...Let me start this travelog by saying, "I saw a yak on Tuesday"...(I never thought I would say a sentence like that)...heh heh heh....yeah, a real live yak waltzing down the street, but now I am getting ahead of myself.....
When I last left off we were still in Chengdu and still had a night to spend there before getting on a mad-hatter bus to Jiuzhaigou. The last night in Chengdu was great. Sun Yi Yi, our old colleagues friend, treated us to a fantastic Sichuan fish and tomato hot pot. What a great meal! Once again the restaurant left much to be desired (sunflower seed shells and fishbones littered the floor) but the food was great, and of course I had to wash it down with a beer. How else can you hope to eat a Sichuan fish and tomato hotpot?
At dinner we were telling Sun Yi Yi about our trip to the Panda base. She told us a funny story of a man who had a big white dog and had died its ears and eyes black and also the tail and some of the torso to make it look like a Panda. The poor guy had apparently been arrested nine times for having an endangered animal. This may be a Chengdu urban legend, but if its true it is funny...heh heh heh....
Going home that night we sadly noticed that the beautiful river that ran next to our hotel and bisects Chengdu was a place for prostitutes to find customers. It seems that China is one big brothel...(and yes we saw brothels too)...but remember prostitution is illegal in China...there is none! Such is life...at least there were not so many as there are in Shenzhen. The Lonely Planet says of Shenzhen, a city that used to be a small fishing village, that the "only fishnets your are likely to see are on the hordes of whores that inhabit the city." Such is life!
It is funny how we get used to the places we live in. When I first moved to Shenzhen the one thing that caused me great interest was the way people all crowded around a single television, and overflowed into the street, to watch a particular program. Well, I never noticed it for a long time but then in Chengdu, walking back to the hotel on Monday night, we saw some entrepeneurs had setup small rooms, with chairs, for people to watch television. They can then order a drink from the guy who owns the stand and that is how they make their money. Interesting concept and excellent idea.
The other thing that I had become "blind" to is how the public authorities stick the daily newspaper on a public notice boad so that people who cannot afford to buy the newspaper can still have access to the news. We have seen this regularly on our travels. Perhaps this journey is reopening our eyes to the things we had forgotten. This is indeed good!
So then, Tuesday morning and the road to Jiuzhaigou....what a ride....what was meant to be a ten hour jaunt become a 14-hour ride into madness by two insane cowboy drivers whose only agenda seemed to drive as fast as possible and to honk their horn when they saw anything that seemed alive and moving....sometimes they just honked their horn...but they only honked in daylight...when darkness overcame us they decided that honking wasn't needed. The best way to describe the journey would be to say that it was a combination of taking a ride on the Wizard bus in "Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban" and Jonathan Harker's mad rush to Dracula's castle in the first chapter of Bram Stokers Dracula. The ride was crazy....somehow we survived....
Of course there were two delays: one was 2-hours and the other 1-hour. The first was caused by an obstruction on the road and the second was caused by a crash (no one injured) but they refused to move the bus, car and truck until the police came. Of course these vehicles were blocking the road and instead of just marking the accident site to allow the free flow of traffic, they had to delay about 1000-people. Although the police were just down the road they took an hour to get there. It was lunch time I think.
Something else that was really funny was whenever there was a bathroom break the bus would come to a screeching halt, we would all nearly fall out of the window and the driver would shout, "Shang Tse Suo" (go to the toilet) and everybody would dutifully march off the bus into some of the most disgusting toilets we have ever seen (the public toilets in China are something else again and civility prevents a thorough description...use your imagination...on second thoughts don't).
Well anyway, it was at one of these crazy toilet stops that I saw the Yak....and it was not too friendly....Actually, I remember the first time I heard about a Yak was when I read Willard Price's "Indian Adventure" when I was nine or ten, it took me a while to see a real one.....
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