Everything was telling me to stay put. I really love Fenghuang and found a great hostel, I really hate Hong Kong and haven’t found a decent place to stay so far, and it was pissing down with rain. I should have followed my instincts and stayed in Fenghuang for a few more days.
But instict be damned, I decided to leave. I trekked through the rain to the bus station to find that the bus to Huaihua was full. Another pulled up soon after and I waited on it for an hour for it to leave. On the journey I had the only gigantic man in China sitting beside me and not only was he expanding over onto my side of the seat, he also kept falling alseep and his head kept falling onto my shoulder. Eventually I came up with a plan to reverse my position, face him, and back as far away from him as far as I could before hitting the side of the bus. This created a bit of space between us for awhile but then he did some sort of manoever where he stealthily filled up the space I’d just created with his ass. Now we were spooning. I was about to start whispering sweet nothings into his ear when the bus came to a sudden halt and he got up and left. I felt so used.
By my calculations we should have had about 30 more minutes to go in our ride to Huaihua where I’d be (hopefully) catching a night train down towards Hong Kong. I knew we hadn’t arrived because everyone who got off left their stuff on the bus. I thought at first it was a massive smoke/pee break but as the break dragged on I started to wonder. I attempted to ask the bus driver if we had arrived and he mimed back to me something that resembled two things (his fists) crashing together. I took this to mean there had been an accident so went for a look to confirm whether or not my mime understanding skills were up to scratch.
Sure enough, two minutes up the road was a house with the back end of an SUV sticking out of it. The police were doing what seemed to be an in depth investigation complete with video, but I noticed that the road wasn’t actually blocked. Cars, vans, buses and even a truck full of chickens were all forbidden to pass not because of the investigation, but because of the villagers.
The police told us the road wouldn’t be opening anytime soon so everyone on my bus grabbed their stuff and started walking. I really had no choice so grabbed my bag and wandered off with the rest of my stranded bus mates in what I assumed to be the general direction of Huaihua. A couple of young people adopted me and told me that three people had died in the crash, a baby had been seriously injured, the driver had done a runner and the villagers were not letting any vehicles pass until… well I’m not sure when. Eventually after about 20 minutes some of us got picked up by a suicidal minivan driver and got to Huaihua in one piece.
Delayed by about 3 hours at this point, I didn’t get a ticket on any of the late afternoon trains and could only swing a spot on the midnight train. So I had six hours to kill. Great. I was starving and in search of food and wandering around, looking lost when I was approached by a youngish girl who spoke a bit of English. She asked what I wanted, I said food, she thought I wanted to eat with foreigners and proceeded to take me to the town’s only five-star hotel. But we passed a KFC on the way and I was able to spare the five star people from a visit from my smelly self and my dirty bags.
I chatted with the girl for a while and she asked if I wanted to hang out at her place until my train. She kept telling me over and over how terrible a place it was and I countered, telling her about the squalor I used to live in in London. Well her place was worse (but didn’t have the mushrooms growing in it like my old house did). It was super small consisting only of one room about two meters wide and 6 meters long, a single bed, a desk, a table but no cooker or fridge, and the toilet/shower was actually an add on that was outside on the roof! She was about seven floors up so that made for a pretty impressive place to pee. But for $30/month, what can you expect?
She kept telling me how brave I was to be travelling on my own. That seems to be a trend with Chinese people. They seem to think that they live in some sort of scary, dangerous place when in truth, it’s one of the safest places I’ve ever been. I went on my spiel about how most people in the world are good, if you trust people great things will happen, people look out for a lone female traveller blah blah blah and by the end of it I think I had convinced her to travel the world.
So for a day that started out questionably, it turned out to be a pretty interesting one. I had some good chats with some locals, got to my destination in one piece and got to see what $30 a month buys these days in Huaihua. Success!
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