The further adventures of illiterate hitchhikers in China: towns of the same name, mysteries of an ancient city, and how we became vandals

The unfamiliarity of China and of its language can’t be overcome in just a few weeks. You can get used to it, though. Eventually, you are no longer confused about being confused. While we are hitchhiking from the sacred mountain near the city of Xi’an towards the border with Mongolia, we regularly get into situations that we or the other people just don’t understand. It has become a routine for us. These situations are usually awkward. Sometimes they are hilarious, though. And sometimes they are a true mystery.

Inner Mongolia

A mysterious town near the city of Taiyuan

 

In the Xi’an region, it was so boiling hot that it was painful to even walk to the toll gate and start hitchhiking. On the same day more north, the temperature suddenly drops by some 20°C. I suddenly feel happy and able to do things again. It’s incredible how heat turns me to a lifeless zombie, and how normal temperature turns me back to a human being. (And it’s even more incredible that for Vojta it makes no difference.) When we get out of the truck in the suburbs of Taiyuan, it is raining, the air is mild and I am the happiest person in the world.

Vojta wants to see a historical site nearby and the driver is almost going past. We don’t even have to go downtown. This is another reason to be happy; it is hard to hitchhike and to find camping spots in cities. And it is particularly difficult to get around in Chinese cities in general if the only thing you understand is your map, whereas people around you don’t really read maps. A map doesn’t help you much to use the public transport either. So we try avoiding Chinese cities at all cost. So far, we’ve been incredibly lucky; the only major city we’ve been to is Xi’an – and we went there on purpose. Now we seem to be lucky again. The Jinci Temple is 2 kilometers away. We comfortably walk to the village, order noodles in a local diner (we already know how to do that if there are pictures of meals) and pitch the tent in a nearby park. It’s the first time we are using this tent in rain (our families brought this tent for us to Kyrgyzstan) and it’s leaking. It can’t spoil my happiness, though – we just cover the tent with Vojta’s big raincoat and the issue is solved.

We spend the next day in the temple. It is a vast garden with pavilions, lakes, statues and massive trees. The inscriptions say it is almost 1500 years old. I find it as unfamiliar as most of the things in China but it is a spiritual place and I enjoy walking around all the strangely shaped pavilions and towers. It is also raining the whole day and everything is fresh and green and I love it. 

The Jinci temple

To continue north, we decide to avoid the big city of Taiyuan completely. This requires walking a few more kilometers and hitching a ride on a small road across the mountains. There are hardly any cars and we get stuck. Late in the afternoon, we get picked up by a guy and a little girl with a van. The guy doesn’t seem confused at seeing us hitchhiking, which actually is confusing. We show him our list of sentences in Chinese saying what we are doing, and he seems to understand.

Then, he leaves the road and brings us to a deserted ancient village in a small river valley. The hillside is covered by a cascade of stone houses pressed against each other, and stairs. Except from round red Chinese lanterns suspended on roofs or wooden structures, the village looks completely abandoned. The only house that looks used is the one belonging to our driver. He shows us we can sleep somewhere in the village and tells us to come back in the morning. At least we think so. We don’t manage to ask him where exactly we can put up our tent, though, so we start exploring the village.

The houses look historical but we are not exactly sure how to tell anything historical in China. Some of the houses are decorated on the outside but they still are crumbling, some of their roofs are missing and they are mostly empty. We have no idea how old this place is, why it’s abandoned and why it’s decorated. In one of the houses, the lights are on. The door is a bit open, so we can see a lady monk sitting on the ground, maybe praying. We don’t want to disturb her but as she is the only person around, we dare knocking on the door and try to ask her if we can put up a tent nearby. She says something without any gesture and we don’t have the slightest clue what that was. So we give up and just find a nice place for the tent on one of the terraces, with a nice view of the valley.

