Naturally everyone was overjoyed this morning at the opportunity to use the bathroom whenever it suited them. They were also fairly pleased about being able to drink water as it suited them, given the increased bathroom availability.
What did we do on the train? We mainly looked out the window, at the countryside, the sections of the Great Wall starting and stopping here and there, and finished watching the movie we had started last night during the bogie changing, before the train stopped moving and the power stopped coming out of the power points.
Nothing like suspense I guess. And for those who’ve seen Lucky Number Slevin, suspense is the right word.
Then we had to hand back our sheets, towels, blankets etc. About the only thing we had used was the fateful soup-absorbent handtowel. The train lady made an amusing ‘No this won’t do’ noise when she saw it, and bought me a laminated plastic sheet stating what the inventory for each room should be, and that in the event of loss or damage ‘I have obligated to compensate these items.’
No mention of a price though. I got Ann to help me translate, or thought I had, until she pointed out that the train lady is Mongolian; Ann does speak Mandarin but that wouldn’t be of much use.
After a bit of mime we discovered that she didn’t want us to pay for the towel but rather to try and wash it. The train carriage we were on, in with all the other luxuries, also had a ‘shower room’, and next to the shower room was a hand-washing sink. I attacked our soup-besmirched towel with soap and scrubbed and rinsed and got boiling hot water from the machine but it didn’t really get much less green-spattered.
The train lady came past now and then to check my progress and advise me in mime on various techniques for ‘getting soup stains out of tea towels’. One is to grind the sections of towel in circles against each other. And so forth. She was a funny lady and quite nice actually; she even fetched a bucket and some bleach from the cleaning room, and that, combined with more boiling hot water, really started to get the muck out.
After about an hour – literally – she made her final ‘tut-tut cluck-cluck’ noise, and left the towel in a bucket to soak with four tablets from a small plastic bottle labelled ‘Super Cleaning Tablet’.
I returned to our room with a sheepish grin and a patch of my knuckle rubbed raw and stinging from where it got bleach in it when I put my hands in the bucket water.
How entertaining.
And then, after at least an hour going through the suburbs, we got off in Beijing. We expected the train station to be busy and it complied with enthusiasm, but our hostel was literally across the road, and after diddling about with passports and trips to the ATM and keycard deposits and clogging up the lobby with our plethora of backpacks for nearly an hour we finally got to check into our rooms. which were really really nice. And we got to have a shower. And we got free internet.
Bonus.
Adam promptly used the free internet to show me the original Numberwang, a sketch from a British comedy show where the contestants rattle off random (and stupid) numbers at each other until the badly dressed enthusiastic presenter declares ‘That’s Numberwang!’ This is funny when seen on TV but even funnier when played as a drinking game in a Mongolian nightclub.
Then we had to go to the bank, which sounds quite simple. Unfortunately, it involves walking up the street for a while looking for a particular bank which we read somewhere doesn’t charge any commission on American Express traveller’s cheques, not finding that bank, realising that it’s 4.15 and because we’re not in Ulan Bataar anymore the banks aren’t 24h, and then ducking into the nearest bank only to find that it’s the one where to cash TCs involves sitting and waiting while the clerk fills out more than one type of form in triplicate. Then we noticed that our money was about to be cashed into Yuan, not USD, and had to start again. Eventually we acquired the right amount of USD minus a very modest commission, plus $100 on top of what we needed for the Intrepid Local Payment. Obviously this would have been a good time to turn that $100 into Yuan, but it had already taken the nice lady ages and she was happy to have given us what we wanted, so we just couldn’t do it.
Amusingly the bank has put in a little series of buttons on your side of the glass window, and you press one of these buttons to rate how satisfied with the service you were. For the record we were ‘very satisfied’.
Other interesting facts about Beijing;
1. Drivers in Beijing are either currently using the horn or lamenting a missed opportunity to use the horn.
2. The smog on the first day we were there wasn’t as bad as we had been led to expect.
3. The place is incredibly busy but it does somehow manage to feel organised as well.
Next cab off the rank was the group meeting for the next Intrepid group at 6pm. We met our new leader Li Jing (‘Lilian’), a birdlike Chinese girl who used to work for Shangri La (hotel group), while Andy, Adam and Steve were staying in the same group as well. The new group is larger (16 people) and asides of two Swedish Paramedics (Petra and Anna), and Dom from Brisbane, the rest of the group are British. Mike and June were born in Yorkshire but have lived in Melbourne for 20 years, and then the British girls: Katie, Catherine and Kate, Sat and Charlotte.
With the paperwork out the way, Katie realised that for some reason or other she had pasted in her passport a 10 day single entry visa, instead of the 30 day double entry visa that she applied for. So… Lilian started thinking about how to get around that, and we all went downstairs for a combination dinner. A combination dinner is when one Intrepid group has a finishing dinner, another group has a starting dinner with the same tour leader, and a third group also has a starting dinner with a different leader, and there’s 5 people who are in two of those groups. We all sat at different tables so that kept it under control.
To finish the evening off those who were interested swarmed into about 15,000 taxis and took a 20-Yuan ride over to Hou Hai lake, which is a small but trendy lake surrounded by swishy expensive bars. We had a couple of sit down drinks and a good time generally, got pestered by people trying to sell us laser pointers, then split up into those who felt like staying on and those who preferred to get on back to the hotel.
Greg
