I'm a liar. I've been peddling untruths to myself, friends, and lovers for years and it's time to come clean. Unless you're taking a day trip to a national park, traveling is never ever cheap. Ever. I've created the most elaborate Excel spreadsheets to spread my lies in slick emails. I've told countless friends the only cost of Bonnaroo is gas money and the ticket, and since each car is packed with people the travel costs are negligable. And, hey, food doesn't count 'cause you'd be eating at home anyway, right? Right?
This time I was absolutely convinced I could do a weekend run to Macau for under $60. Not just me, mind you, I also offered the trip as "my treat" to an initially reluctant travel companion. I had a website promising me they would ferry me across the Pearl River delta for 80rmb up till 9:30 at night and I had a quasi-reservation for a double room at a guest house for 150rmb. Add buses and meals, and wa la... an über-cheap side trip to that Portuguese bastard child of a forfeited colony opposite Hong Kong on the delta.
The other myth that's become obvious to me over the past few weeks is that I can plan. I can research and improvise just about anything... but plan? No. Not a chance. My "plan" was to look up the characters for "ferry terminal" and scout them out at the bus stop an hour before the last departure. That was it.
First we were running late because I had to conduct my first ever phone interview [I invite you to speculate what that means] so after making Hera wait outside my apartment in the cold for half an hour, we had to get a cab to the ferry terminal. 40RMB. We get there and learn a) my ferry company doesn't really exist, and b) the company that does exist sent their last ferry to Macau an hour earlier, and c) by the time we decided to ferry over to HK and take another to Macau, the last HK-bound ferry was pulling out of dock.
At this point a rational set of characters would have called it a night and tried to set out again in the morning. No such luck that your humble narrator and his guest were rational thinkers. We wanted to go to Macau. That was that, obstacles be damned. We decide to go to Lou Hu to look for a night bus to Zhuhai [Mainland border city of Macau]. For Jacksonville readers, imagine being in at the Gate gas station on A1A in between Ponte Vedra Beach and St. Augustine and deciding you need to catch a Greyhound in downtown Jax to Orlando at that very moment - 9:45 at night.
So we hopped another cab [add 40 RMB] back to Bai Shi Zhou to get on the subway to Lou Hu. When we get there we discover that, alas, all the buses were gone already.... but wait! A dashing young gentleman offers to have someone drive us to Zhuhai for 500 RMB. I turn to walk away. 350 RMB it is. We're now at 430 RMB [$53 USD], for those keeping score at home, and we haven't even left Shenzhen yet.
So at 11am on a Saturday night I get into a strangers van with my Filipino friend for a two hour drive through China's industrial wastelands to a city I've never been to. Though expensive, I know it was a good deal because our driver was angry. Very angry. He drove fast and blared his Sino-Techno out of a small 8" sub in the back of his can [take the most mediocre house music you've heard, strip away all but the barest of melody, run it through a $20 Radioshack keyboard to get that 4-bit MIDI effect in full, increase it to a happy hardcore 250bmp tempo, and wa la! You're a Chinese DJ!].
Guangzhou, the third most populous city in China and shoe factory capital of the world, was the mid-way point at the north corner of the Delta. Our driver pulled off the highway here and into a dark parking lot of what, in America, would look like an abandoned strip mall near MLK Drive. Businesses closed but people hanging out in the shadows outside. Our driver stepped out and was swarmed by six or seven men who looked angry. He disappeared inside the mob.
"Should we be worried, Trey?" Hera asked.
It was a very reasonable question.
"Yes. I think so, maybe a little bit anyway," I giggled back. I was worried a little bit. The situation was weird and becoming a bit too fluid. We had bitten off a little more than we could chew when hired a driver who didn't speak any English to drive us two hours in the middle of the night to a town I was familiar with through Wikipedia. But that's precisely what made the situation so fun [and funny] to me.
Our driver came back, opened the side door, and grabbed Hera's backpack. We correctly assumed we were switching drivers. We left our nightclub-on-wheels and drove off with our curious new driver.
"Ni hao, pengyou [hello friend]"
No response.
"Where are you from?" I asked in Chinese.
No response.
"Do you like Zhuhai?"
No response.
"Friend, do you speak Chinese or only Cantonese?"
No response. Nice.
- - - - too be continued [with pictures] - - - -
