The joys of travelling China without a guidebook

We were awoken at 6am and herded unceremoniously off the boat and packed into cable-cars to ride up from the docks onto a fleet of waiting buses.


From there it was a 2 hour bumpy ride into the down to Yichang, with a poor 80 year old Chinese woman spitting and retching continuously with her face pressed against the back of Sarah's feet. I can confirm that keeping your feet lifted off the ground for 2 hours straight in order to avoid a torrent of phlegm and bile is a good thigh workout.

Then it was being met as we disembarked and pushed directly onto the next bus and told there was no time to even go to the toilet. Good thing we hurried because that bus took off immediately... in order to circumnavigate the block for just over an hour in the hopes of picking up more passengers until it was packed to the gills. Finally we were off on a delightful 4 hour ride to the historic river city of Wuhan.

Then it was right onto a city bus for half an hour and then a cab, and then a 15 minute walk to try to find the travel agent that had Chris and Cherie's train tickets. They told us they had hotel rooms as well, but we didn't need them because we were catching a train that night. Another 20 min walk with packs on to find a spot of lunch, and then a city bus for half an hour to the other side of Wuhan to get to the south train station so we could buy tickets for our train to Huang Shan that night. We were told it that the train leaves in 30 minutes - from the north train station. Which is on the other side of town, just past where we'd had lunch. So cab back across town, and when I went to buy tickets was told there is no train at all to that destination, only a bus. So into another cab and off to the bus station. Bought tickets for the next morning.

Is anyone confused yet? I sure hope so because by this point I had no idea what was going on.

Now we need a hotel. No guidebook, so we have to go back to the travel agent that we stopped at earlier which mentioned hotel rooms. But where the hell is it? We remember seeing it on the bus from the north train station, so it's another cab back to the train station, walk for 30 minutes to find a place where the bus stops, onto another bus and then another 20 minute walk to find the hotel. Which was an absolute rathole, most disgusting dive we've ever seen...

Now it's another walk around town for an hour trying to vainly stumble upon a decent, reasonably priced hotel. We eventually started asking in random establishments and were told of a room in a Swiss Hotel that (we thought) they agreed to halve the price on a room over the phone. After a cab there we found out that it was a misunderstanding, they still expected about 4 to 5 times the price of the hotels we had been staying at all over. We finally bargained them down to something reasonable and had the bellboy send our bags to our room. After laying around in our robes for a few minutes we realised it was almost midnight and time for bed - we had a 12 hour bus ride at the crack of dawn to be ready for!

Hell, it still beats work!