My OperaSEPTEMBER 21, 2007 - China or Bust
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 5:23:46 AM
To say this trip is a dream come true is to minimize it drastically. We have planned, hoped, and dreamed of this trip and it seemed like it would never happen. We started planning it five years ago. I kept on talking about it, year after year, believing that we were going, only to have several people look me square in the face and say, "You're never going to China!" I met them with an equally level gaze and said, "OH, YES, I AM!"
I was sitting at my computer at about 10:00 one night in March, 2007, when I got an email from a dear friend. "What's going on with your plans to go to China?" she asked. "I have a tentative date of September, but there is no money," I wrote back. Every year, for five years, I had set a date of departure for China. This time, I had decided that September 21st would be a prime time to leave.
"How much would it cost?" came the question. I quickly checked four or five discount ticketing agencies online and emailed her back with the amounts. "I think we can help you!" I could hardly breathe, I was so shocked and thrilled. That was the beginning, and true to her word, she put the wheels in motion that sent us on our way.
The day did not start out well. I had planned to be at the airport two hours early and woke up accordingly. Ken, mistakenly thinking that the first leg of the journey, which took us from Portland, OR to San Francisco, CA was a domestic flight, thought we didn't need more than an hour of leeway time before our flight so he was leisurely in his getting ready.
We got in the wrong line at the airport and when we finally got to the head of the line, we discovered that we had missed our flight by two minutes. The bags had to be checked forty minutes before the flight and it was 38 minutes until flight time. Since this was the first international trip we had taken in twenty-five years of marriage, except to Canada, the stress level was fairly high.
Kindly, the airlines put us on a flight to San Francisco with another airlines, but it only gave us fifteen minutes in San Francisco to make our connecting flight to Hong Kong! We were not very familiar with the San Francisco airport. It had been nearly thirty years since I flew into it. Fifteen minutes wasn't going to be much time. More stress. We wouldn't think about it until we had to do it.
The original plane we had been booked on to Hong Kong was jammed and the new one had 150 spare seats, so we were happy to hear that we could probably share a row of three seats that would allow us to have our arm-rests up and lay our books and my purse between us. Happily, we took our new tickets and headed to the gate to board our plane for San Francisco...well...we were going to board, but the ticketing agent had given us boarding passes with someone elses names on them! Back we went to get it straightened out. Our flight to San Francisco was smooth and quick. We were excited to be on our way.
Unfortunately, the girl who gave us our new tickets failed to inform us that we were supposed to pick up our bags in the San Francisco baggage claim and check them again at the ticket counter before we boarded our flight to Hong Kong. How in the world could we have done that in fifteen minutes? We boarded in happy ignorance. The original flight was scheduled to land in Hong Kong at 11:30 AM and this one was set for 1:09 PM, so that wasn't bad.
Shortly after boarding the plane, the captain's voice came over the intercom announcing that there was "trouble with the air-conditioning..." Having flown many times, I knew that those words were code for "There is something seriously wrong with this plane!" I started praying. "God, if this plane is not going to get us to Hong Kong in perfect safety, don't let it leave the ground!" Three minutes later, we were evacuated and told that our next plane would be announced and it would leave at 1:30 PM...No, 2:00 PM...No, it will be 3:30 PM when it leaves. When we finally boarded, it was 4:00 in the afternoon.
Once we boarded, we sat and sat at the gate for half an hour, not going anywhere. Finally, the flight attendants started calling for Leo Ching..."Leo Ching? Are you here?" No answer. "Leo Chung? Is there a Leo Chung on board?" No answer. "Lieu Qing? Is there a Lieu Qing?" The guy was nowhere. His bags were on the plane and he had disappeared. Not good! If he couldn't be located, the bags would have to be removed and who knew how deeply they were buried in the bowels of the plane?
Another half hour passed, while we waited and then, the flight attendants escorted a squat, plump, smiling Liu Cheng to his seat. We were on our way!
