Eager to try my hand at the bigger hostel’s perks, I noticed right away that there were two tours offered to locations a couple of hours outside of Shanghai: Zhouzhuang, a Chinese water town noted as “The Venice of the East,” and Suzhou, a city famed for its Chinese gardens. The prices weren’t too bad, about 160 yuan per person per tour. I figured that it would be worth sitting through a few extraneous sites (like jade or silk factories) in order not to have to figure out bus schedules. So I signed up for both, while also having the clerk book airline tickets for us to Chengdu. There was a flurry of activity and money changing hands, and honestly, I should have taken the time to read the fliers more carefully, but I didn’t. Not until later, that is. And then I realized…the tours were entirely in Chinese.
The day did not begin auspiciously.
The desk clerk had told us to be down in the lobby at 7:15 am. We got down a couple of minutes early, and I was surprised to find out that there was no one else there. I had thought hostel tours were supposed to be popular, which is the reason the hostels sponsor them. But apparently, everyone else had read the fine print and realized a Chinese tour was not the best choice.
The desk clerk was dead asleep. I tried to rouse him.
“Hello? Hello? Where is the tour?” I said.
The desk clerk was really out of it. His head lolled to the side. He tried to rouse himself, but he was in that deep sleep mode where things don’t make much sense. He thought I was asking for towels, and it took a few tries before he understood tour.
“It will come,” he said haltingly, because of all the clerks, his English was the weakest. “Maybe 7:30.” Then he promptly put his head back down and fell asleep.
So we sat patiently to wait.
At 7:30, some people walked into the hostel, and the clerk was briefly awakened. I took advantage of his consciousness and went up to the desk again.
“Where is the tour?” I asked again. You can’t really put many variations on what you’re saying, but maybe he didn’t remember our first conversation anyway.
The clerk picked up his cellphone and called someone else. After a brief flurry of Chinese, he hung up.
“Maybe 8 o’clock,” he said.
“But it says the bus will leave the park at 7:40,” I said. When I booked the tour, the instructions were that someone would pick us up, take us to a central meeting point at the People’s Park, and then we would leave.
“It will come,” he said.
I was mollified…enough. I figured this meant that someone knew we were coming on the tour, so we wouldn’t be left behind.
Fifteen minutes later, a van pulled up, and the clerk made some little noise at us, indicating that this was our ride. Kinsey and I got in. At this point, I noticed that all the occupants were Chinese, so I mentioned to Kinsey that I had made a little mistake and the tour would be entirely in Chinese.
“It doesn’t really matter,” I said soothingly. “There’s not that much I want to hear about. I’d just like to see the town. It’s supposed to be like Venice.”
Kinsey was skeptical, but didn’t complain.
Meanwhile, as we drove to the park, I noticed that a few raindrops had begun to fall. The sky had been gray in the mornings before, but whether this had been due to weather or pollution, I couldn’t tell, and usually things cleared up by 11 with a lot of heat and sun. In any event, it didn’t really register that the gray might be different this time, (and at 7:45 am, I’m not that attentive anyway) but now I realized we hadn’t packed umbrellas.
At the park, we transferred to a large bus, and our group only filled about half of it. The tour guide, a compact Chinese woman in short heels and a black sequined outfit, walked down the aisle, handing everyone a small blue oval badge to clip on. As she handed us ours, I asked her, “Do you speak English?”
She recoiled slightly, didn’t say a word, but made a gesture to the front of the bus.
As the bus started off to Zhouzhuang, I took a look around and realized that we were the only non-Chinese speakers on the bus. A few miles down the road, the tour guide got on the speaker to address the tour group. Kinsey and I looked at each other and nearly burst out laughing. The loudspeaker system was very strange, having a lot of reverb and echo, which meant that the guide sounded like a very bad science fiction movie, the kind where it sounds like the aliens are talking on an intercom from inside a pit.
We pulled out our books. Luckily, Kinsey was deep into Queste, a book with many pages, and I had just started Dan Brown’s, The Lost Symbol, so we had something to keep us occupied for many hours.
The rain started to come down steadily, not hard, but a constant drizzle. The tour guide droned on and on. I couldn’t believe she had so much information to impart. Meanwhile, she sent her assistant, a college-age Chinese man named Chu, to speak with us briefly. He spoke English, but I could tell that he always had to translate everything in his mind before he spoke. Nevertheless, it was very comforting. I had begun to panic wondering how we would be able to function if I didn’t know what she was telling the group to do, when we would meet, or where.
