I surrender
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2007
1
4
20
Trip End
Dec 15, 2007
Harbin,
China
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
as i was bouncing along (slowly, painfully) towards wudalian chi i started to get this sense that things were about to get complicated. i was headed for a small town where i would be arriving after dark with no hotel reservation and no map. there were only three hotels listed in the lonely planet and only two of them had pricing that i could afford (supposedly). it would make sense to book rooms in advance, and i do have a mobile phone with a local number, but any time i've tried to do that i've been met with total communication meltdown. over the phone, when confronted with someone who doesn't know any english (which is most of the time) there's nothing i can do really. i need gestures, and scribbled notes, and pointed at phrases of chinese characters to make myself understood in those situations...the phone just doesn't cut it. it's easy to get stressed out thinking about it all...and i decided that i need to cultivate a sense of surrender if i'm to ultimately enjoy my time in china (and beyond). that is, giving in to my environment to be carried along instead of resisting and being torn apart. i could call it 'going with the flow' but that doesn't really get at it...it's not so much about willingly following as it is about understanding that i will often end up in places and situations in which i never intended to be...and that i'll have to let go of the frustration over my circumstances to be able to properly deal with whatever it is that's confronting me. surrender in a positive sense...not giving in, but letting go of that which doesn't help me get to where i want to be.
when we arrived in wudalian chi the bus pulled into some sort of compound...it was obviously of the hotel variety. all the russians got off the bus...leaving me and one other chinese woman. i quickly realized that this was one of the two hotels in which i had decided to try to get a bed. i hopped out, grabbed my bag from under the bus, and walked into the lobby. my guide book had mentioned that this hotel was popular with russians, but it didn't mention that it catered almost exclusively to them. when the staff discovered that i was not part of the russian tour group they all started twittering and getting excited. many of the chinese staff spoke fluent russian, but not one of them knew a word of english. i was worried that they simply weren't going to let me stay at all due to my non-russianness but finally someone pointed to a board listing room prices, his finger aimed up way too high...i followed it...400 yuan. i protested...but the body language suggesting 'tough shit' is fairly universal. they claimed it was all they had left. with my newfound sense of surrender, i turned and walked out into the night to find somewhere else to stay. the lonely planet said that this hotel was just east of the traffic circle and that the other hotel i was hoping to stay at was just west (that there is no traffic circle at all in wudalian chi is something i'll address later). since i hadn't seen an intersection of any kind on the way in, i continued down the road assuming that it was headed west. i came to an intersection with a couple of cops in their police van, lights on and swirling all red and blue, warning the non-existent traffic to behave. they were very friendly and happy to talk to me (or anyone probably) and one of them even spoke english! he informed me that i was headed in the right direction and that the hotel i wanted was not too far down the road. the night was chilly in a pleasant autumn kind of way and i found myself smiling about the stupid sitations i get myself into as i hiked along. i found the hotel after about five minutes. their best price...180 yuan. i grudgingly accepted (with flashbacks of dalian) as i knew of nowhere else to go. i was informed that there was hot water only between the hours of 6:00 and 7:30 am. i asked when checkout time was (noon) and if i could leave my bag with them during the day (yes). i set my alarm for 6:45 and went to bed.
the lonely planet lists both of the hotels i was trying to stay at as having dorm beds for 40-50 yuan a night...but at neither hotel did i find evidence of any kind of dorm bed being offered. had i known there was no truly budget accomodation i might have done other things with my time. calling the main intersection a 'traffic circle' instead of an intersection might seem like a small detail in a editor's office...but on the ground it adds greatly to creeping self-doubt when wandering around in the dark. for something listed as one of the highlights of heilongjiang province having no map of any kind for wudalian chi in the guide book seems like a huge oversight, nevermind that the description of bus connections consists entirely of how to get there...with nothing on what times buses leave wudalian chi to go back to haerbin (which anyone not crossing into russia will probably do). the lonely planet divides up the chinese provinces among different researchers and the woman who did the north-eastern provinces has done such a poor job on the details for every place i've been to (even considering how fast things change and/or disappear in china). we'll see how the rest of the trip goes (and how the other researchers do), but at this rate i'm going to seriously consider a different guide book company next time.
the reason i point out the issue with buses leaving wudalian chi is that i had not yet bought a ticket back to haerbin (i was planning on doing it when i arrived, but i didn't end up getting out of the bus at the bus station and so i had no idea where the bus station even was). i did have a train ticket back to beijing though...leaving haerbin at around 8 pm on wednesday. and here i was on tuesday morning needing to be back in haerbin mid-afternoon the next day at the latest. my original plan had been to stay two nights in wudalian chi and then take a bus back on wednesday morning (hopefully) having spent a full day exploring the lava fields. but now that there was nowhere i could really afford to stay i decided to try something else. i would check out, leave my bag at the hotel, take a taxi to the bus station to buy a bus ticket leaving in the afternoon, and then spend as much time as i could until the bus left taking in the sights. then i would bus back to haerbin and stay one more night at the hostel where i had already been and then leave the following night to go back to beijing. it was a good plan for all of about five minutes. checking out went very smoothly, storing my bag...not so much. the same girl (the hotel was staffed almost entirely by teenagers) who had checked me in the night before had checked me out and i reconfirmed with her that i could leave my bag. but then the manager (who had not been around the previous night) came over and started asking what was going on. the girl explained. the manager (an older woman) asked me when i would come back for the bag...i indicated no later than 4 pm. she said no, absolutely not. i was stunned. i asked her why...and she fumbled around in my phrasebook trying to find an adequate word to explain...after five minutes she came up with 'impossible'. so i asked the obvious question...how much? after a minute's contemplation she came back with 50 yuan. to be blunt, she was being a greedy bitch. i think i asked how much it would cost to leave my bag for 6 hours more out of curiosity than anything else...because i was unwilling to even haggle over something that i considered to be such a basic hotel service (every other hotel/hostel that i've stayed at so far agreeing with me on this point). i told everyone present that they could all screw themselves (not that they understood me) and then walked out, bag in tow.
and then i surrendered in the other, negative sense. i gave up completely. i got a taxi, went to the bus station, bought a ticket for the first bus back to haerbin (which happened to be in 20 minutes) and left wudalian chi without ever having set foot on a lava field. as the bus pulled out i wondered if i was being stubborn in a way that was only hurting myself. but then i realized that even if i had payed to leave my bag at the hotel there was no guarantee that i would have been able to buy a bus ticket that would have allowed me to spend any time in wudalian chi anyway. i could have payed another 180 yuan for a second night as i'd originally planned...but that would have left me dangerously low on cash in a place with no money changing services (that i knew of...i had already checked at my hotel and they didn't do it) as well as spending money at an unsustainable rate. i could have lugged my bag around with me all day but carrying all that weight up to crater edges and through fields of lava rock didn't seem like a great idea. i chose the course that was safest, if also the most despiriting. i had ended up wasting two days (14 hours of which spent on buses) and $50 to spend one night in an overpriced hotel run by assholes. as the bus was leaving i could tell from the landscapes that i hadn't been able to see the night before as we'd arrived (which reminded me of northern scotland) that wudalian chi probably was a very interesting, beautiful place. i didn't feel very good about it. and then we finally got back to haerbin and the small joy of knowing which bus to take and where to get off went a long way towards making it ok.
