2015 China

4 April, Zhengzhou to Qufu
Huancheng Hotel 98CNY

The fast train between Zhengzhou and Qufu is fully booked for five consecutive days; the slow train is torpid; so we opted for the five-plus hour bus. Long-distance bus travel in China is pleasant enough, the roads in good nick, the loo breaks sufficient. We have gotten the ticket-buying process beat. We write down the date on which we wish to depart and show the ticket seller this in conjunction with the Chinese characters in our guide book for our destination town. Getting onto the right bus once through the ticket and security checks is more challenging, however. Bus depots are crowded with people going places and packed with buses waiting to take them there. As a rule, the buses are numbered and labelled in Chinese script only. Once evicted from the waiting room into this arena of relative chaos, we show our ticket to any random soul who looks as though he won’t bolt in fright at being confronted by a westerner. This usually results in a finger pointing vaguely in one direction or another. Once in the general area shown us, we approach yet another person, preferably a bus driver or assistant, though these are hard to discern. Their pointing finger might direct us somewhere further along the line or in a completely new direction or back to where we started. It usually takes three or four enquiries before we are welcomed aboard the correct bus. Any additional information that might be made available to a Chinese traveller is denied us by virtue of our complete dearth of Chinese language skills. For example, our Qufu-bound bus did not in fact go into Qufu at all but dropped us bewildered on the offramp into town. Before we could protest or panic we were approached by a taxi driver hoping for business off the bus and driven without let or hindrance to our hotel. 

We have discovered a website (ctrip.com) through which to book hotels in China. It offers more in the way of budget hotels than either booking.com, an old friend, or our Lonely Planet guide, a firm favourite. We used ctrip.com first to book a hotel near the train station in Zhengzhou. Tracing the hotel with its name and address in English only took some time, but with our second reservation in Qufu, we have found a solution to this problem. We made the reservation online using ctrip’s English language site, then converted it to the Chinese language site, then took a photograph of the screen containing both the hotel name and address in Chinese, then showed this to our taxi driver whose immediate comprehension was a real boon.   

The Huancheng Hotel is located within Qufu’s old city walls, our room opening onto a potplant-rich courtyard, our hostess welcoming. In the cold night we walked the city streets, dined well on a soup prepared at our table, and briefly joined a group of old women dancing (by way of exercise) in the square outside the main city gate.