Fleeing the scene or making a strategic withdrawal

I am finding that the difficulties of communication and understanding, exacerbate the difficulties of day to day living, and the difficulties of making and implementing travel decisions. All these difficulties act as emotional amplifiers, feeding back on my initial reactions, no matter how inappropriate they might be.

So I arrived at Xinghai at about 16:30, after a journey of some 9.5 hours. I saw what seemed to be the one and only hotel as we drew in. Gathering myself together as much as I ever can in these circumstances, I emerged from the bus with my hand bag, and my shopping bag, and ferreted out my rucsac from underneath the bus. While putting this on I was being approached by one of the drivers of one of the newer cars that were parked round the bus station (about half a dozen). My reaction was he was touting for business and I did not want to know. In retrospect this was almost certainly a mistake - the fact that he was trying to earn a dollar, did not mean that he was trying to rip me off; nor that he was not providing a valuable and useful service. I have learnt subsequently that most long distance travel is done by these private hire cars. None the less the start of an emotional positive feedback circle headed off at a gallop into the wild blue yonder. While dealing with this perceived wheeler-dealer, somebody made to take my bag. This added to my feelings of being beleaguered and under attack. My defensive posture was now entering overdrive. As it happens, the guy trying to take the bag was either trying to help, or it was his form of begging. As usual hindsight makes clear the most murky of situations.

Then the interesting start with the hotel I described earlier. And then I explored Xinghai.

A one horse town. Trouble is that before I arrived they had got the horse out of town. Or it had died and they'd never had the gumption to replace it.

By this time, the resources I might use were down to: the hotel staff - Tibetan speakers with either very poor (most of the staff) or mediocre (the manager) Mandarin; a selection of Chinese sentences carefully constructed, by the travel agency in Xining, to aid me in getting to the Buddhist monastery that is the feature  of visiting this town. There were a number of small shops - grocery and food bars mainly - Tibetan or Uighar run. There was no cellphone signals of any description. The cars that had been there earlier had now all gone, so the whole town, was a suitable set for a Clint Eastwood western - except that there was no tumbleweed blowing along the street.

So I approached the hotel desk with one of my pre-prepared questions "Could you help me arrange for a car to go to the monastery?" I know this was understood because the receptionist's Mandarin was sufficiently poor, that he had to spell out the written question, character by character, and I could hear the manager, tucked away in a corner, assembling his efforts into the original question. Came to the end, and the manager's response was immediate and final. No. I don't know whether it was just bloody mindedness; whether this Tibetan was going to have nothing at all to do with some weird foreigner using Chinese; or she was just incompetent. So now stuck in the town, not knowing how to find a means of transport to my intended destination, nor how to get out of town by sunset, partner - sorry Clint, wrong script. I retired to bed and to ponder. Over the next few hours of wakefulness, I came to the conclusion that the way I was trying to do things, was just not working, and I was going to have to come up with other methods. I further came to the conclusion that I needed to retire back to a known base - where I knew I could get at least some level of support. Also I came very near to making the decision that not only would I retreat back to a known base, but then use that known base to bail out from the entire trip and return to the UK. I've only been at this trip for slightly less than a month, but this is the second time that I have come close to a decision to call the whole thing off, on the basis that I can't do it.

None of this was helped by the recurrence of my one health issue - at each new place I've arrived at, I have developed what I think of my short term fever. This is a fever that does not seem to do much - except cause me to radiate what seems like immense amounts of heat. I don't sweat or anything like that, just lie under the bed clothes and glow. This lasts for about eight hours and then just goes away. It is usually accompanied by a slight runny nose, and the sniffles, again for no more than eight hours. This time, rather than runny nose, and other very minor symptoms, I developed a chest cough, and what my mother, a Registered Sick Child Nurse before I came along, used to describe as a rubbishy chest. In other words a pulmonary infection which develops a bad cough designed to remove the junk that accumulates on the chest. This has now lasted five days, and it is only last night, when I awoke at 2 O'Clock, that I realised I have finally turned the corner on fighting the infection off. I have improved substantially over the course of today.

As I didn't know what time the bus went back to Xining, I made the assumption that it would leave for Xining at a similar time that the bus from Xining had left for Xinghai - ie at 07:00. So I shot out of the hotel at 06:00 to find (or not find) two things. Firstly I knew the bus depot was within about four hundred yards of the crossroads on which the hotel stood, on one of the four arms. Could I find it. could I heck. Then I realised that there were two or three cars gathered at the crossroads. The driver of one of them approached me and asked, via phrasebooks, electronic translators, a good deal of head scratching between us, and eventual light dawning, whether I wanted a journey to Xining. I accepted. Then the passenger for whom he had been booked, a senior NCO in the Border Defense Group of the PLO joined us, and eventually we set off.

I did of course display my quintesential British nature during these negotiations. The driver showed me a figure of 300 Yuan, which I took as a quote, rather than the starting point of a bargining session. I learnt later that the other passengers (we picked more up en route, again pre-booked) were paying between 50 and 75 each. Even so, the cost I had accepted was only 6 times the bus fare to Xinghai, which struck me as a bargain.

We mosied along, stopping early for breakfast at a noodle bar. It has been so long since I used them that I had forgotten the distinction for the gesture asking how much chili you wanted in your breakfast noodles; and how wide a noodle you wanted. As a consequence I ended up with virtually no chili (result); and vermicelli like noodles (side effect).

When we got back to Xining, I went back to the travel agency, and they, among other things, recommended a different hostel, closer in to the city centre. I turned up here, and have been here ever since. But that is for the next report in this never ending tale.