| A group of us traveled to this mountain area, Moganshan, about 4 hours from Shanghai and the tour guide told us a bus left every hour. So we got to the bus station and only to find out that there was only one bus and it had left two hours earlier. So we try to figure out what to do, we call the travel agent and he says we will have to wait until tomorrow for the next bus. But we had already paid for the hotel and can't get our money back, so we really don't want to wait. So this guy offered to drive us there, he didn't speak English and we didn't speak Chinese and we had no idea who this guy was (we thought he was a cabbie, but he didn't have a cab just his own car) or where he really planned on taking us, but we reached an agreeable price and decided to go for it. The plan was to go to this one city by bus and then someone from our hotel was supposed to meet us to take us the rest of the way. Along the way one of the girls got a call on her cell phone from someone speaking chinese so we just gave it to the driver, they talked and hung up. We got to the city where we were supposed to meet the person from the hotel and he just kept driving. By this time it's very dark and we are riding with some stranger to who knows where in the middle of China. After driving for quite awhile longer he pulled over by the side of the highway where some other people wer stopped and he told us to get out. We had no idea what's going on and were extremely confused and we're a little scared. Eventually we found out that this was the lady who was supposed to meet us and her van had broken down. The lady told us we would have to wait for a while and we were ok with this and were just glad to be getting on our way finally. Then Bruce realized he left his camera bag, with his camcorder and my camera, in the taxi that had left 5 minutes ago. We had no way to track the guy down. That was the first mishap, up until that point it had been fun and games but that was harder to laugh off. Eventually we got to the hotel and had a very nice time for a couple of days. The mountains were breathtaking and our hotel was very posh. So posh in fact, that they had a pimp who ran a "massage" room complete with a harem of gorgeous girls to give you those "massages," but I'm sure it was legitimate. Mishap number two occurred when after using the hot tub we found out that the pimp also controlled the hot tub and he charged us an large sum of money for it's use. But soon that passed and we had another amazing day. We left Shanghai on Wednesday and spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday hiking and hanging out. We got to see all kinds of beautiful views and waterfalls and it was really cool. On Saturday we climbed to the top of the mountain and the view was amazing. Then mishap number three happened when I started feeling sick Saturday night. I started getting kind of delirious and had a sore throat and a 104 degree temp complete with hallucinations. We had to rush to the nearest hospital and no one there spoke any English. Eventually we were able to communicate what was wrong and they did some tests. This wass not your average hospital though, apparently in this one, smoking was allowed and cleanliness did not really matter. The bathroom wasn't even inside the hospital, it was an outhouse with trenches for toilets. So they told us the tests showed something was pretty serious and they told us to go to a hospital in a big city, Hangzhou, about an hour away where they spoke English. Now you would think the hospital in a city of several million people would be pretty nice right, think again. While there, Bruce and I witnessed a lady puking all over the floor, a doctor slipping in it, and still no one thinking it was a big enough deal to clean up. If that wasn't enough, the same lady was wheeled by on a stretcher a few minutes later and was bleeding profusly all over the floor. Apparantly that was not a big deal either because they just kept wheeling her down the hallway leaving a trail if blood as they went and that wasn't even cleaned up until someone complained. I went into the hospital with a fever and sore throat and somehow they managed to think that I was pregnant because they suggested a pelvic exam and a sonogram and they kept asking us if we were married. We finally convinced them that sore throat does not equal baby so they gave me antibiotics and put me on an IV. Finally 12 hours, a chest x-ray, a sonogram and 8 IV's later they let us leave the hospital. Now we were stranded in a city an hour and a half away from our hotel short on cash and with no way to call anyone. Evetually we talked a cabbie into driving us to our hotel for the amount of money we had and we made it back. We made it back home to Shanghai and I spent the next three days either sleeping or receiving IV's in the school clinic. It was quite an adventure. |