Based on the previous morning's experience, we opted for a 6:30am wake-up call and tthat turned out to be a lifesaver. It was a busy morning -- we had to make sure everything was packed for the big move to Guilin -- so instead of Skyping we silently thought happy birthday thoughts in Mom's direction. In addition to the packing, some of which we had blearily completed the previous night, we had to deal with the Pipsqueak shifting back into Put Me Down And You Will Regret It mode (except for when she decided a post-bottle nap before our breakfast was required). This complicated things because the only way we could keep the peace was for AJ or I to carry now-super-clingy Miri around the room while the other took care of some tasks, then swap roles. Maybe it was just a baby being a baby... and maybe it was a reaction to having her entire young life turned upside-down and inside-out literally overnight. We didn't know, we just tried our best to deal with it and get things done.
Despite the Pipsqueak-sized complications, we actually managed to get downstairs early enough to actually taste breakfast (as opposed to inhale it) and I even remembered to avoid the corrosively spiced green beans. We had been told that we would probably want to eat a large breakfast because we might or might not be able to have a lunch that day, so AJ and I took full advantage of the buffet... which I will make reference to a few paragraphs farther down. I took a couple of last photos from the vantage point of our room and then we headed downstairs to check out and get some road under our show.
With a new driver, we headed through downtown Nanning. It was obviously a very modern city (although some of the newer buildings looked like they had literally sprouted up through older ones), and there were even little whimsical touches here & there like the colored bird logos stamped on all the median barriers. Of course, the traffic that our driver was calmly making his way through provided constant, ongoing reminders that none of us would ever want to take his place. (His zen approach may have been helped by a buddy riding up front with him, a guy whose entire job appeared to be to smoke cigarettes and carry on conversations with our driver on the road...)
Before getting into the details of the trip itself, here's some data to help put it all into perspective...
According to online sources, the straight-line distance from Nanning to Guilin is approximately 210 miles, and the route we followed in 2010 was approximately 232 road miles. However, the real-life physical measurement of the distance between Nanning and Guilin was something closer to 87,426,219 shakes; 4,284,203 rattles; 857,642 bumps; at least one downright scary truck stop bathroom, roughly five hours of nonstop vibration, and an uncountably high number of assorted shimmies, shifts, bucks, jostles, and jolts.
...and now back to our tale.
Our driver navigated his way onto the Liunan Expressway and we soon left the sadly-unexplored Nanning behind. A highway is a highway (although I later found out that because Chinese engineers studied the U.S. highway system, their standard lane is about 3 inches wider than ours)... but I soon noticed that absolutely every overpass served double duty as a billboard, with every advertised business listing the URL of their website in Roman characters. We continued rolling along with just an occastional bump (and dodging the occasional much larger tour bus, some of whom did not seem to want to let us pass)... and then we pulled into a large roadside rest stop.
The rest stop could've been anywhere in Europe or the U.S. -- gas station sized for big vehicles, a large snack bar, plenty of parking for all kinds of vehicles, and public restrooms. As we started to step off our little bus, one of the ginormous tour buses we'd passed earlier hissed to a stop beside us and disgorged a steady stream of Chinese tourists, most heading directly to the restrooms. Lisa pointed out we could get ice cream, probably should get bottles of water, and definitely should try to use the restrooms because we had a long stretch of road ahead of us.
You'll notice she said "try" to use the restrooms...
Some of the group bought bottles of water, some of us got (yummy) ice cream, and then everyone headed for the restrooms. As I entered the breezeway that ran between the entrances for the men's room and women's room, many of the Chinese women who'd just gotten off that big bus next to ours came piling out of the women's room... coughing, wiping their tear-filled eyes, wiping runny mascara, and holding hankies over their mouths. I paused for a moment, decided I really should try to "go," turned the corned into the men's room...
