Gran Turismo – Hot China Nights
Have you ever been in a passenger car – you know, family thing, four doors, shitty motor – while going so fast that when it hits a bump in the road it takes flight, all four tires slipping their surly, earthly bonds? I have, twice. The first was in 1997 on the way to Niagara Falls with Steve Dobler. The second time was last night, at 2am outside of He Feng, China, while a coked-out lawyer drove the five of us home from what was supposed to be a simple camping trip. Allow me to elaborate.
I found myself in a hostel in Enshi, Hubei province, five hours west of Wuhan. This was clearly not the sort of village where westerners made habitual stops in backpacker hostels; the staff admitted I was the first foreigner most of them had ever seen in person. Now, when I say ‘village’, in China that means the city has less than a million people and you might be a 2 – 3 hour high-speed train trip from the nearest major metropolis. Enshi is the most-quaint place I’ve yet been in China, with a population of only 800,000. It sits in a sloping valley, walled on three sides by a saw-tooth range of verdant mountains, and the air here is blessedly cleaner and cooler than the rest of the country so far. I’d come this way looking for Enshi’s ‘Grand Canyon’, and as a general escape from the blight that is urban China.
looks like Izu
<Do you want to go camping?> (< > quotes are in conversations held via Google Translate)
Surrounded by a friendly group of slightly awe-struck Chinese kids (<30 years) who had never met a Canadian before, I had been telling stories about how I got to China. On hearing of my boat and train trips, they assumed I was the adventurous type and were kind enough to invite me along on their next planned excursion into the mountains, the following day.
Or so I thought.
I agreed that, yes, I would like to go camping. We clarified, via hand gestures at the tents set up in the common area of the hostel (which I assumed were drying out from their last adventure?), that when they said camping they meant the same thing, basically, as what I meant when I said camping. I told them that I didn’t have much equipment with me, but they assured me that that would be no problem. Thus it came that the hostel owner, his girlfriend, one staff member, one local traveler, and I, ended up in a white Chevy Cruze at noon on a Thursday, hitting the road for adventure and what-may-come. I was excited. Camping!
<How long is the drive?>
<Four hours>
No prob, pretty standard, right?
Confusedly, the trip started with a two-hour layover while the one staff member disappeared on an errand. The rest of us wandered around a very modern mall, looking at outdoor equipment to kill time (not specifically to stock up on anything). I had been warned that Chinese people were not great at, uh, explaining things to foreigners, and I was beginning to see the truth of this. Why were we at a mall instead of on the road? Where, in fact, were we going? Why had we only brought one small tent, no food, and no other gear? I shrugged, assuming they weren’t a suicide cult and thus would eventually have satisfactory answers to all said questions.
Having reacquired our wayward amigo, we finally set out into the hills of Hubei. It was a sunny afternoon and I was shocked to see blue sky for the first time since arriving in China – massive cities like Beijing and Wuhan never escaped the grey prison of their smog and humidity. We quickly left Enshi behind and settled into a familiar road-trip pattern of chatter, music, silence, napping, window-gazing and snacks. The topography in western Hubei reminded me of a sandbox after two boisterous boys had got done building towers and digging streams, then attempted to destroy each others’ work – we were surrounded by lumpy, irregular mountains, deep gorges, and lush valleys, all in an impressive, if haphazard, display of creative geology.
Two hours into the trip, the boss stopped the car and everyone got out. I looked around at the highway and mountains, confused.
<What are we doing?>
<There is a nice river down this valley, we are going to go see it>
fact: as I write this, I’m listening to “I’m On a Boat” by The Lonely Island
We hiked down 100m of scrub, through a poorly-worn path, to find a clear green lake at the bottom. It was admittedly quite lovely.
Three hours after that, having driven through some ugly rural towns made entirely of concrete and neon, we once again stopped, unannounced, on the side of the highway. Everyone got out. I looked around, confused.
<What are we doing?>
<There is an old village across the river, very beautiful>
who doesn’t love a good rope bridge?
They were right, again. It was a lovely village. I’m glad we stopped there, because I was otherwise going to name this post ‘Concrete Camping in China’s Countryside’ in honour of the misery of those few earlier towns we had passed. This village, though, was a place out of time.