It was now late afternoon, but the sun was shining and it was gorgeous outside. People stretched out full-length on back rows and went to sleep. Ken and I had three seats together again, so we settled back for the long trip. Neither of us were sleepy in the least. Shades were pulled down all over the airplane. It created a surreal atmosphere. I didn't like losing the daylight.
I was enjoying the sunlight, shade up, reading a book, looking at the blue of the ocean below us through a curtain of fluffy white clouds, when a steward came and told me to close my window shade because it was bothering people who wanted to sleep.
It made no sense to me, since it was only about five by that time, but I reluctantly acquiesced. We flew in this strange twilight on the plane all the way across the ocean for eleven hours, arriving in Hong Kong where it was nighttime when we landed, so we missed the whole evening. It gave one a very odd sensation. Like we were living two nights in a row, with no day in-between. Of course there was nothing but clouds and ocean to see below us for all of those hours, so perhaps that was their reasoning. I peeked through the window shade from time to time, not wanting to miss anything. Neither Ken nor I slept much at all on the flight.
The seats were quite uncomfortable by about the fourth hour and my back was starting to spasm, so I pulled out my bottle of Valerian root and put a few pills in my hand. A female flight attendent was walking by as I swallowed them and she said, "What is that SMELL?" looking around with anxious eyes. "It smells like a chemical!" Valerian stinks. There is no way around it. But the benefits it gives me as a muscle relaxer with no side effects can't be argued with. I pulled the bottle out of my bag and said, "It's Valerian. It smells terrible, I know, but my back was spasming and this is the best for muscle relaxing." I could sell the stuff, I believe in it so much. She took the bottle, took a whiff and jerked back. "Ooohh! That's awful!" She handed it back. Everyone in our section of the plane was looking and listening. "But it works like a charm!" I assured her. She and several other people wrote down the name so they could get some at some future date. Crisis over.
The lights on the islands around Hong Kong were breath-taking at night. It looked like Christmas down there! We landed in Hong Kong without incident and went promptly down to baggage claim where we discovered that our bags were still in San Francisco. We had only the clothes on our backs and our small backpacks filled with our camera, magazines, books, and snacks. By this time, we were both quite tired, stressed, and short with each other. How could we ever get our bags when we were in a country that didn't speak English? We concluded that we could buy more clothes if we had to and that we were all that each other had in this foreign country, so we needed to be kind to each other. No need to panic, we still had the clothes on our backs and some money in our pockets.
After leaving the baggage area, we stopped at an information booth and asked where to catch a bus to the Silvermine Beach Hotel and were told by a very nice young Chinese lady who spoke delicate, broken English that a bus would arrive in about five minutes; that once we reached our destination, we would get off the bus and walk for about 10 minutes in the dark to get to our hotel. Yikes! She gave us a computer print-out with a bus schedule to Mui Wo Ferry Terminal.
It was now 9:30 PM. The thought of heading out in the dark was a bit daunting. I suggested to Ken that we just stay in the airport and lean against a wall for the night. He reminded me that we had paid US$68.00 for that hotel and there was no use wasting the money, so we hurriedly followed her directions, across the airport lobby, down two flights of back stairs marked with a Code Orange for “Moderate Danger Zone” and found the bus stop ten feet from the double doors we had gone through to go outside.
The bus pulled in just as we walked up, but the bus driver snapped at me in annoyed Chinese and motioned me back roughly as I tried to get on, even though everyone else had exited the bus. He tapped his watch and closed the door of the bus. He pointed to where we should wait and disappeared into Code Orange. He had a break coming and we could just wait until it was over! Ten minutes later, out of the airport he came briskly, rejuvenated from his few minutes of freedom and smiled as he let us on the bus. We paid the required 14 yuan (about $1.95) and settled into the skinniest bus seats either of us had ever tried to squeeze our ample heinies into!
I nudged Ken to have him ask the bus driver if this bus went to the Silvermine Beach Hotel, just to be sure. Ken asked a little hesitantly, not knowing if the driver spoke English. Ken showed him the paper the girl had given us in the airport and the driver nodded. "Yes. Last stop. Ten minute walk to hotel." We were on the right track!