...and was stopped dead in my tracks by an invisible but palpable virtual wall of stink. (Nose to brain: It's mostly ammonia, but there's plenty of other... stuff... as well. Eyes to brain: THE PAIN! THE PAIN!) I managed to glimpse a large concrete-walled room with squatty potties[1] lining both sides through the tears pouring out of my instantly painful eyes and decided I really didn't need to go that badly... and hopefully would never be presented with that kind of choice at any time for the rest of my life.
Not surprisingly, we all boarded the bus without a single member of the group having succeeded at actually using either the men's or women's restroom... and several regretting taking full advantage of the breakfast buffet back at the hotel. After a while on the road, we all settled into a routine... and I mean settled as in "contents may settle during shipping." The bus shook. It shimmied. It vibrated. It occasionally jerked sharply a few inches to either side. In general, the bus (not the driver!) did everything in its power to prevent its occupants from actually sitting still. Part of the problem was the road itself; it consisted of large concrete squares that would crack or shift due to the passage of heavy traffic. Luckily, the provincial government's work crews worked conscientiously to patch & repair the road. Unluckily, the provincial government's work crews never seemed to bother making their patches & repairs the same height as all the surrounding patches & repairs. The majority of the photos I took from the bus are slightly blurry -- but it's no motion blur, it's the result of the camera's digital shake-reducing technology being unable to cope with much of what our bodies were attempting to absorb. (Another side effect of the rough ride was that poor Miri was trying to sit in Mommy's lap but we had to repeatedly pull her up because she kept vibrating down into a semi-prone position!)
And then there's the roadwork itself... We were on a major highway with whoknowswhat as the speed limit (assuming anyone even paid attention), so one might expect "work ahead" warnings, orange cones or concrete barriers shifting traffic around work zones, and such. NOPE! We'd be zooming along at full throttle and all of a sudden there'd be a set of big orange barrels in the middle of the road with men working directly behind them. The men themselves, who wore heavy orange overalls in the blistering heat, were often nonchalantly sitting (or even laying!) on the roadway as they worked with hand tools just inches from the vehicles blasting past them. Oh, and there were warning signs -- work zones were marked by a handful of faded colored triangular pennants suspended on lines that were strung between short poles (or tree branches, or bushes) a few feet off to the side of the road about half a second's travel time ahead of the barrels marking the actual worksite.
Most such worksite encounters devolved into a heat-generated orange blur in the middle of the road ahead, the driver sometimes moving to the adjacent lane and sometimes having to jockey around other traffic that might or might not be moving aside, a few seconds of extremely close proximity to the work crew, and then a few more miles of uneven highway. (Nossiree, I did not want to drive in China!)
Our mainly eastbound route turned north toward Liuzhou a bit past the halfway mark, and after about an hour we began to pass carefully-crafted patches of landscaping beside the road that looked like miniature mountain ranges. I didn't want to ask Lisa about them because she seemed to have gotten very busy with her cellphone, making multiple calls that all seemed to include very animated conversations. Soon the actual landscape became more mountainous and the small hamlets and single houses we had periodically passed vanished. The scenery probably would have been very pretty to watch go past our windows, but by this time we were all so tired from the constant vibration and jerking around that none of us really cared as much as we would have liked to. AJ & I had minimal trouble keeping the Pipsqueak occupied (with all the shaking, she didn't feel like she was sitting still!), and the two older girls linked their handheld Nintendos to play a few competitive games... and Lisa finally finished all her phone calls and somehow managed to fall asleep.
Hours continued to pass and we continued to rattle and shake and vibrate our way down the road while passing countless batches of colored pennants announcing countless batches of orange-barreled worksites. By the time we reached the region around Liuzhou, Lisa had woken up and had a short talk with the driver, who pulled off at a rest stop. Only problem was, it was a rest stop only in the sense that we had stopped to rest: an expanse of badly-maintained concrete with just a couple of cars parked at one end and a run-down concrete building at the other, and nothing else. Lisa assured everyone there were bathrooms available, and we all got off the bus. The menfolk seemed okay, but the women and girls -- all of whom had apparently been clenching as many muscles as they could for hours -- hobbled their way into the building. They returned a short time later, walking more easily and reporting that these restrooms had almost been clean. Shortly after we returned to the highway, I began to catch glimpses of the karst formations that made the Guilin area famous.
