Traveling in Rural China

               It has been quite a while since my last blog post. As often happens with me and blogs, I paused for a little bit (in this case, to travel over National Holiday), and when I returned I wasn’t quite sure where to start. Part of me always wants to start where I left off, but another part of me knows that if I start there I will likely never make it to the much more pertinent present. Now, after several weeks of inaction, my own nagging as well as sweet messages from family friends and family about my blog has gotten me writing once again.

               Since my last post, I have done quite a bit of traveling. First I went to Gengga and Changning with Ida, and then, again with Ida, to Dali for National Holiday. Later I went to Lincang City for a conference with Teach for China. Most recently, I went once again to Changning to celebrate Halloween with other Teach for China Fellows.

               While I have become accustomed to getting around in rural Yunnan, it is nonetheless a fascinating, sometimes frustrating process that deserves an in-depth description. While trains are the transportation of choice in most of China, the bus reigns supreme in the great majority of Yunnan.

I should say that the bus reigns supreme as a form of mass transportation, because if looking at just transportation in general, motorcycles would undoubtedly top the charts, especially in the more remote villages. I happened to be in Ida’s very remote placement, Gengga, when parents were arriving to pick up their kids, and the traffic jam of motorcycles outside the school gates resembled a game I used to play when I was younger called Rush Hour, where you had to move cars, trucks, and vans out of the way one square at a time in order to allow the one red car to drive off the board. But in this iteration, the board was completely packed with exclusively motorcycles, and there were no open squares to move into at all. If the red car were there, it would have had to wait several hours to get to its destination.

This same phenomenon occurred in Lincang City during the Teach for China conference, but with cars (motorcycles are still common, but cars are more so due to the prosperity of the city). We were returning to our hotel from an activity when we ran into an awful traffic jam. We originally assumed it was the result of a bad car accident, but as we saw students in middle school uniforms weave in and out of the cars (some of which we now realized were empty), we realized that the six-lane road in the middle of the city had essentially been turned into a parking lot while parents were picking up their children.

Anyway, back to the bus, the king of mass transportation in Yunnan. The bus has won out over the train here in Yunnan because of Yunnan’s mountainous terrain and relatively dispersed population. It is hugely expensive to lay railroad tracks through the mountains and, compared to the rest of China, Yunnan is not very densely populated (though still much more densely populated when compared to similar areas in the United States), making railroads less economical in general, so trains only go to Yunnan’s largest and most central cities or tourist destinations (like Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang). Thus the only option to the majority of Yunnan is the bus.

In Dazhai, this option is cheap and convenient. Buses leave from Dazhai to go to Yunxian, the nearest large city, every 15 minutes from about 6:30am to 6:30pm for about $3.50. The bus has, in my experience, never filled up, making it a flexible and easy option. However, from the smaller town of Gengga, there are only three or four buses going to the nearest city of Changning each day, and they are almost always full, making it much more difficult and inconvenient to travel. That variety is part of what makes travel in Yunnan unique and, sometimes, frustrating.

Buses also serve an auxiliary role as package carrier for the villages on their route. When boarding the bus, there will often be several packages in the middle of the floor that will be dropped off throughout the trip. I often wonder who receives the money for those packages – the bus driver or the company. One time a woman stopped the bus and handed the driver an open bag of green beans and other vegetables, which he took and dropped off a dozen miles later with an older woman waiting at the side of the road. Another time several crates of chickens were strapped to the top of the bus and dropped off on the way to our destination.

Other than that, how do these buses differ from, say, Greyhound or Megabus? There are three main types of buses in China in my experience. The most common in rural China is a minibus, about two-thirds the length of a Greyhound bus with seats that are somewhat smaller and closer together and with a larger open area in the center for luggage or extra people. In between larger cities you usually find larger, Greyhound-style buses will four seats per row and luggage storage underneath. Both of these types of buses have seatbelts, which bus station officials will actually make sure you buckle before you leave (this in a society where any helmet on a motorcycle is uncommon and actual motorcycle helmets are rarer still). Finally, for long distance nighttime buses, you often find sleeper buses, which have short bunk beds (especially short for us tall Americans) rather than seats. In my recent travel, I was mostly on minibuses, with a few larger buses for longer hauls (for instance, to Dali).

In all of my travel over the past month, I have had two especially interesting experiences in my journeys. First, when Ida and I were on the bus from Changning to Dali over National Holiday, the large bus we were on got in an accident, hitting the small truck in front of us, which in turn hit the SUV in front of it. It was a bad crash for the cars involved, but luckily no one was hurt. Most interesting for me was what happened afterward. Right after the crash, the cars stayed exactly where they were in a rather dangerous, steep spot, leaving only one lane open. That lane was used by cars going in both directions, with a speed and recklessness (around a corner) that made Ida and I think that another accident would soon follow.