In the morning, we continue exploring the place: the village is pretty big, with narrow lanes and staircases between houses that look almost identical. In some of them, there are some items, such as brooms, wooden containers, basic farming tools or new chairs that totally don’t seem to belong here. One of the houses near the river looks fake, like a stage for a theater play. On the road in front of the village, there are some signs we can’t read, a map we can’t read either, and many pictures from movies. Vojta comes up with a theory that the whole place might have been built as a scenery for shooting a famous movie. It might also just be a crumbling village where a movie has been shot.

We go to see the driver who brought us here yesterday. He greets us and offers us instant noodles – the same brand we always buy. At least something is familiar here. He shows us his house – he lives in a place that looks like ancient cellars, and the temperature inside is nicely fresh. He also shows us a text handwritten in English, related to this place. We try to decipher the handwriting to find out something, but it’s hard and the text seems to just be a visitors book entry.

The guy asks us some questions too but we are not able to answer. We try to tell him to write the questions on our phone in order to run it through the translation app, but he just writes them on a piece of paper and we are not really able to copy it into the phone, so we can’t figure out what he is asking. So except for our hitchhiking letters, we stay as mysterious for him as he and his village do for us.

Helpful police and a less helpful toll gate officer

 

When we have crossed the mountains, we join the motorway again. Even though this is not the police province of Xinjinag, we sometimes still seem to disturb the police or the toll gate staff when we try hitchhiking. Every toll gate is different. Sometimes, the staff don’t care at all. Sometimes they are extremely helpful. Sometimes it takes some explaining.

This time, it seems it will be difficult. The officer in charge invites us to his air-conditioned booth and asks us a lot of question. We show him all our letters, and he decides to help us. He actually insists. Through the translation app, he suggests us taking a taxi, taking a train and taking a bus. We explain him that we want to hitchhike, so he suggests he will pay a bus ticket for us. We refuse again. Eventually we convince him that hitchhiking is the only option, so he goes with us to the toll gate, stops a car with a license plate of the next city and orders the driver to give us a ride. The driver doesn’t protest at all and we feel almost sorry for him. Who would defy a police officer’s wish. This was our shortest waiting in China so far, though.

We are less lucky at the next toll gate: the lady on duty just tells us to go away. As simple as that. Thanks to her, we take a small country road and embark on the discovery of the Chinese countryside.

The onion vandals

 

We continue slowly, mostly with farmers going from one village to another. We also catch a ride with a guy who probably is an architect and has layouts of pavilions in his car. We walk through an entire town on foot. We become an attraction for the owners of public bathrooms in a park – they find us so funny as we wash our t-shirts that they burst out laughing and we must take a selfie with them.

When the night comes, we have hard time finding a camping spot as we are in an urbanized suburb. Eventually we find a grassy area along the road, behind a line of trees. We just need to step over a low fence. The area itself is quite vast but there are no trees, so we go rather far so that we can’t be seen from the road, and put our camping mats among a bit taller plants.

In the morning, we are woken by somebody shouting. We were probably not hidden that much well because he is shouting at us – and he is waving his arms animatedly. This helps us find out that Chinese people can indeed gesture while they talk. We also find out that we are lying in the only line of onion plants there is in the entire grassy field.

If there is a hell for travelers, once we get there, this farmer will surely show up to remind us of the onions we killed.

The cities of Shangdu

Some time later, after we hiked the sacred mountain of Heng Shan, Vojta comes up with the idea to see Shangdu, the ancient capital of Kublai Khan’s dynasty. It is in the province of Inner Mongolia and almost on the way to the border crossing to Mongolia we are planning to take.

Before we get there, people are extremely hospitable with us again, some truck drivers invite us for food and settle with a shop owner to let us camp in front of her shop.

 

The region of Inner Mongolia seems to be less populated than the ones before, motorways are emptier and it is not difficult to hitchhike on the entrance ramps or directly on the road.

Shangdu looks like a completely ordinary province town, except that people enjoy staring at us even more than anywhere before. They stare at us when we are buying food, they stare even more when we ask where to find a bathroom, and when we try asking for directions to the historical part of the town, a ring of more than 20 staring people forms around us. They don’t tell us any directions and actually tell us nothing at all. They are just standing and staring and when we try to smile at them or tell them our names, they just keep on staring. It’s not fun, so we just leave and try to look for the historical district on our own.