The bus was warm and I was tired from too many early mornings and late nights, so I put my book on my lap and slowly dozed off. After about 40 minutes, in that half-awake, half-asleep mode, I felt the book start to slide off my lap and it hit the floor with a thud. I woke up, bent down to retrieve the book, and then looked forward out of the bus. Suddenly, the bus driver hit the brakes, and I could see him steering to the right around a car. The bus skidded on the rain-soaked road, and the front corner of the bus hit another vehicle. We were in an accident.
The accident itself was not severe. Had I not heard and seen the impact, I wouldn’t have been able to tell we had even hit anything. Traffic came to a halt. The bus driver got out to inspect the damage. A few minutes later, he reboarded and moved the bus to the side of the road. Instantly, the tour guide said something to the passengers, and everyone got up. We followed everyone else.
“What’s going on?” I asked Chu as we passed him.
“We are going to transfer to another bus,” he said.
I thought we might be stranded in the rain until another bus came, but no, there was another bus right behind us that was going to the same place. We boarded the smaller bus and filled up the remaining seats. I had a brief hope that this might be an English tour, but this too was Chinese. A younger, more enthusiastic girl was this tour’s guide. Her sentences were more lively with more emotional inflection--and no reverb. The rest of the ride was a little more soothing.
We finally made it to Zhouzhuang, took a brief rest stop, and I managed to snag two umbrellas for 5 yuan each. Then we were off to the ticket office, where we had to have mug shots taken that were printed on our tickets.
The water town itself was fairly deserted, although there were a few other tour groups. I had expected a throng of crowds, but perhaps the weather had kept everyone away. I had thought the tour would be more of an outdoor thing, but we were guided through several historic buildings instead. Some were considered historic mansions, while another was more of a religious temple. Each seemed to be a maze, consisting of a large room with a small outdoor passage to the next room, meaning that we were constantly getting wet going from room to room. Eventually the rooms seemed to connect via hallways. Most of the rooms had some beautiful antique furnishings or artwork, but many seemed quite similar. Because we couldn’t understand a thing--and the guide was very long-winded--Kinsey and I made this a photographic experience, and just took some time looking for good photo ops.
After the house tour was over, the guide led us through the narrow streets past all the souvenir shops. Kinsey’s eyes lit up and she hoped we would have time for shopping later. After a fair amount of walking, the guide stopped, and everyone congregated around a meat shop. People started standing in line and buying hunks of darkly-glazed meat. I found Chu and asked him if this was lunch.
“No,” he said. “This is a very famous meat from Zhouzhuang. It is a pig leg.” We watched as one of the sellers took a pair of kitchen shears and cut off the meat from the bone. It did look very good.
After that, we trekked over to a restaurant, where we were supposed to buy our own lunch. Our waitress did not speak English but luckily there was an English menu. Kinsey and I studied the menu. It was a more traditional Chinese menu, full of animal body parts Americans usually don’t eat. We almost ordered the only “safe” dish, spicy beef, when I noticed they had Zhouzhuang pig leg on the menu. I told the waitress we wanted that one, Kinsey already having confided in me that it looked pretty good. Chu had come by to help and told us one pig leg would be enough for both of us. The pig leg was pretty good.
Meanwhile, Chu let us know that we would have free time after lunch and would have to meet back at the bus at 2:15. I was immediately concerned because we had been led through a maze of alleyways and I had no idea where to go. Chu pointed out that our tickets had a map printed on the back. He marked where we were and where we wanted to go.
We wandered the shops and bought a few things, continuously asking shopkeepers how to get back to the parking lot. I thought Zhouzhuang itself was a little overrated. The overcast skies made for some nice pictures, but comparing it to Venice is going to be a big letdown if you’ve ever been to the real thing. I think if we had had more time, we would have taken a canal ride, which might have improved my conception of the town. Around 2 pm we still had no clue where to meet the group, so we stopped at an intersection where I knew someone from our group would have to come by. I was busy taking another tourist’s picture when Chu came by and rescued us.
“Where is everyone else?” I asked.
“They are already at the bus,” he said.
We trotted along next to Chu and struck up some conversation. He mentioned that he had a friend who was going to a university in Indiana. Apparently, Chu also had dreams of studying at a university in America, though not in Indiana. He told me he is studying to be a landscape architect.
The ride home was interrupted by two stops, as I thought it might be--another silk tour, although this one left out any mention of poo-poo and poo-poo pillows, and some kind of Buddhist temple. It was dark by the time we reached Renmin Square and still slightly drizzly. We hopped off, lighthearted that our long Chinese tour was finally over.
Back at the hostel, the clerk who had originally booked our tour was on duty.
“Did you have a good time?” he asked, rather sheepishly I thought, as if he had known the Chinese tour would be troublesome.
“It was good,” I said. “But very long.”
And then I promptly cancelled the tour for Suzhou.
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