Backpacking China Pt 3
// October 23rd, 2008 // Articles/Features, Travel
Before you get started, you’ll probably want to read
- Part 1
- Part 2
Eventually we stopped again, as it began dusking on day two. We joined a queue. Well at least I think it was a queue. Does a queue have to move, to technically be a queue? If so it wasn’t a queue, but a collection of equally stuck people, huddling together in motor vehicles, perhaps for warmth. I had no idea what we were queuing for, and an attempt to get information from John Wayne’s crew had just resulted in bemused looks, and lots of laughter. So resigned to having no idea what was happening and absolutely no power to change it we settled in for another night in the queue. This time there seemed to be a realization that we weren’t going anywhere soon, so we could get on and off the bus for toilet breaks as we pleased. Alongside the bus was a sheer drop to the left and the right, leaving no choice but to just pee on the road, next to the bus, or someone else’s bus, or truck, or car. The choice was yours, I switched each time, just to keep it fresh (the variation not the road). Annett could now pee in the open public, so that part was no problem and she had acquired what would no doubt be a valuable transferable skill, even if it probably wouldn’t make it onto her CV.
As the hours drifted by, and the evening became the night I think I drifted in and out of sanity. I’m guessing it was the potent cocktail of frustration, hunger, futility, cramp, tiredness and cold that caused it. I started wondering if maybe we’d been kidnapped. No-one on the bus appeared in the slightest bit concerned that we got on the bus one day and instead of getting off it the next day were we just going to disappear for another day at least. No-one called their wife, husband, family, work. No-one had a phone; the girl at the back got off just a few hours after getting on, perhaps tipped off by the dentists, sneaky dentists. Surely our fellow captives must have been worried about us? If so, why did they not look more worried? Maybe we’d been kidnapped? I thought maybe there were news reports announcing our kidnapping being shown on the BBC, threats of executions if John Wayne didn’t receive a large PayPal payment or some distant comrades weren’t released from a prison in Cuba. They weren’t able to politely inform us that we’d been kidnapped as no-one spoke English, so they’d just put us on the bus and driven us to the middle of nowhere, where our resolve and fight would be destroyed through humiliating bouts of sleep deprivation, involuntary hunger strike and public urination torture.
I also thought about what would happen if this had occurred in the UK. We were now twenty-six hours into this trip, in the middle of our second night and there was no bus mutiny, not even a hint of dissent. No complaints, no challenges to the driving crews’ authority. Everyone just sat there, barely saying a word to each other. In the UK if the bus had stopped moving without explanation I guess it would have been about four minutes before someone went to the front to ask:
(Four minute delay) “What’s going on, driver?”
“The bridge is closed. Because of the bad weather” the driver would say.
The message would ripple back through the bus amid a chorus of ‘oh no, you must be joking, you’re ‘avin a laugh’
A few minutes would pass, someone else would approach the driver…
(Fifteen minute delay) “Driver, this simply will not do. Eastenders will be on in 60 minutes and I must get home to see whose turn it is to kill their husband and bury him under the stairs.”
(Twenty five minute delay) Mobile phones would be produced, friends would be called “You’re not going to believe this! They’ve closed the bridge.”
“No way?” They would exclaim.
“Yeah I know, utterly ridiculous isn’t it, unbelievable, I mean what do we pay taxes for?! The government can’t even keep a simple bridge in operation.”
(Thirty minute delay) Someone would approach the driver with a plan. “I called a friend of mine and he suggested that if we just turn around, take a left, left, second right, straight over at the lights, take a right passed the fish and chip shop we can join the A421 passed cragglyhead-upon-tyne which will take us around this bridge and we’ll be home in time for tea and biscuits.”
“Erm, no, I know that road and its usually congested, and it’s a long de-tour” the driver would reply. “I’m sure if we just stay put we can wait this out, it will probably re-open again in a few minutes.”
“A few minutes?! Do you think I have a few minutes to spare? Do you have any idea how important I am?! I work in the city you know, yes that’s right the city! I don’t have time to spend idling here in this elongated coffin on the road to nowhere with riff raff like you.”
“Which city?” the driver says, puzzled
“The city! Asshole!” he would reply, bluntly, as if there were more than one.
