After I got back from Chengdu, I thought I was done with that trip. Unfortunately the bites (or allergic reactions?) that I got during the trip continued to get itchier and became really irritating. It’s almost a sure thing that I got them from the dirty, roach-infested hotel at Emeishan. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that bugged me while I was sleeping. I got attacked by a pair of mosquitoes that bit me seven times and kept buzzing past my ear. I had the last laugh though, since I ended up killing both of them.
I went back to sleep and woke up pretty late in the afternoon because I was so tired. All I did was HW and study for Chinese. Wei also visited and we shared pictures (my Guilin/Chengdu photos and his Hong Kong photos). Made me really wish I was in Hong Kong already…
After Guilin, I didn’t think I would miss Shanghai so much. Chengdu wasn’t a good experience, partly because of luck, partly because of our poor planning. We should have never went on a tour, since we knew it had a pretty good chance of being terrible. But alas, we did and at the very least, we have a great story to tell.
Anyways, we got to sleep in a little before we headed out to the airport. Luckily for us, we were able to hire a van for the same price that two cabs would have cost, which was nice. The whole group stayed together and it was convenient for all our luggage. We gave ourselves plenty of time to get to the airport because we knew how bad traffic could get in Chengdu. To our surprise, traffic didn’t slow us down one bit and we got there early. Actually, we got there so early, the guy at the check-in counter wouldn’t let us check-in!
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How do you know when a hotel is dirty? When you wake up and you see a giant roach crawling around. Nice. We couldn’t get out of there any quicker. Unfortunately for us, the tour didn’t get any better. It seems luck wasn’t on our side for this tour because the tour just got worse. And the tour lady wasn’t even around for the second day…
Why was it so bad? Well, let’s start with the weather. It was raining and we were on top of a mountain. This meant it was wet, cold, and foggy. We could barely see a few feet ahead of us. (Of course, this means I didn’t take a single picture.) We also had a really annoying tour guide. She happened to be my age (20) and she was really short. I think she was shorter than Fanny =O
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The day of the tour and I will say, it was… interesting. We waited outside for the bus to pick us up. It felt strange having the bus come to us instead of us going to the bus, but I’m not complaining. The first thing the tour lady noticed when we boarded was that were foreigners. After the rest of the tour group was picked up, she began to talk. Actually, talk isn’t a good word to describe it. More like she was reciting a speech or something. She kept talking and talking and talking nonstop. I couldn’t understand a word of it, so I thought she was talking about stuff relevant to the places we were going to see. It was later brought to my attention that she was talking about herself and her son! Really now? I didn’t get to sleep because she was so self-centered?
Luckily, she stopped at the rest stop, but then started again when we got back on the bus. Ugh. Not only did she not stop talking, she kept bugging Jessie (the only Mandarin speaker in our group) when we refused to pay extra for stuff we didn’t want to see. She insisted and we resisted. She got pretty annoyed at us and continued to make our lives a living hell for the rest of the day.
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Our flight to Chengdu wasn’t until late at night, so we sat around for awhile at the Guilin airport. When we finally boarded, I was immediately knocked out. I didn’t even notice we landed when we did! We arrived pretty late at around 1:00 AM and Chengdu airport made it more painful by taking forever to bring out our luggage. On our way to the hotel, our taxi driver had an empty road, so at times he drove 140 km/h. I’m pretty sure he averaged 100 km/h…
Our hotel wasn’t the best, but what can we expect from a 2.5 star hotel? It was really cheap, so it didn’t really matter. It also helped that the staff was incredibly helpful. When we were trying to figure out what were going to do during our time in Chengdu, the receptionist was very accommodating. She helped us book a van to drive us to the Panda park and even helped us arrange a tour of Leshan and Emeishan. She even let us keep our luggage at the hotel while we went on the tour!
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