June 2014 (by Pat)    Itinerary Link

TRANSPORTATION

During our 5 day trek from Chongqing to Xi’an we used several different modes of transportation. Here they are.

Train – Trains in China are cheap, crowded, uncomfortable and, usually, late. We took three different train trips of 2+ hours each. The total cost for the six tickets was about $27. Most of the time we were in three across bench seats facing three other people in three across bench seats. The aisles were full of standees and luggage. We were lucky to have reserved seats.

Inter Urban Bus – These are large busses, with luggage compartments underneath. They operate out of depots and you buy a ticket at a counter. They run on expressways and are generally comfortable.

Inter Town Bus – I’m not sure what to call these things, but they were the dominant form of transportation on the roads we were traveling. They are minibuses, sitting 10 to 15 people. There’s no luggage compartment underneath and no marked starting and stopping location. There’s a driver and a money collector who collects the fare on the road. They run on rural roads and passengers get on and off anywhere along the road.

We were traveling on mountain roads and the most unnerving thing about these buses was the driver’s willingness to pass on blind curves as long as he tooted his horn once to tell any potential oncoming traffic to get out of his way. I’m surprised I didn’t see wrecks of these things scattered along the roads.

Taxi – Cab drivers tend to be very honest, sometimes to a fault. All the cabs are metered and, in the big cities, the meter is always used. In some of the smaller towns, where the initial flag drop can be as low as 3Y, the meters are not used, but a price is announced up front. For instance, in the town outside Zhangjiajie National Park, it was understood that any cab ride was 10Y. The drivers always said this up front and I had no problem with it.

I was surprised to see that in some towns the meter registered fractions of a yuan. In one instance, the meter read 18.3. I handed the driver 19Y and exited the cab. He called YK back and handed her a 1Y note. He wasn’t going to let us overpay. In another instance, in Xi’an, the meter read 13 and I handed the driver 15. He went through his wad of bills and could find no 1Y notes, so he gave me back 5Y.

City Buses – Generally the fare for a city bus is 1Y. This is cheap enough that you can get on a bus going in the right direction and, if it turns, get off and get on another one. This tactic proved helpful on several occasions.

June 2014 (by Pat)    Itinerary Link

CURRENCY

Before I get to that, though, and because I don’t know who, if anyone, will read this, I thought I’d give a little background information.

The unit of the Chinese currency is the yuan, also known as RMB or by the measure word kuai. It was worth a little over 16 cents at the exchange rate I was getting. All bills of 1Y and up have a portrait of a young Mao.

While most countries have replaced small denomination bills with coins, China has not. There are one yuan and one jiao (a jiao is a tenth of a yuan) coins, but they are not common (there is also a one jiao note.) Commerce is conducted in bills. As a result, the small denomination bills, one, five, and ten, are exchanged a lot and tend to be crumpled and dirty. They’re also small. When I get them in change, I tend to shove them into my pocket and treat them as small scraps of paper. They’re spent without thought and disappear quickly.

The largest bill in general circulation is the 100Y note. It is big and pink and, generally, clean. That, plus the big 100 that they display, makes them feel like big money. If I spend two at once, I feel like a spendthrift, never mind the fact that they’re each worth just a bit over $16 each.

China tightly controls its money exchange. As a consequence, there is little variation in exchange rates from place to place as you can find, for example, in Europe. The actual act of exchanging money, however, appears to have become more complicated than I remembered.

In Xi’an, I was getting low on cash and the ATM, where I usually get local currency, was not cooperating, so I needed to exchange actual dollars. I first went to a hotel with a money exchange sign outside. They told me to go to the Bank of China and pointed me in a direction. I came to a different bank, went in there, and they said Bank of China. I then came to one of the major banks and went in there and they took my dollars and passport and told me to sit down, it would be about 20 minutes. This seemed silly, so I took my money and passport back and continued on to the Bank of China.

At the Bank of China, I was told I needed to fill out a money exchange form, get a number, and wait for a teller. When I got to the teller, I handed him the form, five $20 bills and my passport, which I knew would be necessary. He asked me how much I wanted to exchange and I said $100. He said that I didn’t need the form and handed it back to me. He then proceeded to examine each of the $20 bills minutely, front and back, tilting each one up to look for the watermark. Next, he paged through my passport two times and made a copy of the front page. He then pulled out one of those four part tissue paper forms that are ubiquitous in China, handed it to me and asked me to fill in my name, nationality and passport number and hotel information. Next,he tore the form into its constituent parts, filed three and put one aside for me. He then told me the exchange rate. I said fine. He then removed 6 100Y notes from the till and ran them twice through the counting machine, then proceeded to count them twice. He then told me how much money I was going to get, which, coincidently, was exactly 100 times the rate he had already quoted. I again said fine. He then pulled out some additional small bills, wrapped the whole bunch up in the tissue paper receipt and handed the package to me, saying that according to form I should get an additional fen (a fen is one-tenth of a jaio) but he didn’t have any. I said ok. Total elapsed time – about 15 minutes.

Nothing is ever simple in China.

June 2014 (by Pat)    Itinerary Link

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CHONGQING

Chongqing is one of four special municipal districts in China. It has a population of 30 million. Chiang Kai Sheck made it his capital after the Japanese drove him out of Nanjing. The dense fog that hangs over the city protected it from Japanese bombers. It is a mountain city. Lots of steps. Little level ground. Very difficult to get your bearings. We discovered the bearing issue very quickly.

We left the Yangtze cruise ship on Thursday the 12^th and went on the city tour and to the lunch offered. After lunch, we left the group and caught a cab to our hotel. After settling in for a bit, we decided to head for a central square and look for a railway ticket office near there. It was not quite a mile away and I thought it would be nice to walk there and explore the city along the way. This proved to be a mistake.

I had looked up walking directions, but, before long, we found ourselves in a long automobile tunnel. Emerging from the other side, we saw no streets, just various expressways. We did see a bus stop turnout and crossed over to it to get a bus headed in the general direction we wanted. As soon as we got on the bus, it turned onto a bridge over the river in exactly the opposite direction of what we wanted. We got off the bus, found a cab and the driver managed to bring us to the square.

My walking directions more or less worked from there and we eventually found the ticket office. We were buying tickets for three separate train trips planned for the coming days. YK gave the agent the itineraries, he rang it up and then asked for our passports. China is crazy for passports. You need your passport for the strangest things. I had mine, but YK did not have hers. No tickets. As we walked away, she remembered she had a photocopy. We went back, he accepted the photocopy, and we got the tickets.

The next adventure was getting back to the hotel. I thought it would be easy. We hailed a cab and showed the guy the hotel information. He puzzled over it and said something to us in Chinese. We just pointed back to the hotel info and he eventually took off. After a while, it became clear something was wrong. It was taking too long, the trip was only a mile or so, and we seemed to be going to the wrong area. I tried to point this out to him, but, by then, he had picked up another passenger, a young woman, who was getting his attention. After a while, he pulled over and seemed to indicate that our hotel was “over there.” I was just glad to get out of the cab.

Of course, our hotel wasn’t there. We found ourselves on a wide pedestrian street or mall with many high-end shops – Armani, Cartier, etc. We explored for a while and then found a cab which successfully brought us to the hotel.

The specialty cuisine of Chongqing is hot pot and YK had found a hot pot restaurant she wanted to try. We took a cab to the restaurant and, after dinner, walked around and found ourselves in the same area we had been dumped in the afternoon. It was there that YK fulfilled one of her goals for the trip – buying a 10Y watch.

It was the next day, as we traveled to Gongtan, that the adventure really began.