We are not sure where to start, though. The town looks anything but historical and there are none of the brown signs that everywhere in China point towards cultural sites. We can’t find anything in the map either. Eventually Vojta verifies the location of the Kublai Khan museum – and finds it’s some 300 km east in another Shangdu spelled in totally different Chinese characters. Well played. We are not even surprised anymore.

We still manage to get a cultural experience in this Shangdu though – as we embark on an urban hike back to the motorway, we come across people dancing on a square. On the ground, there is a recorder playing loud music, people stand behind it in regular lines like in an aerobic class and dance to the rhythm. We have noticed a similar dance session in Xi’an but we thought it was a special event for tourists. This town looks anything but touristy, so it probably just is a thing Chinese people do.

Dancing in Shangdu

We don’t join them as we don’t understand dancing and rhythms, but Shangdu offers us another opportunity to see some culture: on the next square, there is an open cinema. A historical drama is showed on a big screen and people sit around on boxes and stools. We of course don’t understand any dialogues but it doesn’t matter much: there are battles, a heroic warrior, a beautiful girl who does nothing, and in the end a character dies and it’s heroic and sad.

The next day we find the other Sangdu: it consists of two grassy mounds in the middle of an empty plain, and a museum. There also is a parking lot guard who speaks Japanese, and that’s nice. Not that we know anything in Japanese but he understands the concept of not understanding Chinese, so we talk about life through a dictionary and it’s kind of fun.

After leaving the ‟right” Shangdu, we are heading to Mongolia. Compared to the distance we’ve already covered, the border is very near. Our days in China are almost over. The god of hitchhikers, if there is one, must love us and be watching over us. We’ve just crossed the fourth largest country in the world, by the way a tough dictatorship, without having any idea about pretty much anything, yet everything has gone smoothly and almost everybody have been nice to us. China was the country I was the most afraid of, and now I think I will miss it, in a way.

Mao is watching you

Hiking Hua Shan and Heng Shan the Chinese way: stairway to heaven and a printer on the top of a holy mountain

We spent most of the time remaining on our visa hiking holy mountains. You might be wondering why I am writing a blog post about it: hiking is a very ordinary thing, isn’t it? It is the same everywhere in the world. You just find a hill and a path, get some supplies, put on hiking boots and walk up until you’re on the summit, right? But in China, also hiking surprised us. Or, at least hiking holy mountains. Anyway, it deserves its own post.

On the top of Hua Shan

 

The importance of being well dressed

 
Dan, our young host from Xi’an, tells us about a holy Daoist mountain called Hua Shan not far from the city. She says it’s one of the five most important mountains in China. Hiking a holy mountain seems like good thing to do, so we decide to hitchhike to the place the trail starts. Dan and her family are way too hospitable and generous to let us hitchhike, though. They insist on driving us to the Huashan town at the foot of the hill themselves. In view of their incredible hospitality, we are relieved they are not trying to fly us there with a private jet or buy us a spaceship, so we don’t even protest. Dan also gives us a map of the hill and explains us in detail how to get to the top. Under the mountain, we say goodbye to each other.

We soon find out that in China, also such a simple thing as hiking is done in a very different way than we are used to.

The surroundings of the hill are very civilized – the way to the top actually starts in the city. At the foot, there is a monastery with a park where every square meter of land is carefully maintained. We want to start hiking the next morning, so we spend the afternoon in the park. We buy some food for the hike – some plastic packages of something we think might be tofu, and some purple sausages. Then we camp in an almost dry stream bed because it is the only hidden spot we can find. I don’t manage to sleep at all as the temperature is still way over 30°C.

The whole night, there is a stream of people with lights and shining phones walking past us up the hill. Hiking at night seems to be a thing. And when I say hiking, I mean walking sometimes in flip-flops or dancing shoes, fancy clothes and with umbrellas.

Early in the morning Vojta wakes up and I give up my efforts to fall asleep in a puddle of my own sweat. We hide our backpacks in shrubs at the edge of the stream bed and join the endless procession moving slowly up the hill. The number of people on the path didn’t seem to grow or drop as the day came.

