Thoughts on China

It’s a little awkward writing this post, after having written a little about it in a comment and then in another post, but I’ll write this as if I hadn’t written about it before. Sorry for the redundancy, if you’re reading everything…

So, upon waking on Saturday the 10th, I checked with the hotel reception desk and, after quite a bit of conversation (some of which I actually understood), I realized that it would be a huge pain to get to Anji (and probably a bigger pain to get from Anji). I really wanted to spend two days at Huangshan and be back in Shanghai with time to pick up my bag that I left at a hotel there and pack everything well for the trip home. So, I decided that I’d just go straight to Huangshan from Yixing.

It wasn’t that bad a bus ride. I forget exactly how long it was, but with a blow up neck pillow and an iPod, I was ready for anything! Well, almost anything…

All the tour guides are messed up when it comes to Huangshan. In fact, almost all the information I got about Huangshan was really way off, including the map of the mountain (with English) that they sell for 5Y. Now that this is an actual post, I’ll explain what I mean…

Upon getting to Tangkou at about 5PM, we were immediately met by people trying to get us to go to their hotels. One of them, I found out later, was Mr. Hu, who is a very decent and honest gentleman. I only wish I had followed him instead of seeing the large International Youth Hostel sign and deciding I’d stay there. The reason? As I found out later, the guy who owns this place put the signs up himself, but he is NOT a hostel. In other words, he’s pretending to be a hostel to lure people in so he can scam them. The amounts we are talking about are not huge, but the principle is just so wrong, that it makes you keep thinking about it. I mean, this guy made business cards with the IYH logo on it and has other (real) hostels business cards and advertising in the lobby, etc.

So, the room there was only 80Y a night, which is very cheap. You had to ask them to turn the hot water on 30 minutes before you wanted to take a shower, however, which wasn’t pleasant. After checking in, I went down the street to look for a good restaurant. I found a couple of people I had seen before and went in to what turned out to be Mr. Hu’s place. (BTW, I’ve nicknamed him “the Doctor”, as in “Dr. Hu”). He is always busy helping somebody and getting them the best price he can. His wife is the cook and I had pork with bamboo shoots, hot and sour mushroom soup, and a green vegetable. All of them were delicious. She is one of the best cooks I’ve encountered, it was that good!

The Doc said he could arrange whatever I needed as far as transportation, etc. and I thanked him, but didn’t make reservations at that time. When I went back to the “hostel”, there was a guy there who said he was the owner (and the only one that spoke any English at all) and wanted to know if I needed him to make reservations for staying overnight on the mountain (the Doctor said he could get me a bed for 80Y) and for a bus to Shanghai. Since I thought I was staying at an IYH facility, which is very reputable, I said, “Sure.”

He said he could get me a room at a hotel on Huangshan for 160Y. I told him Mr. Hu had said 80Y. He told me that Mr. Hu would put me up in a corridor, but he would get me a room. So, still thinking this was a legitimate hostel, I said “OK”. He then booked me a bus to Shanghai for around 4:00PM the following day.

I’ll make this short and then go back and talk about the time at Huangshan. The next morning, he switched out the “receipt” he had written for the room, saying that it was now at another hotel. I said, “OK.” When we got to that hotel, the receptionist said she would get a porter to show us where the bed was. I said that the man at the hostel had said it would be a room in this hotel and she said that no, it wasn’t. So, I got her to call the guy at the hostel. To make this short, it ended up being a bed in a fairly small room that had 12 bunk bed births in it. Hardly a room with a private bath that he had promised!

The other part of the scam, now that I knew what a rip off artist this guy was (he promised to give me 20Y out of the 160Y back, after I told him that two of the people in the room were paying 70Y (and, of course, they got their beds through Mr. Hu). So much for the corridor vs room…I said this was unacceptable, but would talk with the (now not good
English speaker) when I got down from the mountain the next day.

The second part of his scam was the bus to Shanghai. I talked to Mr. Hu and he asked how much the tickets were. When I said 165Y, he said he could have gotten them for me for 120Y. Like I said, the amounts aren’t huge (a total of about $15), but the priciple is the thing.