Most everyone on the bus ended up out on the road (mind you, this is a major road, though only two lanes across) to see the accident, get fresh air, and/or smoke. Ida and I did go out to see what had happened and actually felt safer on the side of the road after seeing what a precarious spot the bus was in with other trucks and buses zooming by with little thought of cars coming in the other direction (in the same lane). We were actually a little concerned that we might cause an accident ourselves with all the rubbernecking we got from passing drivers due to our being foreigners.

Eventually the police did arrive along with what appeared to be an official from the bus company to take pictures of the accident and write down the story. After pictures were taken, the cars were finally moved more toward the side of the road. Meanwhile, we bus passengers were left without any idea of how we would be getting to our destination. We watched and waited, hoping that we would somehow end up in Dali. Finally, about an hour and a half after the crash, another bus showed up that would take us onward. As we left the scene of the crash, we also left our old bus driver, all three crashed cars, and some police still there. I like to think that the crash was resolved without too much trouble and that the look of anguish on the drivers’ faces were due to the immediate situation rather than its effect on their future. However, I have no idea about how such things are resolved in China, so I have no way of knowing.

The second adventure in my recent travel was in my return journey from Gengga after Halloween. As I wrote before, there are only three buses to Changning from Gengga every day. Since I had to get back to Dazhai by the early evening for an evening study hall with Class 185, I took the earliest bus, at 8:00 am. However, the ride from Gengga to Changning to Yunxian to Dazhai is a long one, and the first two legs actually overlap by about 40 minutes (the road from Yunxian to Changning forks and goes to Gengga), so I determined to get off at the fork and figure out a way to get to Yunxian from there. I originally planned to wait for a bus to Yunxian to go by, which I would simply flag down and take the rest of the way. This is a common way to get around, and works well as long as the bus isn't already full.

However, as soon as I arrived at the town where the road forks to Changning and Gengga I was offered a ride to a town in between there and Yunxian by a woman driving a small silver minivan already holding four other passengers. She assured me that I could get to Yunxian from that town, so I agreed to her price of $2.50 and hopped in the front seat. The woman drove a rather frenzied pace to the town, stopping here and there to drop off people and pick up others until the car was full, when she began shaking and waving her hand at people waiting for a ride on the side of the road to show that there was no room. As she drove and passed slower cars (a necessary evil on a two lane mountain road with many slow, over-laden trucks), the driver answered called and made others herself (bus drivers are rarely better and will often smoke as well). We nonetheless made it quickly and easily, safe and sound.

She dropped me off directly next to a minibus heading from the town to Yunxian, which I hopped on just a minute before it left, nabbing the last window seat available (while the aisle offers more leg room, the window is necessary if people start smoking or if your seatmate smells particularly badly). I arrived in Yunxian quickly and easily, and was conveniently able to catch a bus to Dazhai within minutes.

While this second adventure may hardly seem an adventure to my dear readers, it was much more of one as I lived it. I felt rather like I was stepping out of a door with a blindfold on, unsure of what exactly I would land on (if anything). While I ended up finding relatively simple and easy transportation each step of the way, I could have also waited by the side of the road for an hour with only full buses going by.

But no, that is rarely how China works in my experience. It is a place where things crazily, haphazardly, wildly sort out and work out. Many ways of doing business and of living here seem like they should not work, but somehow, day after day, they do. It is something that mystifies and invigorates me about living in China. Somehow this massive, complex, diverse society gets along day by day, month by month, year by year, century by century. Things change and things stay the same, and life goes on.

 During National Holiday, Ida and I spent two nights in Changning as we waited for a bus with available tickets to take us to Dali. As we walked around one day, we ran into the one person we knew in the city of tens of thousands - Huang Laoshi, one of Ida's local teachers. He invited us to his home and then took us with his daughter to visit a really beautiful park.

A boy fishing for minnows in the park in Changning.

Unhappy campers waiting for salvation after the bus crash on the way to Dali.

The police photographing the scene of the crash.

Once in Dali, we immediately found delicious cheese and meat sandwiches to meet our cravings.

Wheat bread and cheddar with Japanese beer and a book. A good day.

I found two packages awaiting me when I returned home, this one from my Dad. What a treasure box!

And another from a close family friend, Kit. The pillow underneath the goodies was also included in the box, and now sends me softly to sleep every night. Thank you!