As the mountain is very steep and rocky, there seems to be just one way to the top from this part of the town. There is an entrance fee to be paid at a big gate. It is more expensive than anything we have tried to buy in China so far but the price is the same for everybody. We don’t have to pay a fine for being foreigners as we had to in some other countries. (It would be pointless here anyway as pretty much all the tourists are Chinese. Pretty much all the tourists are also more elegantly dressed than us (we can again see some people in dresses and sandals even though most wear running shoes and pants one would expect).

Then, we continue to walk up. Instead of a path, there actually are gentle, polished, well-maintained stone stairs going through a gorge between cliffs, along the dry stream bed with occasional puddles of water. On the other side of the stairs, along the rock face, there is a line of stands selling drinks, fruits, instant noodles, souvenirs, hats, umbrellas and pretty much anything you can think of. Sometimes the valley gets a bit wider. On every such spot, there are colourful gazebos, benches or statues. More important spots have boards with information about the place, poems or legends. Often it also is translated into English and sometimes the translation makes sense. 

No watching while walking!

On the opposite side of the stream bed, we sometimes see small stone staircases or ladders going up the cliff, to carved holes half hidden by vegetation. We try to climb up one of these ladders, but almost immediately a guard appears, shouting at us to (probably) get down. So we go back to the crowded path and the mystery of a hole in the rock remains unsolved. 

 

 

It is early morning, the cicadas scream like crazy. The stairs going through the gorge are protected from the sun by the cliffs and trees and washed by occasional small streams of cold water running down the rock face, so the temperature is almost bearable. The shopkeepers catch the water in pipes and run it over their fruits and water bottles to keep them cool, and then the water flows down the stairs. We are walking fast because I want to cover most of the distance before the deadly heat comes.

Soon, the path gets steeper. That doesn’t mean it is any more difficult or any less maintained and polished, though. If the trail goes up a cliff, there is a perfect, comfortable staircase carved in the rock, with railing, electric lighting (now switched off) and all. We soon find ourselves on a cascade of ancient staircases, with (contemporary) artificial platforms. People use them for taking selfies. Even though we are basically climbing a cliff, at any point the ascent doesn’t get any more technical than walking up the stairs in a building.

The people with umbrellas, dressed in skirts, sandals and office shirts still look as fresh and as elegant as downstairs. We also notice the typical Chinese fashion trend: if you’re a guy with a big belly, the right summer outfit for you is to tuck your T-shirt up and roll it above your belly. If your tummy is big enough, it will hold the T-shirt rolled up. Vojta tried it too but his belly is too small, so his T-shirt keeps unrolling and falling loose. Too bad for him.

Fashion trend for this summer.

Mountain shopping

 

Then the slope gets less steep again – we are almost at the North Peak, one of the five peaks the mountain has. We can now see how pointy it is. The peak has the form of a narrow rocky ridge with a top we can’t really see as there is a building. Stairs and paths are carved into the rock even on places where the surface is almost horizontal. Houses and stands selling stuff appear again. There also is a shop with some dried plants, dead snakes and some things we can’t identify. That’s new – we didn’t notice a shop like that downstairs. At one of the stands, you can pose for a picture with a sword. The place is even more crowded than the hiking path as there is a top cable car station near here.
 

Wanna do something for your health? Get a dead lizard!

It is a bit windy and as we are at 1600 meters of altitude, the temperature is still nice and fresh. It is almost noon, so it will probably not get worse. From the top, we can see the land around us. The mountain seems to be rising very abruptly from a completely flat landscape.

We try to eat the purple sausages we carry for lunch, and we find out they are sweet. It’s actually the most horrible food we’ve tried in China so far. So we eat our tofu supplies instead. Luckily, there are those stands with instant noodles we’ve been making fun of.

The path continues on a ridge (it is very safe and protected with a lot of railings) to the remaining peaks. They form a kind of a pointy ring with precipitous slopes around. It is very airy and gives one vertigo a bit – I’ve never been to a mountain this pointy and steep (and this easily accessible) in Europe. Except for the crowds and tourist attractions, the mountain looks like in a fairytale.

