Hanging Monastery, Hunyuan

If you read enough travel bloggers and travel magazines, you might get the idea that long-term travel is the ideal life , full of long days basking in sunshine and rainbows, eating gum drops and lollipops, visiting sensational sights and beautiful wonders, with nary a care in the world.  And, yes, there are many, many days where we both feel like the most fortunate people in the world because we have eaten tofu that blows our mind , jumped off a canyon , or bathed elephants .  But, we here at The Road Forks believe in handing you the raw, unvarnished truth.  You see, there are also those horrible days when we want to pack it all in, hop on the nearest flight home, find ourselves back in our 9-5 jobs, and buy a  house surrounded by a white picket fence.

Hanging Monastery, Hunyuan

It happened on the day we traveled from Datong to Hohhot, the day I like to remember as the "Worst Travel Day Ever."   We got onto a bus at 9:00 a.m., scheduled to arrive in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia at 1:00 p.m.  At 11:30, the bus conductor stops the bus  on the side of the road, points at Patrick and me and the one other white girl on the bus and says, "Go."  He pushes us off the bus and we are standing there, in the middle of nowhere, entirely confused, as another man tells us to get into his car.  I run and catch the bus and tell them not to leave.  We struggle, pointing and gesturing to our Mandarin phrase book, explaining that this is not the right place, when, finally, a very lovely Chinese college student who spoke English and Mandarin got off the bus and determined that the ticket agent had sold us the wrong tickets.

This is not altogether uncommon in China.  Mandarin is a ridiculously difficult language because it is tonal, meaning that when you say "Hohhot," if you don't use the correct tones, then the person to whom you are speaking won't understand you.  On top of this, when the Chinese people don't understand us, they often sell us what they think we want.  So, at a restaurant, we might ask for "shui," or water, and they will look at us, assume that we don't know what we're talking about, and bring us a pitcher of beer.  I kid you not.

Hanging Monastery, Hunyuan

On this day, the woman at the ticket counter sold us tickets to Hunyuan rather than Hohhot.  Will you please look at those two words for me?  Other than that they both start with the letter "h", they have no commonality whatsoever, but because the ticketing agent couldn't figure out why two foreigners would want to go to inner Mongolia, she sold us tickets to Hunyuan.  Hunyuan, home of the awesome and slightly-scary 14th century Hanging Monastery built jutting out of a cliff, is a beautiful site but we had just been there the day before.  We loved the Hanging Monastery but didn't need to see it again.  We stayed on the bus as it turned back around for another 2 1/2 hour trip to Datong.

Hanging Monastery, Hunyuan

Because we were the last ones on the bus, we sat in the very far back, crushed in between two smokers but, thankfully, with the windows open.  I leaned back and thought to myself, "Well, a Coke would be nice."  I opened up my Coke and ka-pow!  The entire bottle explodes, soaking me and the two poor people next to me in syrupy cola.  My very sweet husband immediately begins laughing uproariously while I give him death eyes.  And, that might have been the point that I started crying . . . just a little bit . . . because I was tired, hungry, sticky, and in desperate need of a restroom.

Mongolian yurt ceiling

We reached the Datong bus station and handed the ticket agent the slip of paper in which the young college student had written "Hohhot."  They pointed us toward the bus and, while Patrick bought some snacks, I went to use the restroom, thinking that we had plenty of time before the next bus.

Now, I have been in my fair share of disgusting, gross, and downright awful restrooms but this might have been the worst ever.  It is quite likely that those restrooms were last cleaned when Mao was alive.  There were no doors to any of the squat toilets and some brilliant engineer had planned two rows of squat toilets facing each other, affording me a view of other people doing things that I really didn't need to know about.  I kept my head down and hurried as fast as I could but, apparently, I wasn't fast enough.  The bus conductor was standing with Patrick and both were yelling to me to hurry and get on the bus.

Inner Mongolia

Poor Patrick.  He hadn't been able to use the toilet in the last 6 hours and was now very much regretting the two Cokes he drank.  (I may have inwardly cackled to myself that he deserved it because he laughed at me when I spilled my Coke but I did not externalize that laughter.  That's just how nice I am.)

We got onto the (hopefully) correct bus and waited anxiously for the next pit stop.  The bus driver mercifully stopped within half an hour and we both got back onto the bus, put on our headphones, and pretended that the last 8 hours hadn't happened.

Twelve hours after we left Datong, we arrived in Hohhot --- a trip that should have only taken 4 1/2 hours.  Hohhot turned out to be its own sort of disaster, as I struggled with a stomach bug that left me unable to ingest anything more than bland yogurt once a day, resulting in my furtive hope that I not vomit in my steed's mane as we bounced around on our Mongolian horses.

Mongolian horses

I would like to tell you that there is a positive moral to this story: say, that a good sense of humor is essential to travel or, that even if today is terrible, tomorrow will be better.  Nope.  Sometimes, travel just sucks.