to Haimen City

Last time, I said Haimen City is a Yantze River across from Shanghai. It sounded close at the time, but it's really not, as I had to learn the hard way.
The first day I arrived at Pudong Airport in Shanghai, the co-owner of the TESL training center waited for me in the arrival area. She took me on a bus headed for Shanghai city, about an hour away. The busfare was only 18 yuan, a lot cheaper than when Johnnie and I caught the taxi to the city, which cost around 150 yuan. I must remember this bus route.

When we reached the hotel where the other trainees stayed for the night, we waited a while then got on a private school van that was taking us to our training center.

We drove for over an hour before we reached the Yangtze ferry terminal, but we weren't exactly at the terminal, yet. Apparently, we don't get off the van at the terminal to catch the ferry, instead, the whole van goes on the ferry, with us sitting in it. And because this is during the week-long Chinese labor holidays, there were so many vehicles (i.e. cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles) in queue to get on board that we couldn't even see the terminal ahead.

Seeing the dire situation, the English TEFL instructor got off the bus to try to "talk" to the traffic cop there to see whether we "the foreigners" can cut in front of the others to cross the river, but it was no use; we had to wait in line like every other car.

With an approximate quoted waiting time of 2 hours, I looked out the window and saw that the side of the road was lined with litter, mostly emptied instant noodle cups, plastic bottles and bags, and cigarette butts. By the look of things, this mile-long queueing must not be that unusual after all. Right away, street peddlers took turns coming by our van to sell us the very same things I saw lying on the road. I was dying of thirst, but was afraid to buy bottled water from them, not knowing whether it was clean. Besides, if I drank the water and needed to pee, where the heck am I going to go? As far as I can see, we were in a wide open field with no public toilets in sight.

Sure enough, about two hours later we reached the terminal at last, and the van embarked on the ferry, while other vehicles parked beside us. As you can imagine, the ferry is anything but small. It was big and sturdy enough that I didn’t even notice we left the port. When I finally realized it, I got off the bus and walked near the front of the open ferry. It was getting dark. The weather was foggy and the wind blew hard on my face, but I was still able to look out into the water and over the horizon; yet, I see no land. "Wow! This is a big river. What's the difference between this river and a sea anyway?" I thought. No wonder it took us another hour before we approached the Haimen port. I hurried back inside the van so I don't get run over by other cars when the ferry reaches the port.

From Haimen City, it was only a short 15 minutes ride to the training center. Thank goodness, for I was about to past out from dehydration. In all, it took us 5 hours to get here from Shanghai. Even if we subtract the 2-hour waiting time at the ferry terminal, it's still a good 3 hours away to go to Shanghai. The experience was horrific enough that I've decided not to go there for the rest of my stay here. So all those plans of going to Shanghai every weekend are out the door.

So how did we celebrate our first night in Haimen City after that treacherous journey? We headed to a club nearby and drank pitchers and pitchers of beer. Then we bought even more beers and took them back to the center and drank some more. At least I wasn't thirsty anymore.

Filed Sun - May 9, 2004, 01:30 AM in

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