the road to Taiyuan
Getting to Taiyuan was its own mission. Not too bad, really: Once I had the visa in hand in Hong Kong, it was the KCR up to Lo Wu, walk across the border, lunch with the two friends I'd travelled this far with, then on my way. At Shenzhen station get a ticket for Guangzhou. On arrival in Guangzhou try for a ticket to Taiyuan. None going, so go for Guilin. At Guilin try for a ticket to Taiyuan. None going, so go for Zhengzhou. At Zhengzhou try for a ticket to Taiyuan - success! A train leaving that evening!
Easy - step-by-step making my way across China.
Too many conversations along the way went like this:
Them: Where are you headed?
Me: Taiyuan.
Them, looking some mixture of incredulous and baffled: Taiwan?!
Me: No, Taiyuan. Shanxi Taiyuan.
Them: Shaanxi?
Me: No. Shanxi. Shanxi Taiyuan.
Them: Shaanxi?
Me, taking care to massively over-enunciate the tones so as to be clear which of these two similar-sounding provinces I was trying to get to: Shanxi Taiyuan.
A few more iterations of Shaanxi? Shanxi! and eventually they got it.
But fair enough: I'd started in Hong Kong and was slowly working my way north. Who in the south would ever stop and think of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi? And even as I made my way northwards, people must've been thinking "Surely not Shanxi, land of coalmines and smog? Surely this whitefella must be headed to Shaanxi, land of Terracotta Warriors? That's where the foreign tourists go, after all".
But after about a week on the road, including overnight stays in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, a couple of nights in Yangshuo, and a twentysomething hour train ride from Guilin to Zhengzhou, then finally an overnight train from Zhengzhou to Taiyuan, I arrived.
Along the way I'd been emailing my boss to say where I was and that I would be arriving soon, but had had no reply. Phones weren't very smart back then, the internet wasn't anywhere near as ubiquitous, and connection depended on finding internet cafes along the route.
I walked out of the railway station into a typical northern Chinese day - dry, dusty, sunny. It seemed quite pleasant for all that I had heard and read of coalmine-riddled industrial hellhole Taiyuan. I found a taxi and we took off, going straight down Yingze Dajie then over the river. Staring out the window the whole way. It all seemed a bit rough, but still, not too bad. And the taxi was going exactly the way the map suggested it should.
But then we were crossing the bridge, and I'm thinking, where the hell is the river?! What I saw was grassy former riverbed with only a tiny trickle of a stream on the far side.
Then through a rougher, more industrial part of town and to my school. The taxi dropped me off right outside the international department building. It was a four storey building with a restaurant on the ground floor, two floors of apartments, and the office on the top, and really just a wing of a neighbouring student dorm. I walked inside to find the lobby and stairwell choked up with ladders, scaffolding, and various construction bits and pieces. Somebody found a staff member, and I was told "We weren't expecting you today!" "I've been emailing R every step of the way to let him know I'm coming, including from Zhengzhou yesterday." "Oh, R is on holiday in Shanghai. He didn't tell us anything."
We wrestled my luggage up the stairs through all the ladders and scaffolding and dust then I was shown my apartment. I was also introduced to the staff at the restaurant on the ground floor and told that I had an account there. So long as I squared up with them on a reasonably regular basis, they'd keep me fed. All of this was a bit rough around the edges and dusty, but serviceable.
By this point I was too shattered from a week on the road, anyway. All I needed was food and rest, and that was well taken care of.