Then began the most interesting bus trip of our lifetimes. We wound in dizzying circles just to get out of the city and began an ascent up a mountain road, mostly single-laned, that was under construction from bottom to top. The driver was a madman!
It was an hour ride to the hotel, over the most amazing stretch of roadway I had ever seen in my life. It was a one-lane, two-way road! Only in China! I was fascinated with their ingenuity. They had pull-outs at every sharp corner, with a red/yellow/green light at every stop. It was mandatory to pull out. Sometimes another vehicle would lumber past us. Sometimes, the light would turn green immediately and off we would go, hurtling around hairpin turns at breakneck speeds! There were no guard rails on the sides of the steep cliffs. At every corner, the bus driver would honk to announce to any on-coming driver that he was on his way through. I thought that was a splendid idea and one we should utilize in America, since people are killed every day here going around blind highway corners.
We flew up one mountain and down another. It seemed endless. Finally, I turned to Ken with glowing eyes and said, "This is the most ingenious road I've ever seen!" He grinned and said, "This is the Road of Insanity!" adapting a line from "The Princess Bride" movie. He had been thoroughly enjoying the wild ride.
The bus was jammed to the hilt. There wasn't even standing room left when we headed out. We went through lovely wilderness, blank empty spaces, poorest ghettos, and quaint villages. We stopped dozens of times, with the largest group of people exiting the bus at the worst ghetto; and finally, we stopped in front of a ferry terminal at seemingly the end of the earth. "Last stop!" the driver yelled in English. There was only one other person getting off at our stop. He headed into the ferry terminal.
We asked the bus driver if he knew where the hotel was. "Yes!" he said impatiently. "You get off the bus and walk for 10 minutes and you'll see it! Ten minutes!" His English was perfectly clear. I was a little hesitant, because he seemed so cranky, but I said, "Which way?" He pointed and we headed off, following his finger.
It was quite a lovely paved walkway along the edge of a beach, with streetlights showing the way. Here and there we met a Chinese person who said a shy "Hello." I felt no anxiety being out there, but I think Ken did.
Precisely ten minutes later, we walked into the office of The Silvermine Beach Hotel. From the outside it looked beautiful, a common trait of even the most horrible hotels in China. It gleamed with a huge, intricate neon sign and white paint. It was nestled across from a breathtakingly beautiful salt-water bay that was lighted by the neon. Tiny white wavelets reflected the light as they spread their delightful patterns on the sand. We were on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from home. It was thrillingly hard to believe!
Inside, the lobby was spartan, but clean. Two uniformed young men waited on us, honored our internet pre-paid reservation which I had printed out and carried with me. They gave us a keycard to our room as smoothly as if we’d been in our own country. We walked through double doors to the stairs and our nostrils were bombarded with a carpet deodorizer of a magnitude I had ever experienced. It smelled terrible! I thought I was going to be sick! It was everywhere…up the two flights of stairs…down the hall.
Fortunately, the stench didn't carry into our room, so I quickly put a spare blanket across the bottom of the door to keep the smell out and we wearily prepared for the night, knowing that we had to be up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus back to the airport for our trip to Zhengzhou.
The room sported two single beds with box-springs for mattresses. They were ROCKS!! We had sat up for more than sixteen hours straight and the thought of lying down was heavenly even on rocks. Just before I went to bed, I put on some Chinese deodorant that I had bought in a shop in the airport. BIG MISTAKE!! It smell exactly like the offending carpet in the hall outside our room! I spent half an hour trying to rid my body and my clothes of the disgusting odor.
I had just fallen asleep, stretched luxuriously out on the rock bed, when Ken got out of his cold bath and decided that we needed to make a plan of action for the next day. I grumbled, but somehow, we decided to take a 6:00 AM bus back to the airport through "Old Towne" hoping the trip would be less treacherous than the one we had just experienced. Ken settled down and was soon snoring comfortably. Once awake, I have trouble going back to sleep, so I was staring at the ceiling that glowed with the outside neon lights until 3:30 AM. Two hours of sleep in the hotel, with the two hours I got on the airplane was going to have to do me. Somehow, I woke up refreshed in mind and body and ready to face a new day!