Here on the top, there are no water streams anymore. But there still are shops selling bottled water and many other stuff. The goods are supplied by bearers who carry sticks on their shoulders with heavy load suspended in the front and in the rear. The bearers also collect waste and carry it downstairs. People throw a lot of garbage but the place is not dirty; the system seems to work.

We go to some of the other peaks. On one of them, there is a platform where people put up tents to wait for sunrise. On another, there is an open-air photo studio with a lot of printers. Tourists can have their pictures printed immediately, at 2000 m on a rocky peak. There also is a path made of planks, suspended on the rock face. It is very crowded, so we avoid it.

Along the ridge, there still are trees, pavilions, temples, ancient inscriptions (probably) and small nooks carved in the rocks. The air is fresher the higher we get, so I like the mountain more and more. I try to imagine what the place looked like centuries ago. Even with all the printers and swords and love locks on railings, the mountain seems magical.  

When we are walking down, it is already dark. As the staircase is so user-friendly, it is not even hard to climb down at night. And there still is a never-ending stream of people going up. The zigzag path below us is illuminated by hundreds of electrical lights and it looks like an Elvish kingdom. As we are descending, it’s getting hot again. We decide not to reach the scorching spot where our backpacks are, and stay in the middle of the climb even though we have no camping stuff. We just lie down on the ground in the shrubs, and after the last night up I fall asleep immediately. 

Wishes come true

 

Some days later, several hundred kilometers north, in a temperature lower by almost 20°C, after crossing from the Shaanxi province to Shanxi province (yep, the names are a trap for Europeans) we are hitchhiking to another holy mountain. Mount Heng is located near a town called Hunyuan and it happens to be on our way. It also is one of the five most famous sacred Daoist mountains. This time, we do our best to shop for supplies with more care and try not to buy any sweet sausages. We end up with plastic packages of unknown white content as usual. Most of it probably is tofu or vegetables and some of it are eggs. At least we hope so.

Today seems to be the day of wishes come true. In the morning, Vojta thinks about buying a water melon. Our next driver (who totally could not understand anything we might have been saying) stops at a melon stand next to the road and offers us one.

At the foot of the sacred mountain, we are looking for water on a huge parking lot near a touristy temple. There is none. It can just be bought in shops in tiny plastic bottles. So we keep walking up along the road and we find a small river dam. It is accessible and relatively clean, with no garbage on the shores. Even though nobody swims in there, there are fishers so the water is probably not too polluted either.

Besides filtering some water for drinking, we can also wash our socks and T-shirts and go swimming after a long time. The fishers on the shore stare at us as if we were some water monsters. This is the second time already, so it makes me think swimming probably is unusual, unpopular or maybe inconvenient in China. I am so happy I can bath that I don’t care, though. We eat our melon and are having such a good time that we only feel sorry we don’t have any beer to chill with. A family who is having a picnic nearby ask us to take a picture with them, and then invite us to their picnic. We manage to communicate with them a bit through a translation app. It is an elevating conversation because they understand we don’t understand Chinese. (We have not always been this lucky.) They also share their beer with us and when they need to go, they give us their remaining fruits. I’m wondering whether China is reading our minds today. It’s almost scary.

Heng Shan mountain: the ‟undeveloped part of China”

 

The way to the hill starts on a huge parking lot with a big building with a lot of ticket counters. Actually, most people take a bus or cable car to get to the top. We like walking, though, so we just pay the entrance fee and walk along the road. We are the only ones and it is a nice hike. There are not even too many cars passing us by.

After several kilometers, there is another huge parking lot with a line of shops and stands. The road ends here and from this point, everybody have to walk. Also this mountain has a long stone staircase instead of a path.

