Bus to Pingliang
Trip Start
Oct 19, 2007
1
95
105
Trip End
Jan 23, 2011
Pingliang, Gansu, China
Friday, July 30, 2010
One of the crappy things about travelling alone is having nobody to help watch your luggage when you go to the toilet. Using a squattie while carrying a big pack is horrid, but much better than putting it on the floor. The mean aunty outside the toilets wouldn’t let me put my pack (the big one without valuables in it) outside. She told me there was a hook inside the toilet door. Given I once had one of those hooks break when I put my little day pack on it in the Lanzhou airport causing my laptop to crack, I was hardly likely to trust my big pack (which is about three times heavier) to one. Stingy aunty. The trip to the toilet made my legs hurt.
Buses usually have seats allocated, but this bus didn’t have any numbers on the seats, even though the tickets did. The place I thought my seat probably was had a person in it, so I just found a place halfway down the bus to sit down. Nobody came to claim my new seat, but one old guy was particularly unlucky because somebody was sitting in his seat, so he did the same as me and found another, only to have a couple come and tell him to move. So he sat in another but another guy came and told him to get out of his seat. Finally, in frustration he asked the driver where his seat was, but the driver told him there were no seat numbers and he could sit wherever he liked! The trip to Pingliang was pretty nice because the scenery changed a lot, from desert, to crops and mountains. I didn’t actually know how long the journey would take so it was pretty nice arriving in less than 6 hours, a lot better than the time it took to get to Yinchuan anyway. I took a lot of photos out the window.
Pingliang is alright. I get the feeling the locals don’t see too many Westerners though because after all the staring, I felt like I’d just about lost a layer of skin. The staring wasn’t ill-intentioned, just curious, but more than I am used to (which after ten years of living in Asia, is saying a lot), almost like they had just witnessed some mythical creature walk straight off their television sets and onto the street. That said, even though Pingliang is small as far as cities goes, I managed to buy sunscreen pretty quickly, something I had spent ages searching for (unsuccessfully) the day before in Yinchuan. Food was cheap too. One enormous bowl of chao mianpian (stir-fried noodle pieces) for 6.5RMB. When I went into the restaurant, the owner told me to get the middle-sized bowl because there was no way I would be able to finish a big bowl. I guess they served the big bowl in a bucket or something if what I got was middle-sized. I didn’t finish my dinner. Most unusual for me. I stayed near the East Bus Station, which is where I arrived (Changcheng Hotel 120 for a double, with bath and Internet). The bathroom was a little odd because there didn’t seem to be any drain on the floor which made going in there after a shower a bit like wading through a swamp. What was left of my skin from all the staring was then covered in mosquito bites when I went to sleep. I have to learn how to use the mosquito repelling electic thingamyjig in my room before sleeping again.
The plan for tomorrow? Nearby Kongtong Mountain.
Oh, I forgot to mention some stuff about the Helan mountains near Yinchuan. There are a few wolves there, or so I was told. I can’t remember if it was six or eight, but they were moved there by the government because there were too many goats in the mountains eating the grass on the slopes which was causing erosion. The other thing Xiao Ma told me is that there is between Western Xia Tombs and Yinchuan there is a huge airforce base. From this base, fighter planes are supposed to be able to get anywhere in China within an hour. This being the case it’s probably not the best place for tourists to go wandering off alone taking pictures. Apparently a couple of foreigners got unceremoniously kicked out of the country for taking snapshots in that area. Oops.