I was sitting at my computer at about 10:00 one night in March, 2007, when I got an email from a dear friend. "What's going on with your plans to go to China?" she asked. "I have a tentative date of September, but there is no money," I wrote back. Every year, for five years, I had set a date of departure for China. This time, I had decided that September 21st would be a prime time to leave.
"How much would it cost?" came the question. I quickly checked four or five discount ticketing agencies online and emailed her back with the amounts. "I think we can help you!" I could hardly breathe, I was so shocked and thrilled. That was the beginning, and true to her word, she put the wheels in motion that sent us on our way.
The day did not start out well. I had planned to be at the airport two hours early and woke up accordingly. Ken, mistakenly thinking that the first leg of the journey, which took us from Portland, OR to San Francisco, CA was a domestic flight, thought we didn't need more than an hour of leeway time before our flight so he was leisurely in his getting ready.
We got in the wrong line at the airport and when we finally got to the head of the line, we discovered that we had missed our flight by two minutes. The bags had to be checked forty minutes before the flight and it was 38 minutes until flight time. Since this was the first international trip we had taken in twenty-five years of marriage, except to Canada, the stress level was fairly high.
Kindly, the airlines put us on a flight to San Francisco with another airlines, but it only gave us fifteen minutes in San Francisco to make our connecting flight to Hong Kong! We were not very familiar with the San Francisco airport. It had been nearly thirty years since I flew into it. Fifteen minutes wasn't going to be much time. More stress. We wouldn't think about it until we had to do it.
The original plane we had been booked on to Hong Kong was jammed and the new one had 150 spare seats, so we were happy to hear that we could probably share a row of three seats that would allow us to have our arm-rests up and lay our books and my purse between us. Happily, we took our new tickets and headed to the gate to board our plane for San Francisco...well...we were going to board, but the ticketing agent had given us boarding passes with someone elses names on them! Back we went to get it straightened out. Our flight to San Francisco was smooth and quick. We were excited to be on our way.
Unfortunately, the girl who gave us our new tickets failed to inform us that we were supposed to pick up our bags in the San Francisco baggage claim and check them again at the ticket counter before we boarded our flight to Hong Kong. How in the world could we have done that in fifteen minutes? We boarded in happy ignorance. The original flight was scheduled to land in Hong Kong at 11:30 AM and this one was set for 1:09 PM, so that wasn't bad.
Shortly after boarding the plane, the captain's voice came over the intercom announcing that there was "trouble with the air-conditioning..." Having flown many times, I knew that those words were code for "There is something seriously wrong with this plane!" I started praying. "God, if this plane is not going to get us to Hong Kong in perfect safety, don't let it leave the ground!" Three minutes later, we were evacuated and told that our next plane would be announced and it would leave at 1:30 PM...No, 2:00 PM...No, it will be 3:30 PM when it leaves. When we finally boarded, it was 4:00 in the afternoon.
Once we boarded, we sat and sat at the gate for half an hour, not going anywhere. Finally, the flight attendants started calling for Leo Ching..."Leo Ching? Are you here?" No answer. "Leo Chung? Is there a Leo Chung on board?" No answer. "Lieu Qing? Is there a Lieu Qing?" The guy was nowhere. His bags were on the plane and he had disappeared. Not good! If he couldn't be located, the bags would have to be removed and who knew how deeply they were buried in the bowels of the plane?
Another half hour passed, while we waited and then, the flight attendants escorted a squat, plump, smiling Liu Cheng to his seat. We were on our way!
It was now late afternoon, but the sun was shining and it was gorgeous outside. People stretched out full-length on back rows and went to sleep. Ken and I had three seats together again, so we settled back for the long trip. Neither of us were sleepy in the least. Shades were pulled down all over the airplane. It created a surreal atmosphere. I didn't like losing the daylight.
