Battling Murphy's Law

This past weekend we had our group travel, our final formal activity geared toward familiarizing us with Zhejiang Province. Our trip took us South to the area around Wenzhou. Friday afternoon students and roommates alike packed into a neon green tour bus (about 55 of us altogether), and we set off on what turned out to be a rather interesting but definitely enjoyable weekend.

We spent Friday night in the small city of Rui’an (yes, 瑞安，the same name as our beloved stateside classmate). Unfortunately this Rui’an is not as much fun as the other one, and after walking around aimlessly for a while, we ended up packing in and resting up for Saturday.

Saturday breakfast was definitely a highlight: an epic buffet in the hotel restaurant featuring several choices but also (miraculously) Western-style choices. I chose to ignore some of the interesting looking Chinese choices and a rather out-of-place salad, and reveled instead in my eggs and toast with jam. After breakfast we set off for the “Nine Pools”, which turned out to be just that. We spent the morning hiking along a gorgeously pristine river to a mountain top (abandoning our boots at the first river crossing and hiking barefoot), and then making our way back down, jumping off of rocks into deep swimming holes, standing under waterfalls and swimming. I was exhausted by the time we got back to the bus around 3:00, in time to change and order some lunch. And that’s when the trouble started.

At four when we were scheduled to depart, the driver discovered that we had some engine trouble. When the key was turned, the bus would rev for a while and then stall, and refused to start. Flexible college students we are, we filed off the humid bus and started tossing a Frisbee, making extra bathroom runs, etc. The bus started up, and we all piled back on, backed up about five feet, and stalled again. This continued for a little over an hour, when the driver finally got the bus going and we set off for the mountaintop Daoist temple/monastery we were to hike to and spend the night.

I’ll say this about our driver: he is good at his job. The roads we were on contained such obstacles as low-lying cables, passages just barely wider than the bus, chickens and bikers and things in the road at every turn (he would honk in warning before every such bend). And then we hit the switchbacks, and our respect for the driver doubled. We drove up a darkening, narrow mountain road for quite a ways, and never once did he think twice about whether or not he could make the turn. Several times we had to stop the bus and wait while several volunteers moved large rocks out of the way. Somewhere around this time it started raining. After the second such rock-moving expedition, the bus stalled again. It took about an hour and a half to fix. During this time, several people’s (mostly the boys) well-trained college mentalities kicked in, bottles of beer and rice liquor emerged from backpacks, and the back of the bus got drunk and rowdy. This is always a good state to be in before a hike in the rain at night. The rest of us alternated between humid hot bus and rainy cold outside, eating various snacks and speculating about when exactly we would get there. The bus finally roared back to life, and we made it to the trailhead with little interference, except the comically large pile of sand we drove over (I swear it was just looming ahead like something from a cartoon or bad video game). Relieved, we said goodbye to the bus and started slowly filing up the mountain to the temple. The hike was pretty steep in parts, and though it was dark and foggy we could tell that daylight would offer some great views. The hike only took about 45 minutes, but when we arrived it felt like much longer. We were greeted with a wonderfully simple vegetarian meal with dishes of lotus root, beans, mushrooms, bamboo and the like. Probably one of my best meals since I’ve been here, though that’s partially because I was so exhausted.

We were planning to get up at 5 to walk to the summit for sunrise, but we were told it was still raining and shooed back to bed. At 7:30 when we went back downstairs, we discovered that the problem was not rain (the rain had stopped) but the fog that poured into every courtyard, obscured anything more than 15 feet away, and sadly made even photographing the buildings we were in difficult. We explored the place a bit and set off down the mountain, assured that the driver had eaten well before us and departed a half an hour earlier. The hike down was gloriously comfortable, with occasional large gusts blowing up at us. The views were as obscured as the night before, but the feeling of being entirely surrounded by fog was pretty cool. Jingbo at one point seemed pretty impressed that he’d essentially run up the same route drunk the night before. The downside was that half an hour of descending jagged stairs does a number on your knees, and by the time we reached the bus, our legs were shaking, our previously clean clothes were damp, and…what? You guessed it: our driver was nowhere to be found. So we waited, watching the fog and demolishing our remaining snacks, as everyone else came down the mountain. Turns out he’d gone back to sleep, and not decided to run off and abandon the defective bus and crazy Americans on it, so about an hour later we finally started the descent from the mountain. Sunday was taken up almost entirely by driving, with the exception of an hour stop for lunch in the city of Wenzhou. We made it back around 9:00 at night, smelly, tired and ready for class the next morning.