2015 China

1 April, Zhengzhou
Datong Hotel 146CNY

A foolish day in April, icy cold and very wet. We had planned a day trip to visit Zhuxian Zhen village and two artists there: one a woodblock printer, the other a cutter of paper. Our first bus dropped us in Kaifeng; our second forgot to drop us at the entrance to Zhuxian Zhen. When Charl finally approached the driver to remind him about our desired destination, there was some consternation and quite a lot of giggling, and an imminently practical solution. The driver flagged down an approaching bus, gestured for us to change vehicles, and back we were driven free of charge to be disgorged onto a wet and windy side-road. Within a minute of leaving the relative warmth of the bus, we were miserable and asking each other “Whose idea was this?” In Zhuxian Zhen, the 1000-year old art of woodblock printing is still practised by a few families, most notably by Mr Yin, a fifth-generation artisan whose family has been in the business for over 200 years, and whose work was represented at the Beijing Olympics. We admired some of his prints, but in truth were more taken with the heater in the centre of his studio! To our relief, he told us that Mr Hu, listed in the Guinness world record for cutting 10,000 paper butterflies, had relocated, providing the perfect excuse to call it a day.

But we were not to make it back to Zhengzhou without a fair amount of understated drama. The bus we flagged down on the outskirts of the village was not bound for the long-distance bus station in Kaifeng, resulting in a long wet walk. At the correct station we bought Kaifeng-Zhengzhou tickets that proved to be considerably cheaper than those we had bought for the Zhengzhou-Kaifeng leg. Lesson learned: if it’s cheaper, it ain’t the same. In this instance the bus dropped us not at the bus station near our hotel from which we had departed town this morning, but at a completely unknown station in a city of over two million. By then it was dark and the light rain that had been falling for much of the day was now heavy and accompanied by thunder and lightning. We had no idea where we were and no idea how to ask for where we wanted to be. The best we could do was show a taxi driver the Chinese word for “train” in our guidebook, the train station being adjacent to “our” bus station. The first taxi refused to take us. A young man who spoke some English and had approached us to offer his help, refused to assist us find another taxi, saying the driver would cheat us. In the end though, a taxi driver did agree to drive us to the train station, but took us to the high-speed station many kms away from the slow train station we needed but could not ask for. It was only once we were at the wrong station that we could gesticulate in such a way that made it clear to him we wanted the other train station. With much sighing, with much weaving onto and off the pavement, he drove us through appalling traffic, taking over an hour to get us where we wanted to be. We stepped from our toasty taxi into ankle-depth rain-water and made a splashing dash for the nearest KFC, ravenous after our long, unproductive day, but very, very glad to be “home”.