Heng Shan seems not as large as Hua Shan and a bit less crowded (even though it still is considerably crowded compared to mountains in Europe). It also is full of temples, caves, gazebos, shrines and boards with inscriptions in Chinese and in lousy English. All of them are on the same side of the mountain, pressed against the rock face. In one of the rooms, I come across an aged monk who tells me something and gestures when he talks, so I get an idea of what he means. It’s reassuring.

Disaster hidden trouble site

Later, we even meet a tourist who speaks English. He comes from a southern part of China and we exchange a few sentences about hiking. ‟It’s my first time here,” he says. ‟I don’t go to these undeveloped parts of the country much.” 

To me, this region seems completely normal. I knew that this part was more rural than the most touristy regions but I am surprised it actually is considered backward. I’m wondering what a developed part of China looks like. If developed means crowded and urbanized, it scares me. 

On the official top of the hill, there is a paved area where people take selfies and then go back again. There are no printers. The stairway continues on a grassy ridge but we are the only ones to follow it. Nobody else seems to care what’s behind the official summit. It’s a lovely walk, though. There are no crowds and the views are nice. Finally, even a Chinese sacred mountain feels familiar.

 

 

 

Phenomenology of China: things just happen, what the hell

Squeezed in a truck, we are swallowing miles of China. We are leaving Xinjiang and heading east through the desert. I have a lot of time to think.

Phenomenology (I apologize for oversimplifying) describes things in a way they appear to us, ignoring the possible true nature of the things themselves. In philosophy classes, I always struggled to understand this concept. China finally illustrated it for me. (Yay.) As we are hitchhiking through this country as Europeans, without knowing anything about it and without speaking the language, many of the things we come across just appear. And we don’t have the slightest idea what the heck they are actually supposed to mean.

China feels more distant and different to me than all the countries we crossed before. It’s not just because we are unable to learn any Mandarin and because we meet no people who would speak any western language. Everything seems different: food, roads, cars, towns, the way people communicate, their gestures... But we are not traveling across a third of the planet for things to be always the same, are we? Eventually, we just accept that things happen and we are not even surprised we don’t understand them. Everything becomes a part of endless exploration. And it’s fun.

An easy guide to missing the Chinese Wall

 

Our two truck drivers make 1300 km in 1 day, taking turns in sleeping and driving. They just stop twice for bathroom and food. (They invite us for the meal and it is delicious). We communicate with them a bit through Google Translate (VPN is needed) and their WeChat. They are very polite and compliment us, and it is not creepy. They also beat my personal record for the longest ride I’ve ever hitched. I am almost wondering if they have any human needs at all. They seem like robots with superhuman abilities.

They leave us in Ningxia province, not far from Mongolia, and continue their hell ride to Beijing. In one day, we crossed a distance we expected to cross in a week. Suddenly, we have plenty of time to hang around.

In our Chinese map, there is a line of squares near us: the Chinese Wall. So we decide to hitchhike to it. It’s still scorching hot even though we are not in the desert anymore. Fortunately, the flower patches with water sprinklers are still all around so we can use them as showers to cool a bit. And people still don’t understand us, don’t speak any language we speak and don’t use gestures while they talk. When a car stops and we show our hitchhiking letter to the crew, they talk in fast Chinese at us. When we point at the sentence saying ‟sorry, we don’t speak Chinese“, they reply by talking in fast Chinese as well. The only way to find out if they want to give us a ride or not is to start getting into their cars and see if they protest. They usually don’t. So we hope it means they agreed to give us the ride.

A view from the hill above the monastery

Somehow, we manage to get to the spot where the wall is in our map. In the real world, there is none.

Even though the thing is visible from the space, we managed to miss it from the Earth. Great job, congratulations to us. Instead of the wall, there is a monastery. Some young kids seem to have some kind of a holiday bootcamp in there. A young boy speaks fluent English and helps us communicate with the monks. (I will remember him very well because it is the 5th time in China we can speak in a language we understand with someone. There will be 4 more occasions in the weeks to come). The monks let us take some water and enter the sanctuary.

