"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."


-- Friedrich Nietzsche


This entry was going to be all about the bus journey from Litang to Xiancheng. I had it all worked out. As we had driven our rickety bus along tiny mountain roads in the late afternoon, sheer drop to one side and landslide prone mountain to the other, I was thinking about mortality, the survival rate of China Bus users and Travelpod.

As the sun began to set I was thinking about Dracula (having just read the book), and the bit at the end when they're chasing the Count through Transylvania, trying to stop him before the sun sets. I was thinking about the comparison, as our chances of survival were going to reduce considerably when it got dark, as there were no lights anywhere and the driver seemed reluctant to put his own headlights on. So as I sat there, trying to will the driver to turn his lights on, he seemed to share my concern and sped up.

I was thinking that, should we survive, I would write all about it on Travelpod, making my metaphor clear and not forgetting to mention the film version where Keanu Reeves put on the worst English accent the world has ever seen.

But then we didn't get to the Internet for a few days, and I decided that it didn't make nearly as much of a story as our next bus journey, from Xiancheng to Zhongdian, so I'm afraid you don't get my Dracula metaphor, you get this instead........


We had a couple of nice days in Xiancheng and then tried to find out when the bus left to Zhongdian, which would be a little bit of civilisation before we go off to trek the Tiger Leaping Gorge. The bus station was just a mud pit with a small office that was never open, so it was a bit of a struggle to know when to get the bus but our random questioning of people informed us that the only bus of the day left at 6:30am. So we would have got a good night's sleep but didn't, and then got up at the crack of dawn to go to the station.

It turned out that our ridiculous wake up time was not in vain and we leapt onto the bus a minute before it departed. The first hour or so was pretty uneventful, and we found that we had quite a lot of room, with Vinny and I sharing the back seat and Adam the American having the seat in front to himself. Then more people started to pile on and things got a little crowded, with six of us on the back.

The road wound its way up to around 5000 metres, along a single lane road without markings or a barrier separating us from the sheer drop to one side - my side, it turned out. The entire journey was going to take place on the right hand side of mountains, and me sitting on the back seat at the right gave me several hundred views that could end up all too breathtaking.

It's worth pointing out that the scenery in this area of China is some of the most fantastic I've ever seen. It ranks as the second most beautiful natural sight I've had the pleasure of witnessing. The photos don't really do it justice, we can but try.

The road became more and more rubbish, going from a stone track to a mud track. This road is famous for becoming impassable in the winter, and even now in high summer the rain fall had churned up the mud something chronic. The bus itself was in no way designed for such conditions - it was a shoddy, old banger of a thing. Every time it went over a bump we would actually leave our seats. This was highly amusing for the first hour or so, but four hours later it was starting to wear thin.

We stopped for lunch and then continued - the road, if possible, getting even worse. Again and again the bus would wheel spin and slide precariously left and right, and at one point we had to swerve to avoid an oncoming jeep and nearly tipped over. And by over, I mean over the edge and into certain death.

Our phrasebook has been an invaluable tool thus far in our journey. We can count to ten, say hello, goodbye and thank you, ask how much things are, wether a meal has meat in it, order three beers and basically get on with Chinese living. However it's on journeys like this one that you realise just how limited it is.

For example, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find the Mandarin for "For the love of God slow down!", or "If you take a blind bend at that speed again I'm going to stick the gear lever up your ass", or even "Look mate, I smoke, but even I don't smoke on buses you antisocial nipplehead".

For the next hour or so things were at their most scary. We had passed over a mountain and were now descending, having a great time. At one point the road was blocked by trucks and a digger trying to fix it where it had collapsed into the abyss. We waited there for maybe half an hour before we got going again.

The road wound up once again - we had been hoping there wasn't any more 'up' for it to find, but it was persistent and clearly building to something.

Myself and Vinny were not having the greatest of times, as being at the back amplified and magnified every near miss and close call. We had got into the situation of being in fits of near constant laughter - it was by no means funny but an emotional response was demanded and the alternative was crying. We had seriously discussed the best thing to do if the bus actually went over the side, and decided we were lucky to be crammed in at the back as the sardine effect would hopefully keep us in our seats. That would only work of course if we went off in one of the places where there were trees down the valley to stop our descent. In all other situations we would be, for want of more pertinent euphemism, f***ed.

Our actual Near Death Experience happened like this:

We were taking a particulary tight corner through the rutted mud track, and the bus lost control and started to wheel spin. Not put out by this the driver simply gave it more power, and as we watched from our terrible vantage point the back of the bus slid out towards the edge of the mountain. The driver felt it go and tried to compensate (what I've always refered to in driving as the "Mario Kart Reverse Skid") and this would have worked fine had we not gone up one of the mud ridges.

The bus tilted thirty degrees to the right, and Vinny and I found ourselves staring quite literally two miles straight down (we are very aware of how far two miles is, especially when it's vertical). And then we saw the road collapsing down the mountain, under the rear wheels. It started as a few bits of dirt but then a whole chunk gave way and the bus lurched.

Now, I don't mind telling you, the global public, that Vinny and I had hold of each other pretty tight at this point. It was a shared moment of complete and total terror, as our lives flashed before our eyes (fortunatly they were great).

Then the front wheels found purchase and pulled us from the abyss.

It was all over, and the rest of the journey passed without incident.

Adam the American had slept through the whole thing.

b******.