(Forty minute delay) The Sun is called, prepares a front page exposes “Broken Britain is BUST – Public transport meltdown!!”
(Forty-five minute delay) “Sorry driver, but the passengers and I have taken a vote and found you to be incompetent and no longer fit for service. Hunger levels have reached a dangerous new high, fast approaching what could only be described as ‘peckish’.” So we will now kill and eat you. Sorry about that, no hard feelings though old chap there really is no other choice. Rule Britannia.”
(One hour delay) Driver is eaten. People give up, get off and walk home.
(One and a half hour delay) Everyone arrives home, begins writing the memoirs of their hardship for serialization in weekly women’s magazines alongside Britney’s latest yawn.
Meanwhile another night passes, and the bus hasn’t move an inch…..
The next morning and its now thirty four hours since we left Tangkou. We’re still in the queue, which still hasn’t moved. We’ve given up all hope of every getting off the bus. Forget our pasts Annett, we were different people then. Now we’re bus people. We can make it work, we’ll just live here in our bunks forever. My body will slowly adapt and shrink in upon itself, collapsing vertebrae until I can lay flat instead of concertinaed like an English Monkey Accordion. We can decorate my window with hand-drawn dust imagery, there’ll be all the spit you can drink courtesy of our Chinese bus friends, I’ll take a job, anything to pass the time maybe become a full-time yawner or head scratcher both valued occupations, you can be a bus wife and stay at home in the day keeping the coops clean. We won’t have much, but we’ll make it work.
Okay, at this point something had clearly snapped and it was more than delusion, I’d gone full blown crazy. Luckily at roughly the same time something snapped in John Wayne as well, and he manoeuvred the bus onto the equivalent of the hard shoulder. There we started slowly moving past the waiting traffic. I have no idea why now we were allowed to use this lane before, I was just relieved to see us moving again. We passed waiting buses and cars, although there were plenty of spaces where vehicles had just given up, turned round and left presumably also by the hard shoulder. Anyway, there was no time for analysis, we were free and moving. It was time for breakfast, the other half of the croissant. Then after a brief period of empty road, we turned a corner to see………………..another queue.
Different, yet still very familiar. We’d been here before. Ah yeah, awesome, another freakin’ queue. I’d of swapped my first born child for a KitKat by this point. For the first time we contemplated abandoning the bus and just following blindly some of the people walking past to try and find a town where we could wait out the bad weather. But we had no idea where that town might be, and knew for a fact that if we did find this town we would be unable to communicate with anyone and would be just ignored. We got off the bus and began walking around a bit trying to decide whether to take our chances. A girl who’d been walking along the road begged to join our bus, literally begged. At first they said no, but then took pity upon her. This didn’t exactly fill us with the confidence we need to abandon the bus and its warm blankets. Amazingly the next time we passed her on the way to the toilet she informed us that she spoke a little English and she could help us if we wanted. We wanted. Did she perhaps have a magic carpet we could borrow? No. Ah, shame. Instead she translated for us while we spoke to John and his crew. He confirmed that the bridge was closed, no idea when it would open, we were a little over half through the journey, there was a town a few kms back where everyone is also stuck, no taxis, no hotel, best to stay put.
Then something quite unexpected happened, the queue started moving. The crew scrambled to put the snow chains back on the tyres and we edged closer to the bridge, inch by inch by inch closer to our destination. Within thirty minutes we were crossing the bridge, wheels spinning, very gingerly as we moved slowly across trying not to slip down the ravine that already housed one overturned bus. Our progress was good and a mere 5 minutes later we reached the other end of the bridge and saw the queue of vehicles waiting to cross in the opposite direct. Poor buggers, I muttered as we passed lines and lines of waiting cars, trucks and buses. I know how you feel. Hold on in there, just another hour or two. Then inexplicably with the taste of freedom on our tongues, the bus stopped, turned around and joined the back of the queue to cross the bridge we’d just spent the last day queuing to cross?!?! WTF? Was this some sort of joke? Did we love the bridge that much that we needed to ride it again? Missing our queue friends back on the other side? Had Sandra Bullock boarded the bus to inform us of a reverse Speed situation, drive over 5kms/hr and a bomb will go off?