 

Even though I don’t understand the meaning of any symbols, the place is calm and peaceful and the peace spreads on to me as well. We also climb the hill behind the sanctuary. There are trees but it doesn’t make the air any less sweltering. The countryside all around us is covered in fields and an endless labyrinth of brown irrigation channels. It seems to be gleaming with heat. The fields are green, though, and I can’t imagine how that is possible.

At night, the temperature stays almost the same and mosquitoes come. We put up the tent in a lemon orchard, on parched ground, and don’t even try to hide much.

A VIP delegation from Outer Space

The next day, we are woken up by farmers. We hang around in a nearby town and manage to buy internet card for the rest of the month. Even the cheapest plan available in the shop has unlimited data. The further east we get, the more we realize how bad and overpriced all data plans in Czechia are compared to almost all countries we’ve been to. 

Somewhere in Ningxia

Since we finally have internet, we can contact people. We remember Faker. It is a young guy we met on the very first day of our trip. He had just finished his studies in the UK and was on his way home to China, unsuccessfully trying to hitchhike out of Prague for 2 days already. After getting stuck as well, we invited him to my place in Prague. The following morning, all of us managed to get a lift and we parted for good. Now, Faker has been home for several months, having crossed Pakistan and Afghanistan. We find out he lives in a totally different part of China, so no chance to meet up. Pretty much everybody lives in a totally different part of China, it seems. Except for Dan.

Dan is Faker’s friend, she is a Hospitality student, speaks English, lives in a nearby province and will be happy to meet us. So we go to the motorway and start hitchhiking to the city of Xi’an.

The crew at the toll gate seem very confused by our presence. They seem convinced we must need something, and they zealously try to find out what that is. They are unwilling to believe we just came here to hitch a ride. Gradually, almost 10 people surround us. They greet us as if we were an official delegation of a distant land, and as we are showing them our hitchhiking letters and pictures and telling them through the translation app that China is an exciting country, they call their boss and then the boss’ boss. Each boss greats us almost ceremoniously. Then the manager of the toll gate shows up. He eventually understands what we are up to – and decides to help us. 

Helpers

He orders his employees to bring us drinking water, and writes a sign on a cardboard for us. Some of the staff then start waving at cars and show us the ones with the license plates of our destination. Thanks to – or despite of – their help, a car stops pretty soon, and the show is over.

Insane heat, insane hospitality and an endless option to do inappropriate things

The next city, Guyuan, is in higher altitude, so the temperature becomes almost nice. We camp in a cozy park with pine trees, and I feel absolutely blissful. If you were wondering what is the key to ultimate happiness in human life, it’s temperature under 25°C. You’re welcome. I was glad to help.

In the morning we get some food in a restaurant for free again even though we were just asking for water. It seems that in China, not only Uyghur people are ready to feed illiterate aliens just because. I’m still wondering, though, whether it’s maybe some kind of tarof we abuse by not refusing enough. But how can I protest genuinely against being offered food! Is one minute of refusing not enough?

We cross mountains. The terrible heat suddenly turns into a terrible downpour, and then it is scorching hot again.

Old town of Xi'an

Before arriving to Xi’an, we find out that Dan paid subway tickets and a hotel for us. Just like that. She just announced it as a fait accompli, there is no chance of protesting. All we can do is to thank her thousand times and go to the address she gave us, and we meet there. She is a very young student of Hospitality and seems to be excited about her major – and pretty much about everything, actually. She did a part of her studies in the UK, she speaks some English and is extremely polite. She is so polite that it is hard to even trying to keep up with her in politeness. The next day, she goes to classes, so we explore the city on our own. 

Xi’an is the first big Chinese city we ended up in. It is also important and historical, which I didn’t know before. The weather is still swelteringly hot. I melt in liters of sweat whereas other people carry cute umbrellas and look fresh. In the subway, a young, elegant woman starts a small-talk with us in English. Apart for breaking the stereotype that Chinese people don’t talk to strangers, she also is so far the seventh person in China (including a customs officer) who speaks a western language with us, so I would love to talk with her for hours. She gets off soon, though.