Something else I noticed was that the road (now called the Guiliu Expressway) was lined with signs advising people how to drive safely -- all in English! I missed a couple of cute cartoon-style messages, but here are a few examples:
This being China, many of the vehicles we saw were driven as if the sole purpose of those signs was to give the signposts something to do. We saw maneuvers behind, beside, and directly in front of our bus (all of which our driver ignored) that brought to mind Dad's adage, "It's not how many accidents there are that's amazing, it's how many there aren't!" The most hair-raising moment was watching the driver of a Honda maneuver his full-size SUV diagonally through the gap between two large trucks that were in the process of passing each other, but there was also plenty of concern generated by the many obviously top-heavy car carriers we passed along the way.
I think we had all reached a point where we didn't care where we were, we just wanted off the damn bus, when we actually entered the outskirts of Guilin. The entry to the city was a brand-new highway (we passed through a very decorative toll plaza that had not been completed), mirror-smooth and many lanes wide with nary a line painted on it. Maybe it was just how traffic worked in China, or maybe the locals just weren't used to being on a multi-lane highway, but just beyond the toll plaza a little old lady slooowly pedaled her 3-wheeler across the road in front of us... Our front bumper missed the rear of her bike by maybe two feet; I don't think our driver even thought to swerve around her.
As we rolled into Guilin proper, Lisa clued us in on all the phone calls she'd been making. Apparently, just a few minutes after we left Nanning, the hotel in Guilin that we had reservations for called her to say there was a big convention in town, other hotels had run out of rooms, and in order to take care of the high-profit overflow traffic they were cancelling our reservations have a nice day goodbye. (I'm assuming the last few words, the rest was real.) All those other calls had been to all those other hotels, but not to worry; she had gotten us three large rooms in a five-star hotel... of which apparently neither she, the driver, nor the driver's companion knew the location.
The result was an interesting driving tour of Guilin as we zig-zagged through & around the city in search of the hotel. Around the 3rd or 4th time we passed the same guy sitting against the same wall on the same corner, Papa S decided to see if his phone's GPS feature would work in China. He turned it on, typed in the address Lisa gave him, and waited for it to find a satellite. And we passed the same guy on the corner, and he waited for it to find a 2nd satellite. And we crossed a bridge over the river going out of the city, and he waited for it to talk to the satellites. And we crossed a bridge over the river going back into the city, and he waited for the phone to figure out where it was. And we crossed back over the river again and turned the other way, and he waited for it to figure out where the hotel's address was. Finally, just as the driver turned into the driveway running across the front of the Guilin Royal Garden Hotel, the GPS announced that we had arrived at our destination. (We gave him points for trying.)
We got checked in -- yep, there was a revolving door with live rose bushes in the center -- and a spacious elevator up to our rooms (three in a row at the back of the hotel). Despite a beautiful lobby the place had the air of being more than just a tad past its prime, but our room turned out to be at least as nice as any other I'd stayed in over the years. We pulled open the drapes for our first glimpse of the city's famous karst mountains and... Oh, well....
Never mind the view; we had a roof over our heads, a working Internet connection, and -- halleleuyah! -- the beds were old enough to almost be "soft" to lay on! AJ changed her blouse, we got Miri cleaned up a bit, and headed downstairs for dinner. The dining room was huge, but we were ushered into a private dining room toward the front of the hotel with a big picture window overlooking the Li River. Service was friendly and attentive, there was really good food a-plenty, and even enough soda to slake our thirst... so by the time our artfully-carved melon dessert arrived, all those shaky, rattly, jerky, uncomfy hours on the bus had (mostly) melted away. We had some free time, so we all decided to go for a walk along the river before nightfall. (Lisa warned us that it would be best for us to be back in the hotel by then.)
