The darkness of the Chinese pseudo-internet is behind me at last!

****I'm unable to upload pictures to this blog due to the VPN. Please check out my facebook album "China Spring 2011" though! I've uploaded all of the photos I wanted to include there.****



I do apologize to anyone who is trying to stay up-to-date on my whereabouts via this blog. However, as you are probably aware by now, China decided to block blogspot.com. But! I anticipated that this might be a problem, and--thanks to the wonders of Northeastern University’s VPN (Virtual Private Network, to those of you who are not particularly acronym-friendly)--I once again have access to Blogspot.com, Facebook, Youtube, and the rest of the “good” internet that you all take for granted in the US. It’s a painfully slow connection, but lest I forget my childhood of dial-up internet, I can’t complain. Let’s all just take a moment and be grateful that those days are behind us at last.
…
Thank you.

But I digress. Where in the world is Jason H Wolf? Why hasn’t he learned to speak Mandarin yet? When is he going to mail me my panda? Answers to these questions, and more, are coming. Simply read on my followers…

I arrived in China on the evening of the 2nd. This was, of course, Chinese New Year, and roughly 19 hours after I had left Oregon. I was tired. Very, very tired. After taking the metro from Pudong airport to the Shanghai city center, I did my best to find the hostel where I was staying. 2 hours later, I managed to stumble upon the Mingtown Youth Hiker Hostel (a lovely place with clean, albeit windowless, rooms for about $8 USD). I immediately fell asleep, though I woke up several times to the sound of chaos outside. It’s almost two weeks later, by the way, and people are still lighting off fireworks. It seems that there is very little that the Chinese love more than explosives.

(insert pictures)

The next day was uneventful. I went out to explore The Bund in the morning, took a nap around 2PM, and woke up 14 hours later craving cheese and clean air. Neither of which are available in Shanghai.

Again, I digress. After sleeping for the better part of two days, I was finally ready to set out and see China. I ventured out to the train station in search of a ticket to Huangshan. Communicating where I wanted to go was easy; finding a ticket for that day was the hard part. I finally managed to purchase a train ticket, but it wasn’t for a seat—I was supposed to stand for 13 hours. Obviously this was a less-than-ideal situation, but in my eagerness to get to Huangshan, I purchased the ticket anyway. However, after realizing the hell I was about to put myself through, I decided to seek out an alternative. Thanks to the help of an English-speaking woman who was behind me in line at the train station, I found out that I could purchase an overnight “hard seat” ticket that left later that day. I switched my ticket to the later train, and occupied myself by wandering around the city for a few hours. At 5:45PM, I boarded my first Chinese train!

…And 13 hours later, I was in Huangshan.

Never again will I subject myself to a “hard seat” for such a long period of time. It could have been worse—I could’ve been standing—but it couldn’t have been much worse. To those of you who do not understand the concept of a hard seat, let me explain. First, picture a train compartment enclosed by 3 sides (there is no door), with two adjacent bunk beds, each with three bunks. The top two bunks on each side are enjoyed by one person each (known as a “hard sleeper”), while the bottom beds are shared by eight people, four on each side, facing one another. Your legroom is communal, and also shared with the belongings of the seven other people around you, and the four people above you. If you are lucky, or smart, you have purchased the seat nearest the window, so that you have something to lie against and sleep. If you are like me, a dumb American, you will have purchased any ticket available to you and will be forced to sleep sitting upright. The mattress—if you would dare to call such a thing a mattress—is the only “padded” component of your seat. Your backrest is actually just the plastic divider between your train compartment and the poor souls in the hard sleeper compartment behind you. Though the bunks above you may not be occupied, you dare not take them because of some strange social taboo.

At 7AM I arrived at the train station and was greeted by a “friend” of Mr. Hu, the owner of the hostel I was staying at. I question how close they actually were, but the woman was holding a piece of cardboard with my name scratched onto it. I was a little concerned by this, but she pulled me aside (I was the only white person in the crowd) and forced me to follow her back to a minibus full of hikers. As we pulled away, she jumped off the moving bus. I was assured by other passengers, however, that I was going to the right place. After a terrifying ride (I’ve discovered that there is truth behind the stereotype that Asians are bad drivers) I was dropped off outside of “Mr. Hu’s Restaurant,” which also happens to be a hostel.

Mr. Hu is a strange man. Words can do very little describe him, but is overly friendly, speaks excellent English, and has an absurd amount of connections. In a sense, he runs a sort of underground, cash-only travel agency. He also makes cheap Chinese food, has an English menu, but charges an absurd amount for a “western breakfast” that he pushes upon you at all hours.
“No thanks, I think I’ll just have a Chinese alternative for about $2.”
…
“Really, Mr. Hu, I’m sure. But thank you.”
…
“No, really.”

I spent the first day traveling around some UNESCO villages in the area, stayed in Mr. Hu’s hostel that night, and made for Huangshan the next morning. I started at the very base, thinking that it was a cheaper alternative to paying the entrance fee where the gondola starts, about halfway up. I learned 6KM later that this was not the case, and was forced to pay a second entrance fee. I shouldn’t complain though, there was a beautiful waterfall and stream that followed the trail the majority of way up.

The trail. I should take a minute and explain this. It’s terrifying, really. The trail I took, from the very base of the mountain, was 13KM long. Granted, there is a road that leads halfway up the mountain (to the gondola, if you can afford it), but the last 6 KM of the hike are in areas seemingly inaccessible to anyone but monkeys and porters. And here’s where it gets strange: the entire path was a nicely paved staircase—practically a sidewalk. I don’t know how they actually built it, but I can’t see any way to do it besides physically carrying up individual bags of concrete. I wouldn’t put it past the Chinese government to do that, either. Regardless, the feat of building a staircase up an entire mountain astounds me.
…It also made for a much easier hike.

