Saturday, July 19 Cut to the chase. We made it!

We woke up extra early, checked out of our super cute Yide Hotel (Josh calls it a very well preserved, traditional courtyard house) and walked to the slightly shadier hostel that would actually arrange for us to hop on a bus in the middle of a highway. Our hotel would not arrange such illicit tickets for us and the workers there were concerned that this was our plan, but the only trains through Pingyao to Xi’an left at late evening and we needed a morning departure. I am actually no longer so certain that the hostel lady is truly a CITS agent. I think that Pingyao does not have a CITS office and she is maybe a helper – or a go between – or a friend of CITS – but really I think she is a Red, a man who knows how to get things, and we are Andy.

We had a pricey breakfast at the shady but kind-seeming hostel and then rode an open air pedicab to the highway, an experience in itself. Josh offered to throw luggage overboard or run alongside and push the tiny cart like a bobsled when it appeared our vehicle was struggling on the highway. When we got to our improvised highway meeting point, others were there as well for pickup and we were pleasantly surprised when the bus actually came and picked us up. Unfortunately, the bus ticket black market does not properly account for number of seats and Josh had to make do on a stool on the floor in the aisle (a stool that was about 6 inches tall).

But we are now in Xi’an in one piece with all our luggage. We made very good time on the bus arriving aroung 3pm. We checked in to our new hotel, the Bell Tower Hotel. We got plane tickets to Guilin and a ride arranged from Guilin to our hotel there. We toured the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower, strolled the Muslim Quarter and the nearby night market (where we grabbed some street food) and now we are settled in for some outdoor drinks on a happening, yet fairly quaint, bar street Josh remembered from his previous trip here.

Tomorrow it is the Terracotta Army.

We got caught in a big rain storm on the walk home from the bar.

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Friday, July 18 We woke up early and headed straight back to the CITS office.  Thankfully, Josh felt a little more within himself in the morning and did not explode on the CITS guy.  When he saw us, he knew something was wrong and recognized his mistake when he looked at the tickets.  He ran us over to a bus ticket station and bought us tickets to a city called Taiyuan from which we could catch another bus to Pingyao.  We got the bus fine and slept some and saw some funny Chinese movies on it.  In Taiyuan, we had to take a taxi from one bus station to another, buy new bus tickets and get on the right bus to Pingyao.  This we managed reasonably well with only a little help and pointing and gesturing, but no English.  The second bus to Pingyao was more adventurous with not great roads the whole way and random passengers picked up and dropped off all along the highway.  No one seemed to think it was weird, so we tried not to either.  We finally arrived at Pingyao at about 3:30pm after 5 hour and 2 hour bus rides.

Our Pingyao hotel, the Yide hotel,  is super cute and the town is a very well preserved ancient walled city that is very old and pretty small.  We had dinner immediately upon arrival and took an exploratory walk around the city.  We are glad to have made it to Pingyao, it was worth the effort.  The train tickets we had to Xi’an were for tonight (we were supposed to pick them up at a hearby hostel) and were no longer available, nor were our bodies available for more travel today.  We are staying the night in our hotel and will leave in the morning on another bus to Xi’an and should arrive early afternoon and be close to back on our expected itinerary.

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I can’t tell which mapping program is better so I have included two maps.

We are headed in a counter-clockwise direction, beginning in the upper right (i.e., Northeast) corner in Beijing.  Since the green and red push pins are not labeled with the appropriate city names and do not tell us “geographically hindered” people what cities they are “tacking”, here’s the list in chronological order:  Beijing, Datong, Pingyao, Xi’an, Guilin, Yangshuo, Shenzhen and ending in Hong Kong.

Map #1

Map #2

Here is the first map zoomed in a bit differently.  The map of the states beneath it is set at the exact same scale just so you can get an idea of how far we will be traveling.