During dinner, I had been sitting with my back to the window and concentrating on helping AJ keep the Pipsqueak from wreaking too much havoc. (How someone with one-foot arms could reach everything dangerous and/or inedible and/or breakable within a four-foot radius baffles me to this day.) When I stood up & turned around the view just stopped me dead in my tracks. The photos below were all shot through the windows either in our private dining room or on the main stairs into the lobby; they don't really do justice to the living postcard I saw through the glass.
We returned to our room to freshen up, and AJ decided to walk with the baby sling a friend had gifted her instead of using the stroller. Problem was, we'd never used it before, and had no instructions... so we got Miri into the thing and figured out an arrangement of the straps that kinda sorta maybe worked and joined everyone waiting in the lobby with the Pipsqueak perfectly content to be hanging in front of Mommy. We all walked along the main road that paralleled the river, with a narrow strip of park on the river side and homes & shops on the other. We could see a lot of the locals enjoying an evening dip in the river (which was lined with beaches and steps), dodging the occasional small boat that navigated past through what appeared to be at most five or six feet of water.
A number of groups & families were enjoying the evening air in the park, some even bringing tables & chairs from their homes across the street for some al fresco dining and although we got a few odd glances we also got some nods and smiles... and then a little girl came running up to us with a big smile yelling, "Hello! Hello!" This was apparently her entire English vocabulary, because it was all that she said -- but what she lacked in word count she more than made up for in volume & enthusiasm. Finally her aiyi corralled her, and as we waved goodbye we could hear, "Hello!" Zai jian! Hello!" fading into the distance behind us.
It may have been hot & muggy but there was a nice intermittent breeze, and it felt so good to be off that meshuggineh bus that we all felt refreshed and ready for more adventures by the time we'd made it back to the hotel. Along the way we tried to figure out if the archway we saw across the river was the famous Elephant Trunk Hill (it wasn't), discovered they liked colored floodlights & neon just as much here as in Nanning (it was pretty), and settled the question of whether or not we had rigged the Pipsqueak's baby sling correctly (we had not). Miri also demonstrated a rather unique relationship with gravity, being just as happy perpendicular to Mommy as when she was parallel.
Back in our room, my new niece presented me with a little surprise. She would still not let us put her down so AJ & I took turns passing her back & forth as we got ready for bed. Finally, when AJ was done getting ready, I passed Miri to her... and discovered a big ol' wet spot on my shirt where she'd been resting. The Pipsqueak seemed puzzled, then amused, by the funny noises her uncle made and seemed content in her fresh, dry diaper as she dozed off. I decided that I'd better get used to that sort of thing (and boy, did I ever!) and sealed the shirt into a ziplock bag before settling down for the night.
We had survived the most uncomfortable ride of our lives, with new adventures ahead... and it was all good. As I finished the nightly blog post (to the tune of mini-snores from the crib between our beds and perhaps a few not-mini snores from AJ's side), I mused that we had now carried Miri farther from her birthplace than she'd ever been in her short life, a distance that would only continue to grow. During the night, Miri began fussing in her crib and I reached through the bars to comfort her. She looked surprised for a moment, then looked at me and went right back to sleep. There was a sleepy, "Thank you" from my sister on the other side of the crib, and as I dozed off myself I remember thinking that maybe we would be able to close the personal distance even as the geographical distance opened.
We had made it to Guilin, and now the real family-building could begin.
[1] I don't remember defining it earlier, so... A squatty potty is basically a shallow 2- or 3-foot long hole a few inches wide in the floor with a drain in the bottom. To use it, one drops trou and squats down over the artificial ditch to do whatever one needs to do, all while trying to make one does not 1) pee or poop on oneself, 2) pee or poop on one's own clothing, 3) drop one's clothing into the pee or poop already in the ditch and (inevitably) the floor on either side, or 4) lose one's balance and sit in the mess.
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