I was enjoying the sunlight, shade up, reading a book, looking at the blue of the ocean below us through a curtain of fluffy white clouds, when a steward came and told me to close my window shade because it was bothering people who wanted to sleep.
It made no sense to me, since it was only about five by that time, but I reluctantly acquiesced. We flew in this strange twilight on the plane all the way across the ocean for eleven hours, arriving in Hong Kong where it was nighttime when we landed, so we missed the whole evening. It gave one a very odd sensation. Like we were living two nights in a row, with no day in-between. Of course there was nothing but clouds and ocean to see below us for all of those hours, so perhaps that was their reasoning. I peeked through the window shade from time to time, not wanting to miss anything. Neither Ken nor I slept much at all on the flight.
The seats were quite uncomfortable by about the fourth hour and my back was starting to spasm, so I pulled out my bottle of Valerian root and put a few pills in my hand. A female flight attendent was walking by as I swallowed them and she said, "What is that SMELL?" looking around with anxious eyes. "It smells like a chemical!" Valerian stinks. There is no way around it. But the benefits it gives me as a muscle relaxer with no side effects can't be argued with. I pulled the bottle out of my bag and said, "It's Valerian. It smells terrible, I know, but my back was spasming and this is the best for muscle relaxing." I could sell the stuff, I believe in it so much. She took the bottle, took a whiff and jerked back. "Ooohh! That's awful!" She handed it back. Everyone in our section of the plane was looking and listening. "But it works like a charm!" I assured her. She and several other people wrote down the name so they could get some at some future date. Crisis over.
The lights on the islands around Hong Kong were breath-taking at night. It looked like Christmas down there! We landed in Hong Kong without incident and went promptly down to baggage claim where we discovered that our bags were still in San Francisco. We had only the clothes on our backs and our small backpacks filled with our camera, magazines, books, and snacks. By this time, we were both quite tired, stressed, and short with each other. How could we ever get our bags when we were in a country that didn't speak English? We concluded that we could buy more clothes if we had to and that we were all that each other had in this foreign country, so we needed to be kind to each other. No need to panic, we still had the clothes on our backs and some money in our pockets.
After leaving the baggage area, we stopped at an information booth and asked where to catch a bus to the Silvermine Beach Hotel and were told by a very nice young Chinese lady who spoke delicate, broken English that a bus would arrive in about five minutes; that once we reached our destination, we would get off the bus and walk for about 10 minutes in the dark to get to our hotel. Yikes! She gave us a computer print-out with a bus schedule to Mui Wo Ferry Terminal.
It was now 9:30 PM. The thought of heading out in the dark was a bit daunting. I suggested to Ken that we just stay in the airport and lean against a wall for the night. He reminded me that we had paid US$68.00 for that hotel and there was no use wasting the money, so we hurriedly followed her directions, across the airport lobby, down two flights of back stairs marked with a Code Orange for “Moderate Danger Zone” and found the bus stop ten feet from the double doors we had gone through to go outside.
The bus pulled in just as we walked up, but the bus driver snapped at me in annoyed Chinese and motioned me back roughly as I tried to get on, even though everyone else had exited the bus. He tapped his watch and closed the door of the bus. He pointed to where we should wait and disappeared into Code Orange. He had a break coming and we could just wait until it was over! Ten minutes later, out of the airport he came briskly, rejuvenated from his few minutes of freedom and smiled as he let us on the bus. We paid the required 14 yuan (about $1.95) and settled into the skinniest bus seats either of us had ever tried to squeeze our ample heinies into!
I nudged Ken to have him ask the bus driver if this bus went to the Silvermine Beach Hotel, just to be sure. Ken asked a little hesitantly, not knowing if the driver spoke English. Ken showed him the paper the girl had given us in the airport and the driver nodded. "Yes. Last stop. Ten minute walk to hotel." We were on the right track!
Then began the most interesting bus trip of our lifetimes. We wound in dizzying circles just to get out of the city and began an ascent up a mountain road, mostly single-laned, that was under construction from bottom to top. The driver was a madman!
