In June a friend bought a GPS device so we decided to try it out by going geocaching. (For those of you that don’t click the link, it’s like high-tech treasure hunting.) The closest cache site was near a city that was a 3 hour bus ride away so we set off hoping to find another bus in that city to take us the rest of the way. Unfortunately when we arrived at the new city’s bus station we were informed by the workers there that the place we wanted to go didn’t exist. Thinking that this was just a ploy to get us out of their hair, my friend and I didn’t take heed to the warnings and insisted on them taking us to a place that was close to where we wanted to go. A few hours later after a couple of more bus rides we were still around 10 kilometers away from the cache site but out of buses to take us any further up the winding mountain road. Since it was still early in the afternoon and after asking a few of the locals who told us that we should be able to make it before dark, we decided to take off on foot. 10 kilometers is only a little over 6 miles and even with a few switchbacks thrown in it couldn’t be that bad could it? 20 kilometers later with darkness setting in we were still climbing the steep, rutted mountain road having last seen a habitation a few hours earlier. And it had started raining steadily about an hour after starting out. Luckily, my we were somewhat prepared for this and set up a tent on the side of the road. The meal that night of ramen and bread was one of the best tasting meals I’ve had in a long time.
The next day we trudged through a few more hours of heavy rain and finally arrived at the cache site , the 10 kilometers we orignally thought we would hike had stretched into 30. The site was located in a valley that had a nong jia le and we took advantage of its protection from the elements that night. We talked to the family that ran the place and they said they would arrange some sort of transportation out of the valley for us the next day so we wouldn’t have to walk the 30 kilometers back to catch a bus. After an early wake up call by a very confused rooster (seriously why would you crow at 4 in the morning? stupid bird) we were informed that after breakfast we would ride motorcylcles back to catch the bus. Breakfast came and went and no motorcycles materialized. Then we were told after lunch a car would come to get us. Realizing we were in China and stuff like this happens all the time, we weren’t too worried. When asked when the car would come the farmers ambiguously replied “They’ll be here soon” or “Wait a little bit.” It wasn’t until about 4 in the afternoon and there was still no sign of a car that we started getting suspicious. By now it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t have enough time to catch a bus back home so we were already resigned to spending another night somewhere and we decided we didn’t want it to be at the nong jia le where we had the chance to get the runaround again. So much to the anger of the farmers, we were going to pay them a hefty sum for the car ride, we set off back down the road psyching ourselves up for another 30 kilometers.
About an hour later who do we see coming down the road but one of the farmers and the driver they said they would get. Unfortunately, we were kind of annoyed at this point and were never comfortable with paying so much money for a car ride in the first place so we declined they pleadings to let them take us. (We did pay them some money for their trouble in getting out there, money well spent for the peace of mind knowing that when you are in the middle of the Chinese wilderness there is nobody angry at you) In our hubris we thought that with no rain and a better understanding of where we were going we would make good time and have most of the 30 kilometers down before nightfall but in reality we were more tired than we thought and the going was slower. We were again found in the pitch dark in the middle of nowhere just over halfway to the bus stop. Things turned worse when my friend took a wrong step in a rut and hurt his hip pretty bad. We were slowed up considerably but there weren’t any good spots to set up camp.
I was beginning to worry how we were going to get out of there, if my friend’s hip was still hurting after camping that night it would take the whole next day just to get back to the bus stop. At this point paying those farmers that exorbitant price wasn’t looking so bad after all. We came up to an abandoned farmhouse just then and I started looking for level ground for the tent when all of a sudden I heard a huge BANG that came from the direction of the house. It was so out of place, we had been walking in complete silence up to this point, that I didn’t know what to think. I knew it couldn’t be an animal because the sound was too big but it would be a lie if I said I wasn’t a little bit nervous. After a few seconds the source of the bangs was reveiled to us, it was a truck! It was on a switchback in the road above the house which is why the sound seemed like it was coming from there. When it got closer we could see that it was a three-wheeled truck, example here, that was loaded to capacity with logs. I really want to know what that driver thought of these two foreigners on this secluded mountain road in the middle of the night. He at least understood that we needed help and when we flagged him down and asked for a ride he let us climb on the back with the logs since the cab was full of people.
Thus began the craziest ride of my life, and that’s saying a lot considering the taxis that I’ve been in here. Bumpy does not begin to describe this journey, the road was hardly fit for walking much less for a big truck with a full load and only one front tire. Luckily, the driver took it slow when we were clinging on for our lives in back on top of the logs. However, after a few miles down the road some people in the cab got dropped off and we were able to squeeze in. The driver let us know that he was just holding back before because we were in the back and now began to test the limits of his vechicle, screaming down the road at breakneck speeds, taking switchbacks with reckless abandon. I was loving it, I was scared to death that at any point another vechicle going in the opposite direction would cream us or that we would fly off a cliff taking a corner too fast, but I was loving it. And to top it all off, after the driver figured out that our Chinese was lacking, he turned on the radio and blasted his speakers as loud as they could go with Chinese techno pop. Surreal does not begin to describe it. It only got better after we got on a “nicer” road, one that didn’t have huge rocks sitting in the middle of it, when from the back we heard another but different sounding BANG followed by a long, drawn out hissssssssssss. Yep, one of the back tires went flat. Luckily this truck had duel tires (two tires on both the right and left sides) so our driver got out, kicked the flat tire, said “no problem!” and jumped back in and kept driving, not slowing down from his previous speed one bit. I can assure you never before has so much prayer been made for one overloaded tire. It ended up really not being a problem and our driver took us to a city that had buses that could get us back home in the morning. In all, it was a blast and the less-than-ideal conditions just added to a great story that me and my friend very happily and often recall.
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