Vojta wants to go to a museum, but there is a waiting line several dozens of meters long, so he gives up and we spend the day in the old town. Even though Xi’an is not the most touristy city in China, the ancient lanes are stuffed with stands selling fried octopuses and tons of souvenirs such as mugs with Mao Zedong, books of quotes by Mao Zedong, purses with wrongly translated slogans by Mao Zedong and T-shirts with Mao Zedong or Obama or both combined which is probably meant to be a joke. By far the most bizarre souvenir are play cards with Osama Bin Laden. 

We then turn up at a ceremony in a Buddhist temple. We do things wrong but a young student shows us where to stand correctly. After the ceremony, we end up getting a piece of watermelon from the monks. Even though there is a plenty of Chinese tourists, the watermelon is only given to us and some homeless people on the street. We don’t even have our backpacks with us so we have just no idea how this happened. The watermelon is tasty, though.

Eventually, we go to dinner with Dan. The food is delicious even though in the menu there was a meal translated as ‟High-quality smell of urine sub-surface“ that we didn’t dare to buy. At one point, I stick my chopsticks into the meal and the waitress comes almost running, tries to confiscate the chopsticks from me and force a spoon on me instead. For some reason, sticking sticks in the meal probably is very inappropriate.

Dan invites us to go with her to her parents’ village the next day, which is an offer we can’t refuse – we can’t wait to see her family and spend more time with some people again.

The village looks more like a part of an endless tapestry of family houses. Dan’s mum, dad and young brother are already waiting for us and pick us up from the train station by car. After stepping out of the air-conditioned station, the wave of heat almost knocks me down. The weather is so deadly hot that nobody spends more time than necessary in a place that is not air-conditioned. It is almost noon, all windows are shuttered and the streets are completely deserted as if nobody was living here.

Our friend and her family

Dan’s parents are both physicians: her mother specializes in traditional Chinese medicine, and her father in the western one. They share one cabinet: on one of the walls, there are shelves with mysteriously looking jars, and on the opposite side of the room, western-style medicines we are used to. In contrast to the European controversy and discussion whether the Chinese medicine is scientific enough, for Dan’s parents, both approaches seem to be in harmony.

Western and traditional medicines

Dan’s parents are very warmhearted and even more extremely polite than Dan. It almost seems like a contest in politeness that we are inevitably losing. They keep telling us how brave we are because we travel, and we thank them thousand times for their generosity. They even give us a present, and we have nothing but a postcard for them. We soon run out of compliments to return, so we repeat the old ones over and over. The family invites us for a delicious home-made meal, the most delicious one we’ve had in China. Dan also takes us to visit her aunt, who is also very warmhearted and polite. Even though we probably are very bad at politeness and other cultural conventions we ignore, Dan and her relatives are some of the first people in China (except Xinjiang) we manage to have a real conversation with. We are trying to pronounce some Chinese words and each other’s names, we show each other photos and we relate. 

The best meal in China

Dan also takes us to an old fortress with a museum. In the cellars, the temperature drops to 31°C and it seems almost fresh. Were it not for the fierce heat, the place would be pleasant. We actually are in the valley of Huang He, the Yellow River – the place where Chinese civilization started. In this heat it doesn’t feel like a place for living whatsoever, let alone starting a civilization.

Valley of the Yellow River

Trees on a drip feed. Is it too hot for them to survive?

In the evening, the politeness contest continues and we lose spectacularly – Dan’s family insists on bringing us to a fancy hotel. We try to persuade them we would gladly camp on their floor, but we have no chance. After a pretty long negotiation, they tell us the hotel has actually been already paid for. (We eventually find out that was not the case, but it’s too late and they don’t let us pay anyway.)

I can’t believe all this started by hosting the young hitchhiker half a year ago back in Prague. We offered him a spot on the floor for camping and some pasta with tomatos. In return, we are treated like kings. It just doesn’t feel fair. Also, I am wondering how many social customs we violated and how many expectations we failed to meet. However, I am so excited we finally talked and spent some time with people here in China. This country still seems so unfamiliar and unfathomable, but I am so grateful to Dan and her family for letting us into their lives a bit. This is why we travel, after all.

View from the fancy hotel