Sunday, October 7, 2007

Bus trip to Sichuan province -- Day 1 (a.k.a "17 hours on a bus")


The picture above is called - "welcome to Golden Week traffic, O you foolish foreigners". Our trip got off to a smooth enough start..left within 10 minutes of the scheduled departure with 2 buses filled with a combination of foreign teachers and their families and the International Cooperation Office staff and their families aboard. Of course, no one else had a baby, nor did anyone else have three kids. This is not that unusual for us, of course..but as things progressed, it may have been a clue that this was going to be even more arduous than we expected! We were scheduled to spend 12 hours on the bus with bathroom breaks, bag lunch on the bus and arriving at our hotel in Pingwu county, Sichuan, for dinner around seven pm. Unfortunately a bottleneck at a tunnel on the highway on the Shaanxi province border turned into a four hour traffic jam...


...during which drivers still kept trying to pass other traffic in the oncoming lane, leading to a lot of arguments, like the one above. People had told us that going to the countryside during Golden Week (the October first holiday -- Chinese independence day -- is the start of 3-5 days off work for many Chinese people) was a little crazy..we were beginning to get a taste of that! So we all passed the time as best we could .. people without babies did some reading...


The kids did some storytelling, game playing and fooling around in the back row (of course Thomas is reflecting our true feelings!)



And Sophia ate A LOT of snacks, was passed from lap to lap and became re-addicted to her pacifier.. she actually began calling is pa-hi-fi-er this week, and when your kid says a four syllable word like that, its probably time to take it away, BUT not when you are heading on a bus trip with your three kids. Actually you never really know just what your friends and your kids (and your friends' kids, and yourselves for that matter) are made of until you spend that long on a bus and actually have a pretty good time.
We were traveling with a lot of good sports and we made the best of things -- the squat potties at the rest stops, included. This is the week I finally mastered the squat potty, having managed to avoid it mostly up to now..I would like to acknowledge Malinda (former Fulbrighter in Xiamen) for her extensive blogging on the subject of squat toilets, which was informative and very useful!! (clink on the link to her blog, Xiamen Adventure, and search the archives if you'd like to know more. I would summarize by saying that knees together and don't breathe through your nose are the keys to success).




Here is a map of Sichuan province. We left from Xi'an (which is not on this map), in the middle of Shaanxi province, and crossed into the corner of Sichuan. Our tour would take us to Huanglong temple, Juizhaigou national park and back through the southern tip of the Gansu province by the time we were done. We logged about 42 hours in the bus total over the five days and covered a lot of territory. But oh what territory! I have added a map of China to the bottom of the page (I think) to get a sense of where we are in case your Chinese geography is a little weak. This is the heart of western China, heavily influenced by Tibetan culture and with some of the most stunning scenery I have ever seen. On the down side, the low-end hotels we stayed in most of the time were pretty pitiful. We were offered a meal when we arrived in Pingwu county at our hotel, which we were 5 hours late for and which looked as if it had just been sitting out all that time waiting for us... we put the kids to bed instead of eating, but the room was pretty horrible, best left to your imagination.







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