trouble in bangkok

so i got off-topic a bit (suprise suprise) on that last post; i meant to tell you of all the bad things that happened to us and i got caught up in the splendor and glory of the terracota warriors...but i digress.



mom freaked out a little when the taxi driver we hired at five in the morning couldn't get his car started and we were standing in the rain, wondering whether we should wait for this guy to get his vehicle working or ask for another taxi. we waited, and he got it going, and we were on our way to the airport.

kind of.

turns out the driver didn't know where xian airport was. now i can't read chinese, but i could tell from the big signs with airplanes on them along the highway that we were going in the right direction - sometimes. at other times, the driver would deviate from the proper course and end up on empty streets in industrial areas. he almost hit a bicyclist at one point, although, to be fair, the bicycylist did come out of nowhere and it was really hard to see the bicyclist what with the windows being fogged up and all (the driver apparently didn't know how to work the defroster). after asking a handful (not a plethora) of roadside people how to get to the airport, the driver was on his way. all we had to was cross a really long bridge over a marshy riverbed and we'd be there.

unfortunately, the back left tire of the taxi blew out midway across the ten-kilometer bridge and i found myself standing on the side of the road, shivering under a little pink umbrella, looking down at cranes and other assorted waterfowl, as the driver hummed to himself and changed the tire. it would have made a great picture, me standing there, but mom was understandably freaked out in the car, so i didn't want to bother her. i stood there in the rain as the sun came up, drinking in the set of circumstances that had led to me standing there under that pink umbrella on a long bridge at a quarter past six on a rainy july morning in shanxii province, china.

we were back on the way to the airport, now an hour into our 30-mile trip, and on the airport grounds when the driver decided to freak us out one last time by driving the wrong way down a one-way street - into oncoming traffic. an airport policeman informed him that his head had apparently been inserted up his azz and pointed us in the right direction. our mr.-toad's-wild-ride-esque adventure came to a finish when he dropped us off at the international departures area of the airport. we tipped him, thanked him for the ride, and went inside.

you're supposed to arrive two hours early for international flights, and it was now only an hour and a half until our 7:45 a.m. departure time, but all turned out well because the airport was not very busy at that time, so early on a saturday morning. we made it through customs and had an hour to sit around and wait for our flight to bangkok, which went uneventfully. en route, however, i did take lots of pictures of clouds, with which i have decorated this posting.

we zoomed from bangkok's new international airport to a hotel i'd booked on sukhumvit road. then came naptime because it had already been a long day, and for mom, a stressful one. she'd been worried about the taxi in china, worried about being late to xian airport, worried that the taxi driver in bangkok was going to stick us with an exhorborant charge when i refused to pay the 450 baht ($14) rate they quoted me at the airport taxi stand even though the guy at the hotel reservations desk had told me not five minutes earlier not to pay over 300 baht ($9) for the 20-mile trip from the new airport to central bangkok. all these stresses built up for mom, and she opted to spend the entire rest of the day and night in the hotel room, opting to come out only to eat dinner with me in the hotel restaurant later that night.

we got up the next morning in plenty of time, loaded mom's stuff into the back of a taxi, and booked it to the airport. this trip was completly easy and completely uneventful, which was a nice change, especially in light of what happened next: we waited in line at the china air check-in counter and thought we were a solid two hours early, like we were supposed to be, but it turned out that we were 24 hours late!

excuse my french, but HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!! mom screamed. my heart sank. the counter lady looked sad for us, but there was nothing she could do: the printout that i had handed her from orbitz.com, the same one we had studied repeatedly to verify times, said bright and clear that her flight home left at 8:25 a.m. on Saturday, July 28th. we were at the airport on Sunday, July 29th.

"doh!" doesn't even start to describe it. i felt two inches tall. i'd booked the ticket online in pingyao five or six days earlier, and we'd both looked at it on the screen many times, and we'd both pored over the printout, yet still we'd shown up a day late, and, to mom's great dismay, all flights home were quite booked that day, and there were 40 people waiting in taiwan on standby to go to LAX, lest she decide to fly from bangkok to taiwan and take her chances there getting back to america.

we sat down, crushed, trying to decide what to do. i tried to keep a brave face but i was dying inside to see my mom crying like she was. it was on the verge of uncontrolability. we paced back and forth, inquiring at ticket offices about the chances of getting her onto a flight back to LAX as soon as possible. each time, however, we got shot down. mom said she didn't care how much it was: she wanted to go home.

then, a godsend.

