. The ‘mattress’ is actually a bunch of bamboo mats piled one on top of another on top of a wooden board with a thin sheet over the whole thing, making for a very hard sleep. But at least there was finally A/C! We fell asleep exhausted and were thankful for a chance to sleep in the next morning. Finally we could relax!
Francesca
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