Chinese Schwarzenegger on the b..b.b.b...b.b.b.bus
Trip Start
Mar 21, 2005
1
8
354
Trip End
Ongoing
Dali,
China
Monday, May 16, 2005
First Leg: Yangshuo to Guilin.
Ten yuan gets you a ticket on the mini bus to Guilin. The bus is a small van packed full of seats that are packed full of people--farmers, businessmen, tourists, locals going home. Every bus has a "flight attendant" of sorts, maybe call her (sometimes a man too) a "bus attendant" for simplicity. The job of the bus attendant is to encourage as many people to get on the bus, even if they don't want to: Guilin ma? The skies lightened from the urban dust and smog as we approached the small big city of Guilin. Small for China because it's a city under a million people, but that's still big, if you know what I mean.
A few minutes later I was whipped away on the Korean Daewoo big bus to Nanning, the big big city and provincial capital of Guangxi for 80 yuen ($10). The big attendant hands all the passengers a package with one bottle of water, two buns, three cough drops, a napkin, and a toothpick then makes sure all our seat belt are fastened. On the way, I was privileged to watch 'Predator' for the second time. The first time was on the bus trip between Wuzhou and Yangshuo. Somehow the bus company has a deal with Ahnold. The movie was interspersed with truck ads and Chinese karaoke songs. If you can read the characters, you can sing along. Some English is mixed in, even though it doesn't make much sense.
For example: Chinese...Chinese....Chinese...Happy Birthday...Happy New Year...Chinese Chinese...Chinese...blah, blah, blah.
Back to 'Predator', Ahnold's breakthrough movie back in 1987. The whole movie was dubbed in Chinese. Somehow they found a Chinese person who could imitate Ahnold's accent, basically a Chinese-Austrian-American, if that makes any sense. Not that he said much in the movie anyway.
Once in a while, the bus attendant would pause the movie and pick up the microphone. The mic had way too much reverb on it which was not complete without feedback. It sounded like being in a fishbowl. This was followed by a stop with someone getting off or a food and bathroom break.
At steamy hot Nanning, the gateway to Vietnam, I took a taxi across town, and was amazed at the size and newness of the city. A half an hour of sweaty driving took us only to the middle of the city of about three million people, complete with KFC, Wal-mart SuperStore, and the latest city glitz. It's amazing how cities this size don't even show up on maps half of the time. At least fifteen new mid-sized skyscrapers were under construction, surrounded by derricks and cranes, bamboo scaffolding, and green mesh--standard Chinese construction equipment. Two hours later, I was entering the hard sleeper train to Kunming, with a strong smell of partially-burnt fuel and creosote in the air.
Here, the train began to leave the lowlands and karst country. In this landscape, large plains of rice fields interspersed with knee-high, flowering corn and banana plantations stretched to karst peaks. As we left these plains, the rich brown soils turned to red iron oxide, we climbed 6000 feet and passed through dozens of tunnels and across multiple gorges. After 12 hours, we had reached Kunming in the highlands of Yunnan province. The summer monsoon heat, humidity, and rain had not yet reached the sunny and refreshingly cool highlands.
After 24 hours of traveling, I decided to continue the push to Dali on another small bus. At traffic-jam pace, passing huge industrial zones, large sections of knocked-down buildings, a stone-age nuclear power plant, dust clouds, and other conjurations of urban hell, we left the city limits for Dali, heading up through the red hills into Pine Country. In the low valleys, rice was just starting to grow, unlike the plains around Nanning where the rice was six to eight inches tall already. Farmers churned the red soil by hand with grub hoes. For miles, the terraced landscape was hand turned--an amazing amount of work. On the hillsides grew heavily-used pine forests where farmers were periodically burning slash as spring has reached the highlands.
Ten hours later after 34 hours of straight traveling, I finally arrived in Dali in the northwestern quadrant of Yunnan province, stomach growling from the nasty bus depot food and body weary from not moving for so long--glad to be here and not watching Ahnold for a third time.
