Report from "the Real China"

I'm posting this from the Yangtze River International Youth Hostel in Chongqing, China, which had taken on something of a holy grail status during the seemingly unending and ridiculously complex journey we undertook to get here. Two days ago, we were finishing a pleasant three-night stay in Fenghuang, a beautiful Ming/Qing dynasty-era river town in Hunan province. Fenghuang has only just made its debut in the Lonely Planet, so while it is crowded with Chinese tourists, we saw fewer than half a dozen Western visitors during our time there.

Our next destination was to be Chongqing, starting point for Yangtze River cruises through the Three Gorges. Following the advice of a couple of helpful hotel staffers, we got up early on Friday morning to catch a bus to nearby Tongren, from which we expected to begin - at about 11:00 am - a seven-hour train journey to Chongqing. In Tongren, however, we were confronted with the dreaded "mei you" - often the only words in a sentence that foreigners can understand, and while what can be understood is that "mei you" means "don't have," we have no idea why what we want to have cannot be had, or whether it can be had a little later, or somewhere else, or for a different price, or in another form. All we knew was we were in Tongren, a provincial Chinese town unmentioned in the guidebook, blindly following the advice of people we had met two days and thirty miles previously, and our plan had run aground because when we stumbled through the Mandarin phrases required to book tickets to Chongqing, we were met with "mei you."

Eventually we learned that a landslide had closed a key tunnel on the tracks to Chongqing, which made as much sense as any other explanation. Meanwhile, we stumbled around from train station to long-distance bus station to short-distance bus station, from Tongren to Jishou to Huaihua, eventually ending up in sleeper berths on a train that was claimed to be heading for Chongqing: departing Friday night at 22:38, arriving Saturday morning at 06:00.

Twenty four hours after that, we were sitting in our crowded sleeper carriage, motionless on the tracks about two miles from the Chongqing station, while a passenger revolt began to break out around us. Our train had taken an alternate route to bypass the landslide, arriving in the Chongqing area several hours late, only to find that no platform was available in the Chongqing station. For two hours we sat on one siding outside the city, watching the sun set. Then we rolled forward maybe a mile, to sit for another two hours on yet another siding. The train was out of water and food, and the carriages filled with cigarette smoke as we waited. Some passengers argued with railway staff, demanding to be let off - and a few escaped through windows, hustling down the tracks on foot, luggage in hand, smiling and waving to the cheering crowds still imprisoned on the trains (another train full of delayed passengers was stuck just across from us).

Rachel and I waited it out, and finally, at 11:00 pm, more than 24 hours since we had boarded the train in Huaihua, and about 36 hours since we had begun our (supposedly eight-hour) journey, we pulled in to disembark at Chongqing. We took a room at the first hotel we found near the station, an efficient operation busy funneling in late-arrivers, and spewing out early-departers in the morning.

This morning, after a confusing pair of taxi rides and a bit of lost wandering around, we managed to find the Yangtze River Hostel, which we had booked for two nights previously. We're not staying here now, but we had heard it was a good place to book Three Gorges trips, and it is - the staff here are fantastic (and not at all angry about our no-show).

All along the way, we've been joking about being lost in the "real China" - readers of this blog might know how much terms like that annoy me. For the 48 hours it took us to to get here, we've been the only Westerners in sight, and, with a near-absolute language barrier, we've mostly had only a dim idea, if any, of what was going on at any particular time.

The point of it all - the over-long journey, this over-long post - is that we really would have been lost were it not for the unbroken chain of kindness with which we were met by the people we encountered along the way. I don't like to generalize about vast cultures - "the Chinese are X" - but I do have to say that at every turn we've found people willing to go out of their way to help lost foreigners, even if we don't have any language in common: telling us which bus station to try; explaining to cab drivers where to take us; the woman who took us on a city bus to the Jishou train station (almost certainly not where she herself was planning to go) on a rainy afternoon, and then tried to give us her umbrella; the travel agent in Jishou who went to the ticket counter with us to help us book our tickets (for no fee); two young women on the overnight train who spoke a little English and gave us periodic updates on stituation.

The real China, insofar as we've seen it over the past couple of days, seems to be bustling, and very very big. It's also, I'm happy to say, full of very decent people.