(insert pictures)

Easy, of course, is a very relative term. I was carrying my full pack with me, and by the time I reached the summit—6 hours later—I was exhausted. This is where Mr. Hu’s underground, cash-only travel agency came into play again. As I wanted to see the sunrise, I had asked him where the cheapest place to stay was on top. He had given me a price (far cheaper than anything my guidebook had suggested), and said that I could pay him cash and he would handle it. After all, he had a friend. His last “friend” may have jumped out of a moving bus after picking me up, but I decided that trusting his friend to make my reservation was better than no reservation at all. At the summit, I found out that the name of the hostel Mr. Hu had given me was actually a four-star hotel. The reception desk, of course, had no idea who I was. She asked which travel agency I had used, to which I responded confidently “Mr. Hu.” The confused look she gave me as she mouthed back “Mr. Hu…?” will never leave me. I only wish I had a picture to post on this blog.

Anyway, she laughed in my face when I told her the price I had paid, and handed me off to a doorman who led to me a derelict building. It was devoid of windows, doors, and was empty except for a few rusted-out beds with pads and filthy sheets. I cursed Mr. Hu, and began to accept my fate just as the doorman tried to charge me again. I argued that I had already paid (though I was beginning to suspect that Mr. Hu’s underground, cash-only travel agency might not be as legitimate as I had blinded hoped), but the doorman wouldn’t believe me. He did, however, make me call Mr. Hu. I put him and the doorman on the phone together, they argued in Mandarin for a minute, and then the doorman hung up.

If I’d had a seat, I would’ve been on the edge of it waiting to see what was going to happen next. As it was, I was on the edge of the bed anyway because I was too disgusted to sit on it fully.

The doorman threw me my phone, barked something at me, and walked out of the room. I could only assume that he meant for me to follow him, so I grabbed my bag off the molding carpet and did just that. He led me back up the steps of the Beihai Hotel, through the reception area, down a long hallway, up three flights of stairs, through a small conventional hall, and knocked on an unmarked door. A man came out, they talked, and the doorman left without saying anything to me. I started to follow, but he motioned for me to stay. The man led me into his room, asked for my passport, and began to go through the necessary paperwork for a foreigner to stay at the hotel. I couldn’t help but wonder where I was expected to sleep, but at this point I was so exhausted that I was prepared to stay on the floor of the empty convention hall. I’ve slept on floors before, so at least this carpet wasn’t covered in mildew, and there was no snow inside—two big differences between the first place and this one.

As he finished the paperwork, he led me out of the room—which was obviously also his living quarters—and into a hallway adjacent to the conventional hall. Splitting off from this hallway were four large rooms, each with 14 beds in them. The man told me to pick a spot, and left. All four of the rooms were deserted, and—besides a periodic dripping noise coming from a leak in the ceiling—there was complete silence. It was eerie, to say the least, but the beds were clean and I slept well.

In the morning I discovered that there was not a men’s bathroom. There was no one present to care about me using either of the women’s bathrooms, but it was just another weird quirk that I couldn’t help but ponder. Why was there a conventional hall in a four-star hotel with a strange man living in it, 52 empty beds in connecting rooms, and no men’s bathroom? I never asked. Maybe I should have.

The sunrise was beautiful. I followed some Chinese tourists to the poetically named “Now I Believe It Peak” and waited for about an hour in the cold. I was one of the first people there, but it was crowded by the time the sun rose. I shouldn’t have expected much else; when you build a gondola to the top of one of the most famous mountains in China, everyone and their dog is going to take advantage of that.

After wandering around the top of Huangshan for a bit, I ran out of food (thanks for the protein bars, ma!) and decided it was time to climb down rather than pay for a steeply overpriced meal. Everything that is used on the mountaintop is carried up by hand. The porters make two trips a day, and get paid about $5 USD per trip. It’s cheaper than using the gondola, apparently. I saw men carrying everything from propane tanks, to bed sheets, to eggs. What a life…

(insert pictures)

The climb down was uneventful. Several strangers asked for my picture, and a woman tried to charge me an exit fee, but I walked past and openly refused. She didn’t stop me. I got back to Mr. Hu’s hostel around 1, and enlisted the help of his pseudo travel agency again. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but he’s so overly friendly that you can’t help but trust him a little bit. Probably 60% of me was saying “this guy is really shady,” while the rest was saying “Well. At least he speaks English.” Regardless, I asked him to help me get a bus ticket, as I didn’t want to take another overnight train back to Shanghai. The bus only takes about six hours. Without even making a phone call, he told me the price, a time, and asked for the money. It matched the rate my guidebook listed, so I gave him the money, assuming he must have a “friend” in the bus company as well.

The next morning I got up, refused his offer of a western breakfast again, and he led me outside to the “bus stop.” I asked about my ticket, but he just told me not to worry about it. Several buses drove by, but he flagged one down specifically and spoke to the driver. I’m not sure what he told him, but the driver let me on board, allowing me to only sit in the back of the bus. I never did get a ticket, but six hours later we were in Shanghai. Mr. Hu’s ”travel agency” came through for me again…

I spent the night in the same hostel as I had for the first two nights, and made my way to SUFE (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics) the next day for orientation. And here I am! Almost a week later, I just finished my first day of class.

I think this is enough of a blog entry for one day, but I’ll be sure to post another soon that describes some of my shenanigans since the start of Orientation. We still don’t have internet in our rooms, so I’ve been forced to get online in the computer lab. It isn’t the most ideal place to spend hours writing blog entries…

Until next time, zai jian!

Happy trails,
JHW