By then, the sun had set and everyone else was sleeping in the back seat. The owner and the one staff member rotated driving, but neither spoke much English so I just looked out the window or read on my phone. It had been, since leaving Enshi, eight hours. We arrived at what seemed to be a fairly large city, all the buildings and public spaces lit up with Blood Dragon-esque neon lights – despite my creeping confusion, it was a pretty cool spot. We parked. Everyone got out.
<What are we doing?>
<Having dinner. Are you hungry?> It was ~9pm; yes, I could eat.
We ate.
<Will you sleep in the tent?>
Now I was really confused. We were in the middle of He Feng; Hubei’s Atlantic City. Now, a river run through it, so I guess I could have set up a tent there on its pebble-y, malodorous shore, but I was beginning to get annoyed.
<I’m confused, what about camping?>
<Yes, here is the tent> Someone handed me a pup tent.
I stood there. They stood there.
<Where are you all staying?>
<In a hotel of course>
Of course.
We all stayed in a hotel.
you can’t reason with a backhoe
I could go on like this, but you would die of old age. At no point during the next 24 hours did I have any idea what was going on. The next morning, we packed up the car and left the hotel. We stopped. We dropped off the boss, who was also a lawyer, and left him in He Feng. We picked up a well-dressed woman. We drove away from He Feng. We drove until the road ended. The well-dressed woman yelled into her phone a lot. We moved rocks, with our hands, to clear a path for the car. We continued driving until the road was blocked by a pair of backhoes. We turned around and drove an hour down a different road, in the white Chevy Cruze, that I would have enjoyed taking my Jeep down, in four-wheel drive. We talked to a lot of people on the side of the road. We stopped for lunch four hours later in a town of six houses and one empty restaurant that had no tables. We began following a dude on a motorbike. We came to a shitty wooden roadblock across a small country road. It was agreed the vehicles could not pass the roadblock; we got out and started walking. Two SUVs came up behind us on the road, having clearly passed the roadblock; we rode in the back of a pickup truck. It was 3pm.
after all that, this is what stopped us?
The trip until 3pm had been harrowing at the best of times – our staff member / driver was a very bad driver, and the road was a very bad road, and the cliff was a very steep cliff, and the guardrails were not there because they were imaginary guardrails. The scenery was beautiful, but I couldn’t stop looking ahead, waiting for a cement truck to squash us as we ripped around blind corners at full speed on one-lane roads with jagged stone walls on one side and thousand-foot drops on the other. I wanted to enjoy it, like a rollercoaster, but it was impossible, my having zero faith in the driver – he accelerated into unfamiliar corners. I got back all the grey hair I had lost since quitting the bank. The car was dragged mercilessly, at high speeds, over stones that noisily ground the undercarriage to pulp. I have no idea how we didn’t get a flat. We were a million miles from everything. It was more frightening than a Mexican domestic airline flight.
Anyway, we got there, wherever there was. There are destinations in the world that are worth a 12-hour drive, fraught though it may have been. This was not one of those destinations. It was a pretty valley with a clear-water river running through it. It looked like Ontario. Now, I can understand how it was worth the epic voyage for my Chinese friends, because every other drop of water I’ve seen in the country has been brown and turgid – this water was crystal clear and freezing cold. I was happy to be alive, and almost as happy to go swimming and cool off. We played in the water for two hours, then got back in the car.
that rock looks like a sage Dr. Zoidberg in profile, no?
<What are we doing?>
<We will go pick up the lawyer, then drive home to Enshi>
The white Chevy Cruze returned to earth with the kind of grinding crunch that risks intensive dental surgery. The lawyer, presumed owner of said white Chevy Cruze, popped a CD into the dash, then began singing along with the mellow Chinese folk-pop that emerged. It was in poignant discord with our manic, white-knuckled street race. Driving primarily in the wrong lane, he courteously flicked his highbeams at oncoming vehicles to warn them of his evident lunacy. Thankfully there was very little traffic on the streets as we screamed around blind corners at full speed. Shuttered shops and blinking neon hummed into my eyeballs with a noticeable blue-shift as we approached warp. Liberal use of the horn replaced braking, adherence to lanes, courtesy, safety, and sanity. The other passengers slept soundly in the back.
We made it home in four hours.