It was an hour ride to the hotel, over the most amazing stretch of roadway I had ever seen in my life. It was a one-lane, two-way road! Only in China! I was fascinated with their ingenuity. They had pull-outs at every sharp corner, with a red/yellow/green light at every stop. It was mandatory to pull out. Sometimes another vehicle would lumber past us. Sometimes, the light would turn green immediately and off we would go, hurtling around hairpin turns at breakneck speeds! There were no guard rails on the sides of the steep cliffs. At every corner, the bus driver would honk to announce to any on-coming driver that he was on his way through. I thought that was a splendid idea and one we should utilize in America, since people are killed every day here going around blind highway corners.
We flew up one mountain and down another. It seemed endless. Finally, I turned to Ken with glowing eyes and said, "This is the most ingenious road I've ever seen!" He grinned and said, "This is the Road of Insanity!" adapting a line from "The Princess Bride" movie. He had been thoroughly enjoying the wild ride.
The bus was jammed to the hilt. There wasn't even standing room left when we headed out. We went through lovely wilderness, blank empty spaces, poorest ghettos, and quaint villages. We stopped dozens of times, with the largest group of people exiting the bus at the worst ghetto; and finally, we stopped in front of a ferry terminal at seemingly the end of the earth. "Last stop!" the driver yelled in English. There was only one other person getting off at our stop. He headed into the ferry terminal.
We asked the bus driver if he knew where the hotel was. "Yes!" he said impatiently. "You get off the bus and walk for 10 minutes and you'll see it! Ten minutes!" His English was perfectly clear. I was a little hesitant, because he seemed so cranky, but I said, "Which way?" He pointed and we headed off, following his finger.
It was quite a lovely paved walkway along the edge of a beach, with streetlights showing the way. Here and there we met a Chinese person who said a shy "Hello." I felt no anxiety being out there, but I think Ken did.
Precisely ten minutes later, we walked into the office of The Silvermine Beach Hotel. From the outside it looked beautiful, a common trait of even the most horrible hotels in China. It gleamed with a huge, intricate neon sign and white paint. It was nestled across from a breathtakingly beautiful salt-water bay that was lighted by the neon. Tiny white wavelets reflected the light as they spread their delightful patterns on the sand. We were on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from home. It was thrillingly hard to believe!
Inside, the lobby was spartan, but clean. Two uniformed young men waited on us, honored our internet pre-paid reservation which I had printed out and carried with me. They gave us a keycard to our room as smoothly as if we’d been in our own country. We walked through double doors to the stairs and our nostrils were bombarded with a carpet deodorizer of a magnitude I had ever experienced. It smelled terrible! I thought I was going to be sick! It was everywhere…up the two flights of stairs…down the hall.
Fortunately, the stench didn't carry into our room, so I quickly put a spare blanket across the bottom of the door to keep the smell out and we wearily prepared for the night, knowing that we had to be up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus back to the airport for our trip to Zhengzhou.
The room sported two single beds with box-springs for mattresses. They were ROCKS!! We had sat up for more than sixteen hours straight and the thought of lying down was heavenly even on rocks. Just before I went to bed, I put on some Chinese deodorant that I had bought in a shop in the airport. BIG MISTAKE!! It smell exactly like the offending carpet in the hall outside our room! I spent half an hour trying to rid my body and my clothes of the disgusting odor.
I had just fallen asleep, stretched luxuriously out on the rock bed, when Ken got out of his cold bath and decided that we needed to make a plan of action for the next day. I grumbled, but somehow, we decided to take a 6:00 AM bus back to the airport through "Old Towne" hoping the trip would be less treacherous than the one we had just experienced. Ken settled down and was soon snoring comfortably. Once awake, I have trouble going back to sleep, so I was staring at the ceiling that glowed with the outside neon lights until 3:30 AM. Two hours of sleep in the hotel, with the two hours I got on the airplane was going to have to do me. Somehow, I woke up refreshed in mind and body and ready to face a new day!