this guy in a nice black suit (who looked like mola ram from indiana jones and the temple of doom, but i won't hold that against him in light of what he did for us) saw our consternation and asked me if there was anything he could do to help. turns out he worked for eva airways and (after sitting us down and bringing us coffee) was able to get mom onto a flight leaving that morning at 11 a.m.! mom gladly paid the money to get home - we figure we'll worry about potential refunds later on - and the man took her information and his very pregnant assistant, a lady with a beautiful smile who had been working her cel phone on our behalf for the last hour, handed mom a ticket home.

by this time it was 9 a.m. - two hours before the flight was due to leave. i wanted to hug the man and lady who had helped us soooooooo much, but it seemed that it would have been uncouth. mom's tears of desperation transmogrified into tears of thanks and gratitude as she flipped through the tickets, which would transfer her to LAX via kuala lumpur, malaysia, but then to fret-filled tears of worrying as she prepared to go through customs and begin the long journey home - alone.

"i don't want to leave you," she said, crying, as she prepared to go through the customs checkpoint. "don't worry - i'll be okay," i said, typically oblivious to her consternation at the upcoming solo flight and all the worries she had about successfully changing planes in kuala lumpur, etc. "i know you can do it," i told her. "just follow the signs."

mom disappeare behind the partition, 22 hours from home, and i sat down in an airport lounge and just waited. it had been a hell of a morning. i felt bad, and would continue to feel bad all day. causing all that extra stress to someone who didn't need any extra stress'll do that to a guy.

i waited until her flight read "departed" on the big information board, then caught a taxi back to the hotel on sukhumvit road, and began the last two weeks of my vacation - alone!

trouble in xian

did you ever see, or have you ever read, "the world according to garp?" in the novel and the movie, garp, the main character (played brilliantly by robin williams) persuades his wife to buy a house that a small cessna airplane has just crashed into. "this house has been pre-disastered," he tells her. "what are the chances of ANOTHER plane striking this place?"

well, this trip around the world has been a little bit like that - interestingly bad things keep happening (to each and every member of the traveling party), but i still believe that everything will turn out okay. otherwise, i'd pack it up, pack it in, and return home right now.

so let's recap: annette had massive diarrhea (to put it bluntly, and why not this far into the game) for about a week, which greatly distracted her from the beauty and splendor of siberia. i had my iPod, GameBoy, camera, and travel clock stolen from my train compartment somewhere around ulan-ude, russia, which allowed me to concentrate a lot more on the beauty and splendor of siberia, although without an appropriate soundtrack blaring in my ears. amanda and i both got violently ill, threw up repeatedly, and spent days in our beds in our hotel rooms. i tripped and fell not once, but twice (once in a heat-induced daze as we trudged slowly towards a taxi across a dusty parking lot in mongolia, the other in the slick mud after a heavy rain in pingyao, china). the first fall resulted in a thick scab the size of four postage stamps on my right knee and some loose cartilage, it feels like, in my left knee; the second fall re-opened the injury on the right knee just as it was almost healed.

but it's got to get better from here, right? damn straight.

but first, it got a little worse.

we had a great time in pingyao, but that was not enough to keep my mom in asia. she had decided to come on this trip a few months ago, visions of the great wall and the terracota warriors and angkor wat dancing in her head. the first two of those were great - i've already described the fun we had at the great wall and an account of the terracota warriors is forthcoming - but she won't be around to see angkor wat, because a week in beijing was enough to convince mom to forget about the plane tickets she already has and book some to get home ASAP. it was a combination of things, she told me: the crowds, the challenges of traveling in a difficult country like china, and, more than anything, the general feeling that she didn't belong in the orient.

i started out trying to convince her that southeast asia was totally different than china, that it would be more relaxing in thailand, more kick-back, etc., but talking with amanda and mom's continued lack of fun made my attempts half-hearted, so i knew it would be for the best last week in pingyao when we sat down in an internet cafe and booked a flight home from bangkok to ontario via taiwan and los angeles.

i was bummed, i must admit, for i wanted her to have a great time more than anything - to see the great things i've spoken of and photographed, to share in the same exhilirations i've felt - but the decision to help her get home (to her husband, gene, who she missed incredibly from the time her plane took off from america) was made all the easier when i saw that she was spending so much of her time not having a great time.

