The adventure of a lifetime

Warning: The below couple posts are on the verge of never ending. But as Cliff pointed out to me, blogs are supposed to be your unedited thoughts of what is going on in life. And as Jess said, this blog is as much for me to look back on after I leave China as it is to keep people up to date on life in a foreign country. I didn’t want to forget anything, so…eleven pages in Word later I have fully recounted my trip through Yunnan with six other amazing people.

The adventure (not vacation) that seven crazy people decided to take:

Shenzhen > Guangzhou > Kunming > Lijiang > Qiaotou > Sean’s Guesthouse and then back – Kunming, Lijiang and Qiaotou are in the Yunnan Province of China

Yunnan Province: On the south western edge of China, home of the Naxi people and largely connected with the Tibetan heritage. Kunming is the capital and in the center of the region.

The following retelling of the 2010 Tiger Leaping Gorge excursion will never give justice to all that we experienced through those eight days. I will do my best to recreate the majestic mountains, the china rage that came and went, the breath taking views, the excruciating hikes, and the crazy happenings that led our group through western China.

Roster: Me, Jessica Shewan, Marie Sweetman, Andrew Wanko, Greg Harper, Cliff Burke, Ben Engelbach

The journey:

Our trip started off with a bad sign. The only way the expedition could work out was if we all left on Thursday, September 30^th which was the day before vacation started so we were all teaching then as well. Andrew finished teaching the earliest so he was given money to get tickets for the 7pm train from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, about an hour ride. The tickets were sold out. Luckily he was able to get the 630pm train instead. Jess and Marie were the farthest away from the station so we were all worried they wouldn’t make it. Fortunately one of the teachers at their school had a car and offered them a ride to the bus station cutting their travel time down considerably. Everyone arrived well before 630 and our first hiccup was averted. It turned out that the earlier train was a blessing because our long distance train that we were connecting with from Guangzhou to Kunming was leaving at 9:09pm. Arriving in Guangzhou a half hour earlier than planned gave us time to get dinner and relax for a moment.

After our arrival in Guangzhou, we found some KFC, got seats in the waiting room and joked around for a while. Greg and I were chatting when all of a sudden he turned to me and informed me it was 9:01pm and asked if we should be boarding soon (Jess and I planned the whole trip so we were supposed to have answers to questions like that). I told him I’d go check it out. Standing up, I looked up to the big board of trains people were waiting for. Where ours had been listed, now was a different train number. Dread set in and I rushed to a random Chinese couple and showed them my ticket. They looked at the same board I had and shook their head no. A janitor saw that I was in a panic and called me over. He saw my ticket and his eyes grew wide as he started shouting in Chinese and pointing down the hallway quickly. I scrambled back to my group threw on my backpack and shouted “Run!! We need to go!!!” We all jetted back around the corner the janitor was pointing at. The first security guard we came upon looked at our tickets and shook his head saying the train had left. Not taking that for an answer we ran to the ticket taker who glanced at our tickets and started shouting “Yi lu! Yi lu!”(First floor! First floor!). Turning around we dashed for the escalator not stopping to think. The guys in the group were flinging themselves off the last half of the steps trying to gain as many precious seconds as possible. Reaching the first floor ticket taker the worker said we were in the right place and started laughing at the panic on our faces. He pushed us through and shouted to head down the hallway. We all were running the fastest we had ever run in our lives hoping beyond hope that we were not too late. We skidded around a corner and found ourselves at the bottom of two flights of stairs. Without breathing we jumped up the steps – I literally thought my heart might explode. The train was still there!! We pushed ourselves through the first open door we could find and almost collapsed on the floor. As we started walking down the first train car hallway the engine started chugging and the train pulled away from the station. If we had been 10 to 15 seconds later we would have missed our train. Goodness, the excitement that not knowing the language and being an idiot creates. Also the blessing of being a white person – we showed no one our passports or really our tickets, they just assumed we were innocent, stupid little foreigners.

The train from Guangzhou to Kunming was 26 hours long. We had seven sleeper seats (beds) and luckily five of them were in the same compartment so we had plenty of space to sit and play games. We, the meiguoren (Americans), took over the space and all the Chinese stared and wanted to talk to us when they weren’t annoyed with us for being loud. There were two kids in a compartment down the hallway who ended up attaching themselves to our group. One was a middle schooler and knew a bit of English. Her cousin, FeiFei, was four and the cutest little girl. We were having fun playing cards with her and she ended up loving taking pictures so Andrew and I were trading time of letting her hold our cameras and snap random shots. She had a weird obsession with feet so I think we both ended up with about 20 photos of people’s shoes and socks. Before we knew it we had arrived in Kunming at about 1130pm on October 1^st.