A badly-connected taxi driver gets me to Xi'an...eventually

March 14: He roped me in at Yichang bus station. Probably as thoroughly roped-in as i've ever been.

I told him to take me to the train station, and he asked me why i'd want to go there, as there were no trains tonight. I replied that i knew this, and i was going to take tomorrow's train.

To where, he asked.

Xi'an.

"Oh you should go by bus, there's sleeper buses - buses with beds going to Xi'an tonight."

Yeah, i said, i know about the sleeper buses. They go a long, long way with very infrequent stops, which stops me from whiling away the journey with beers. I'll take the train.

But he did well, talking me round by pointing out the whole extra day, plus cash, i'd save.

I asked him what time the bus left. He didn't reply, but rifled through a stack of business cards before pulling out a typical bus owner's card and calling the number on it. This was a bad sign; i'd been under the impression that by "buses with beds going to Xi'an tonight" he'd meant buses leaving from the bus station. This was a different game - the game the peasants have to play, hailing down buses in the mostly-vain hope they'll stop cold on a superhighway.

Anyway, the outcome of the call, he told me, was that the bus was indeed coming, and we negotiated a price that i found quite reasonable. He dropped me off at an internet bar and said he'd be back in two hours to take me to the bus.

Two-and-a-half hours later he rocked up and told me the bus was running late and would be coming at 1.30. AM, of course. So i wasted another hour online before he picked me up and we headed to the supposed meeting point, under a highway bridge. Half an hour we waited there with no sign of any bus before taxi finally agreed, on my urging, to call bus and check the other's present location. For once i understood the conversation almost-perfectly, and it wasn't encouraging: it was clear that the bus driver wasn't all that fussed whether or not this deal (delivering me to Xi'an) came through or not. The taxi driver was an irrelevant minnow in the transport business; he didn't know the bus driver personally, he'd just come by his card somehow and was now trying to cultivate his "guanxi" (Chinese-style 'connections', or 'netw**king') with these great sharks on the intercity bus scene. The bus driver hadn't bothered to notify him of a change of plans, and he now had to drive 20km out into the countryside if he wanted to make the deal. He laughably tried to get me to pay, then quickly recanted as i started to get out, and away we went to the outskirts of Yichang at top speed.

Once again, however, the bus driver hadn't thought it relevant to tell the taxi driver that the bus was still more than an hour away. Not only did he waste his own petrol and risk our two worthless lives, he was now risking his whole livelihood driving at 140km/h down wet roads to make this deal.

Waiting under another highway bridge, it was now 2.30am and i was getting pretty keen for the bus-bed. Taxi convinced me it would be a good idea to go up onto the bridge, in the rain, to wait for the bus which would be here "on the horse", (ie. a very non-specific "soon"). After about 5 minutes of this a cop pulled up and banished us from the bridge, effectively forcing the taxi driver to pay the toll to enter and use the highway just to stop in the rest zone 500m ahead to meet the bus. Still he fought the inevitable - he stopped the car just before the toll gate and we watched for the bus, which still didn't appear. It looked and felt decidedly like a wild guce chase, but i actually felt sorry for him, this taxi driver who had got me into this and deprived me of a night's sleep. After witnessing his struggle to make it happen I actually wanted him to make his deal. At 3.30, with the bus now a full 4 hours late, he called the bus driver again and discovered that the bus had already gone past us. Luckily, at least as far as our immediate aim of getting me onto the bus was concerned, it had some kind of mechanical problem and was still there in the rest zone ahead. So he floored it, paid the toll and i got on the bus.

Inevitably, having finally got on the bus, desperate for sleep, there turned out to be no berth for me, but i was so tired that the floor proved very inviting.

The next day i awoke as the bus pulled into a(nother?) mechanic's, presumably for the same reason the bus was so late. But inside ten minutes those passengers who had braved the drizzle to relieve ourselves on the green and sodden Hubei countryside were being herded back on board.

The driver seemed to be avoiding the superhighway, instead hurtling along side-roads, probably to maintain proximity to mechanical services. But we weren't hurtling for long before we reached a traffic jam where a "horror smash" had recently taken place. A truck and a passenger bus had apparently collided head-on and the front of both vehicles was completely mangled. Somehow, people said, no-one was seriously hurt, but nothing was getting past on that road. So, after a farcical 10-minute, 15-point turn, we backtracked the 20 minutes to the superhighway entrance.

I was at this point holding the bus bosses - the driver and the owner - responsible for all that had gone wrong, and had decided the previous night, in a fit of pique upon learning i had only the floor to sleep on, that i wouldn't be speaking to either of those two dirty scheming wretches. But as the questionable nature of my decision to devour fresh fruit for breakfast became clear (they don't call fresh fruit 水果 "water fruit" for nothing), i asked when the next stop would be. I didn't quite catch the reply, but apparently when the bus is late there are no bathroom stops. I suggested i could use a plastic water bottle to relieve myself, which the bus bosses found hilarious and quite awesome. Two hours later i was about to crank out another bottle, but the bus owner insisted a plastic bag was a better idea. These seemingly "low quality" behaviours - i don't normally litter China but that double-blue piss bag obviously went straight out the window - apparently endeared me to them, and the owner invited me to stay up front, which was much more comfortable than being walked on in the aisle.

The pair of them, boss and driver, from the start plied me mostly with dirty questions, and the conversation actually ended up quite worthwhile. The boss, who said he was 51 but looked about 30, was a former soldier who'd gone into business with the money he'd saved from the army - an extremely common story in China. He'd bought the sleeper bus for 200,000-odd RMB, and said it took 2 years to recoup the initial outlay. He then had 6 more years in the profit zone before the bus would get pulled off the road. At this point the driver chimed in with, "he's really rich!" He didn't look it, but he's certainly doing alright.

The conversation came pretty quickly round to sexual practices when he told me very confidently that he knew the West was all about "free love" whereas "we Chinese are conservative". I replied that the situation in China's cities was almost exactly the same as in the West - that people pick up in nightclubs, but obviously not everyone does it all the time. He laughed, saying he didn't believe me, that i was trying to protect my "country's face"...so i told him every fucked-up detail i could think of about the treatment of Aboriginal Australia, and he seemed genuinely taken-aback that i would tell him such things, and (possibly, or so it seemed) keener to consider what i was saying.

Maybe it means nothing, but perhaps it could be the start of a legitimate tactic for foreigners trying to talk about controversial issues with Chinese - start by talking about the worst crimes of the Wild West or the British Empire. Make it something worse than they've even heard about - like Younghusband's invasion of Tibet in 1904, if Tibet's the topic under discussion - and your Chinese counterpart may decide your points are more worthwhile considering. The Iraq War might offer some excellent opportunities because the Chinese media, according to the Chinese professor behind this fascinating speech/article, covered it and the all-important leadup to it very similarly to Fox News, only probably less critically. The speech was made in '04 but my experience, or more specifically the near-complete absence of anyone in China ever bringing up the Iraq War with me in the last 2 years, would seem to suggest that the mainstream Chinese media have continued on a similar trajectory.

We drove into a tunnel in the rain and came out the other side in the snow.


Then we came down from the mountains and we were back in Xi'an, the Tang Dynasty capital with the awesome wall. If only Beijing's hadn't been pulled down...