we booked the tickets for her to leave from bangkok on sunday morning and set out from pingyao to xian via an overnight train on thursday night. this train trip was infinitely better than the horrendous, cramped, hot, stinky, third-class train from beijing to pingyao had been. it was a second-class hard sleeper train, with six bunks in each little open-air section, stacked three-high. i spent most of the first few hours of the trip, which began at 8 p.m., talking to a group of chinese men and women who were all teachers on a vacation retreat to pingyao, and my snoring, in the words of one of them, "shook the train" as we rolled down the track, i was informed the next morning.

xian was cool. we took an all-day tour out to the terracota warriors, which were made like eight billion years ago to protect an ancient emporer in the afterlife. each of the life-size figures has a different facial expression. they were discovered, buried underground in an area the size of about three football fields, by some chinese farmers in 1974. now, a giant hangar-type building has been constructed over the terracota warriors, and tourist after tourist goes through and checks them out, in awe of the scale and splendor and artistic skill necessary to create such a display.

amanda and i were particularly impressed with how there were special VIP photo sections available, where, for extra yuan, you could get much closer to the warriors and get better photos. "won't you feel sad if you get home and didn't get the picture you wanted because you didn't pay the money?" a sign near one of the VIP sections asked. i've got to give it to those chinese: they are really embracing capitalism!

we wandered through the three hangars, looked at stuff, and then wandered back 15 minutes to the bus parking lot, giving us ample opportunity to be hassled by stall after stall of merchanise hawkers. they could have built the parking lot right next to the hangars, but then we would have been denied the chance to (not) buy all the crap they were selling.

back at the guest house in xian, we were just getting ready for dinner and plotting out what time mom and i would have to leave for the airport the next morning when amanda discovered that she had (ominous music) lost her wallet!

so there it is: evil fate strikes again! she'd already been sick and throwing up, and now she was without credit cards or her ATM card, in frikkin' china! doh! but she stayed calm and i stayed calm (mom, eh, not so much with the calm...) and we discovered that she still had her passport (whew!) and, with a large loan from my mom and a small loan from me, would be okay until replacement cards could be issued.

we ate dinner and said our sad farewells. mom really, really enjoye getting to know amanda, who is one of my favorite people in the world, and i was sad to say goodbye to her as i sat packing my stuff in my room at half past midnight. she left, however, to go back to her room, and to prepare for the next day's journey, which would be taking her to a six-week kung fu school in a city somewhere south of beijing.

a little more than four hours later, i was awake, and i lugged my stuff into the guesthouse lobby at two minutes after 5 a.m. mom was already there - having been up and worrying all night about the flight to bangkok, and we set off in the dark rainyness of the pre-dawn chinese morning towards the airport and our flight to thailand.

pingyao pix

here in bangkok, chillin' like a villian...i'm trying to get a vietnam visa so i can go there in a few days - alone. which is part of a longer story, one of multiple misadventures, which i shall relate to you in the next posting. but for now, here's some cool pix of the good times we had in pingyao...

ode to pingyao

we left beijing
and those pictures of mao
and took a long train ride
down to pingyao

it's an ancient, old town
in a province called shanxii
and it was really really cool
for us weary travelers three

there's three in our party
down from beijing's four
because annette split for shanghai
and is with us no more

i told you of the train ride
and the fun that ensued
but it was worth it to get to pingyao
where there's cool stuff and good food

a fourteenth century city
mainly built within a wall
and the japanese never destroyed it
they left it standing tall

temples and small alleys
shops and bikes and wares
it was a nice relaxing place
for my mom to lose her cares

for beijing had been stressful
mom's not the big-city kind
so kick-back relaxing pingyao
put her in a relaxed state of mind

and we liked it too,
amanda and me
we had a great time there,
us travelers three

three days we spent
and met many nice folks
and i impressed all the locals
with my impressions and jokes

so more on pingyao later
'cause this net place is busy
and people are waiting for this computer
and nothing rhymes with "busy"

oh well. i'm out. when i have more time, i'll post pictures of the fun we had in pingyao. it was great - lots of really nice people. now we're in xian, china for a few days. terracota warriors tomorrow. more later.

peace. out. word.

ben

regarding comments, by the way

i don't know if it's a communism thing or what, but the whole time we've been in china, neither amanda, annette, nor i have been able to look at our blogs or read the comments people are posting. we can get in to type, for some reason, but we can't view the finished products. i don't know why, and we've now tried in various internet places in various cities. so, in summary, i am currently unable to respond to or even read comments. if you are sending questions, please don't think me rude for not getting back to you...