When I got back from Huangshan, I told him that I’d accept the 20Y back if he’d let me take a hot shower before the bus ride to Shanghai. I hadn’t showered since Yixing because his policy of only turning on the hot water 30 minutes before someone wanted to take a shower and because the dorm on the mountain didn’t have showers. After two days of strenuous hiking, I needed to get a shower in a bad way. He agreed and turned on the hot water in one of the rooms so that I could at least be somewhat presentable.

After the shower, I asked for the bus ticket and he didn’t have it. He said that we would get a bus from the “hostel” and that bus driver would give us the ticket. I said that was unacceptable, because he had said the same thing to a Scottish couple who I walked around Huangshan with the day before. The “bus” never came, but instead a taxi pulled up and the “hostel owner” said this was our transportation. The taxi did not put the meter on (and we all rightly assumed it was because this is part of what we had paid for). Of course, the taxi driver didn’t have the Huangshan tickets the couple had paid the “hostel owner” for and they had to go through a couple of aggravating phone calls to finally have the taxi driver pay the entrance fare for them.

Because we had already experienced this and because he had had two days to get the tickets for the bus, I said this was unacceptable. The Scottish couple, who had booked an overnight hard sleeper train to Shanghai through a travel agent, liked what the “hostel owner” said about a 5 hour bus ride and had the agent cancel the train and got “bus tickets” through the scam artist posing as a hostel owner. They said he had given them tickets and I asked to see them. It was almost funny. They pulled out what appeared to me to be a few transfer tickets from a local bus line. They were definitely not long distance bus tickets. I told the “hostel owner” that I wanted either to have a ticket for the bus or my money back and I’d buy the ticket myself. He ran across the street and came back with another small bunch of local bus transfers which he tried to hand to me as a “ticket”. I told him this was not a ticket and again (perhaps a little more loudly) demanded either a real ticket or my money back. This is when he changed his story to the fact that they were “invoices” (whatever that means). I told him I didn’t want an “invoice”, I wanted a ticket.

It was already after 4:00 PM and the “bus” apparently left at 5:00 PM. He then made a cell phone call and said, you might have guessed it, “the bus driver will have your tickets”. Without going into too many details, he had said it took 10 minutes to get to the bus station and the “bus” that was supposed to take my Scottish friends and me to the bus station was supposed to pick us up at 4:20. It hadn’t arrived by 4:30, prompting me to start again with the money back demand. This was obviously not going to happen, but I had to keep pressing, nonetheless. I told him if the local bus didn’t show up by 4:40 with the bus driver having a legitimate ticket I wanted my money back.

To make a long story a little shorter, the local bus finally showed up at about 10 before 5. There were quite a few other people on the bus, including a group of students from the University of California who were studying in an exchange program at Fudan University in Shanghai. The bus driver did not have our tickets. I was now talking loudly that I wanted my money back right now, thinking we would have to stay another night if we missed the bus. Instead of giving me my money back, the scam artist got on the bus with us! At least he would be there if we encountered problems.

Sinclair, my Scottish friend and others on the local bus that was to break down about 15 minutes later…

Which we did, of course. The local bus, taking on the “10 minute ride to the bus station” was already 15 minutes into the journey (about 2 until 5PM), when its transmission went bad! We got another bus about 20 minutes later, and a promise that the bus to Shanghai would wait for us. It took another 25 minutes on the local bus before getting to a point in the road where the long distance bus was sitting (in other words, not a bus station at all). When my Scottish friend and I went to get on the bus, the ticket taker asked for our ticket. At that point, the scam artist talked with him for a short time and he let us on the bus.

So, we left at 6:30 on the big bus and the “5 hour” bus ride that the scammer promised turned out to be 7 hours, so we arrived in Shanghai at 1:30 AM. Part of that time was spent sitting, while the police were talking to the bus driver for about 15 minutes at one point. My guess is because this was an unauthorized bus and the driver paid him off with some of the extra profits they got from us, but who knows?

It was amazing to constantly be lied to and have to continually push and argue to get what you overpaid for! If you are going to Huangshan, be prepared, there are a lot of scam artists. It would be much better for you to either go to Mr. Hu, or to book the hotel at the top of Huangshan and your ticket out of there through a legitimate travel agent.

Now that I’ve got this off my chest, I’ll be able to write a post about Huangshan without having to weave this tale into it. I’m sorry for spending so much time discussing this, but it definitely pays to be wary…