The China Journal - Day 27 & 28

The ennui created by the overt commercialism of Xijiang left us wanting something a little more authentic, so we were prompted to continue on our journey further south into Guizhou province. However, as is the case of much of China, getting from one destination to the next can prove to be an onerous task. This is chiefly due to the fact that in many places, the road you find yourself on is in the process of being built, and in others it's as if construction began sometime during the early Ming dynasty and was halted shortly thereafter.

Case in point, the road we were to take had been completely washed out by heavy rains, forcing us to retrace our steps back to the small city of Kaili where we had stayed a couple of nights before. Being the only real transport hub in the region, it was the only place where we could then find a bus going in the same direction we'd wanted to go, albeit by a different route.

The day's journey, which we'd hoped would take about five hours, turned into ten, forcing us to stay overnight in a town that was "off the book," meaning that as far as Lonely Planet was concerned, it didn't exist. The entire ordeal made me realize that the amount of time we'd spent in transit in the last week for outweighed anything we'd actually done. The number of repetitious Chinese karaoke videos and bad Chinese sketch comedy we'd been forced to watch, the sound of horking and spitting by the person across the aisle and the constant irritant of second-hand smoke onboard the bus was pushing both Laura and I to the breaking point. A common phrase that the both of us began using during this time was that "it only took one," meaning that it only took one person on the entire bus to make it a miserable and bothersome experience. And without fail, there was always "one."

The following day ensured that our fates don't improve. Laura's feeling sick, and the bus we were to take was delayed by almost an hour after a few men had bribed the driver with a cigarette to convince him to allow them to load a pile of construction materials onto the roof (which then had to be unloaded a little later on, causing yet another delay). Added to that was the two hour delay en route caused by a two-ton truck with a blown out wheel taking up half the road, while a truck of similar size, whose driver had stopped to help, took up the rest (it took a while for them to realize that by backing the second truck up even a metre would have allowed for traffic to pass through).

The trip, which should have taken no more than an hour-and-a-half, took an unbearable five hours, which made the decision to hole up in Zhaoxing village for a couple of days all the much easier to make.