keep it real,

ben

the long road to pingyao

with the hustle and bustle of beijing getting to us, and having seen most everything we wanted to see in the chinese capital, our traveling party split up sunday night and headed in opposite directions. actually, annette will be waiting in beijing another day before heading east by train to shanghai, from where she will wing it to chicago, and finally back home to minnesota. amanada, mom, and i, however, found ourselves in the beijing west train station on sunday night, tickets in hand for a trip of indeterminate length to pingyao, a cool old (ancient, actually) town with a 14th-century wall around the city center and lots of cool old buildings preserved within the wall.

we're here now, and we arrived just in time. another few minutes, and i think mom would have *definitely* have had enough of this trip. can't say i blame her, though: it was one of the more challenging train trips i've ever been on. consider this: we rode 12 hours packed into a train that made lots of local stops, and it was hot every time it stopped, and people were yelling in chinese lots of the way, and there were 128 people sitting just in our carriage, plus many more standing along the way. the train left an hour and a half late, so it didn't roll out of beijing until almost midnight, and arrived here at mid-morning. oh well - at least we only paid 43 yuan (about six bucks) for our tickets.

after such a journey, mom was understandably frazzled, but i think (hope) that this place will have a calming effect on her, because it's had one on me so far, and it is refreshingly different than beijing.

the trip was rough, no doubt, but mom and i were touched by random acts of kindness that we witnessed/benefited from. for instance, mom made her way into the carriage a few minutes ahead of me and amanada, who were lollygagging on the platform. a kind young man lifted mom's very heavy rolling duffel bag onto the racks above the seats for her, and when she was hot and trying to fan herself, he opened the window for her. he had a kind smile and i bet he was very nice. his girlfriend or wife or whoever slept with her head in his lap most of the way, and then, when we finally arrived in pingyao, the young man jumped up and pulled down her bag before i could even get a chance to do it.

we've seen many acts like this in china - people going out of their way to help me or mom or amanda or annette. but on the other hand, we've seen lots of not-so-chivalrous goings-on, like how if there was a husband and a wife on the crowded train, the man would sit while the woman stood most every time. that part, well, eh, not so good.

i slept as best i could on the train. the window next to me stayed open the whole way, which was all the better for the chinese guy across from me to surreptitiously sneak smokes when he thought the conductor wasn't looking. there were smoking areas at both ends of the carriage, but honestly, we were so packed into the train that it would have been hard for him to get there. using a look of facial disgust, however, i did persuade him to hold his lit cigarette outside of the window, instead of trying to hide it under the table between me and him, where i was in constant fear that he would inadvertently set my leg hair on fire.

i slept for five or ten minutes or a time, so it was a welcome relief when we arrived in pingyao and there was a lady there with a sign with my name on it (first and last, both spelled correctly, no less) to take us to the guesthouse. we loaded our luggage and ourselves onto a pair of motorcycle rickshaws (amanda and mom on one, me on the other) and set off across the cobblestone streets towards one of the five entrance gates spread around the old town walls. it was a fun ride, but vehicles weren't allowed past a certain point within the walls, so we had to wheel our luggage the final spurt.

but it was worth it, because the guest house is wonderful. like i said, all of the buildings in here are old, like 14th century. but our guesthouse has been retrofitted with modern restroom facilities (of the western variety - no squat toilet!) and a bed in my room that is (honestly) 6 feet by 10 feet. it is great. i've got to get one at home.

the rooms of the guesthouse (we got three singles - $14 apiece) and, well, pretty much the entire town, are covered in elaborate carvings and hand-painted scenes of ancient china, of concubines and emporers, peasants and oxcarts, temples and processions. the rooms are spread around a central courtyard which is filled with plants and has a big brass pot in the center of it in which swim lots of little goldfish.

we'll be staying here for a few days before heading out to xi'an and the terracotta warriors on wednesday or thursday. mom enjoyed our walk around the city in the afternoon (before a torrential thunderstorm rolled in, brightening the late afternoon sky with lightning). amanda and i are enjoying it, too. it's a good respite from beijing, and a great place to kick back and read a book before carrying on with the trip. they're even helping us book train tickets onward to xi'an.

and this time we'll get the expensive ones.

what a grand, spectacular wall they have here! great, even...

photos to accompany this blog entry can be found on the "chinese madness" entry from a day or two ago. enjoy the writing, then peruse the pix...ben

i was surprised when my mom told me, seven or eight months ago, that she would be interested in getting a passport and leaving america for a few weeks. it turns out, however, that among the places she's most wanted to see all her life have been china's great wall, the terracotta warrior in xian, and angkor wat near siem reap, cambodia.

we checked the great wall off that list yesterday; the other two shall be similarly completed within the next few weeks.

i'd like to add that i am uber-proud of my mom for being here. she arrived tuesday afternoon and we've had 4.5 days here already in beijing, and there've been some cultural hiccups (to be expected), but she's hanging in there and has already shown a good amount of gumption just in coming here at all. i mean, china is not the easiest place i've been to before. it's not like her first international trip was to france or somewhere like that: it's very, very different here, and it means a lot to me that she came here, and that she's doing better every day, and hopefully making great memories that will last a lifetime.

mushy stuff aside and back to the story. we opted for a package tour from our hotel yesterday morning, so a minibus driver picked us up just before eight in the morning. we set out to pick up a few more tourists: a young dutch couple and five australians. we fought our way through the brual beijing morning traffic, all the while hearing interesting tidbits about the city, both past and present, from tony, our heavily accented but very knowledgeable guide.

these tours are a bit of ruse, in that they offer air conditioned comfort and whatnot all for one affordable price, but you also have to stop at predetermined shopping stores, usually government-owned and sponsored, to shop for jade or silk or other knick-knacky stuff that i could care less about. oh well, the stops weren't for that long - and i'd brought a book - and mom ended up buying a cool jade christmas tree ornament that will always reminder her of the time she was, for some odd reason, in china.

we stopped for awhile at the emporers' tombs, where leaders of the past had been laid to rest for millenia, guarded by huge, elaborately detailed stone animals and guardians. it was already quite hot and humid at 10 a.m. and i was dripping sweat by the time i'd walked the 1.5 mile pathway, covered by weeping willows from which emited the sounds of thousands of unseen insects. i was happy when, at the conclusion of this section of the trip, the driver said we'd have time to rest before our next stop, as the drive would take an hour and a half.

we ate lunch after the second of the two predetermined stops at government stores and didn't make it to the great wall, about 120 KM northeast of beijing above a small town called matinyahu, until 1:30 p.m. matinyahu was further away, but the guidebooks and online all said that it was preferable to the more heavily touristed parts of the wall most close to beijing, near the city of badailing.

we parked at matinyahu and the guide told us to be back to the bus by 3:30, so after all that driving and forced shopping, we only ended up with two hours at the wall. but that was actually enough, considering how tired the climb made me.

i'd like to report that i jogged with ease up to the great wall of china, which ran along the peaks of the mountain in the matinyahu section, but the truth is much less impressive. in fact, it's downright pathetic, although i do take some pride in the fact that i made it at all.

not to the top, mind you, but to the ropeway station. in my defense, the station was like halfway up the mountain,and the pathway leading to it was paved with very uneven cobblestones, and it went up and up and up, and on and on and on, at like at a very steep angle. i had to pause a few times on the way up, and many people passed me by, and my 55-year-old mother was waiting for me at the top of hte mountain by the time i'd huffed and puffed my way up there, moving slowly, like a semi truck ascending a steep grade in low gears at a slow speed, but i made it.

i was pouring sweat by the time i reached the base of the aerial tramway station, and was quite nonplussed when i found that it had four flights of stairs to get to where you board the ropeway. i chatted it up with some guys from an egyptian tour group who had also had their asses kicked by the walk up to the station (bear in mind that the fitter among visitors were hiking half an hour up a zillion stairs to the top of the mountain).

my knees were killing me and my pulse was beating pretty good as i rode up five minutes in the cable car, over pine forests, towards the wall, which snaked away over distant peaks in both directions. then i got to the top and found -- guess what! -- more stairs! darn! i really need to hit the stairmaster when i get home, because i was dying as i leaned against the great wall and looked for my mom. i found her quickly, however, and she told me she was proud of me for making it because regardless of my fatness, it was a good haul up to the station.

the wall itself was spectacular, but you've seen it before, and i'm getting tired (nearly midnight here), so i'm gonna cut this entry off pretty soon. mom and i took some photos, admired the views, talked about how the wall had taken 900 years to build and stretched for thousands of miles, and then we took the ropeway back down.

coming down the mountain wasn't as bad as going up had been, although i had some pretty good jelly legs going by the time i made it (without tripping, much to my delight) down to the parking lot, as trucks that go slowly up grades must also use a lot of breaking power to keep the load under control on the way down.

all in all, a great day. anytime you can see something like the great wall, it's a good day, but more than actually seeing the wall, i liked the look of excitement i saw on my mom's face as we explored it. it made all the climbing, all the stairs, all the sweating and sore knees, more than worth it.

i'd do it all again in a heartbeat.