We woke up in our huge bed and I spent the morning catching up on a few emails while Matt did some planning. It's hard not being in touch with people but we hope they know we're thinking of them all constantly.
After a quick trip out into the town we got back to the hostel to ask about the night bus to Xi'an. Mr Dheng had told us that he couldn't book it until 2pm but his wife called earlier and found out that there were no seats left on the night bus. She did however manage to find outt hat there were 2 seats left on the 12.30 bus. Which gave us exactly half an hour before its departure.
We paid for the tickets and quickly ran out to buy some fruit while Mrs Dheng booked the taxi. After an impatient few minutes where Mrs Dheng reassured us that the driver would assist us to get the right bus, the 'taxi' finally arrived at 12.17 and we gathered up all of our bags and rushed out. Once the driver had manually turned his golf buggy around we sped there at the mind-boggling speed of about 4mph. Matt rackoned it was closer to 5mph but judging by the age of the old men who were overtaking us on their bicycles I think that might have been a push. Matt and I were rocking in our seats trying to make it go faster but it trundled on at a steady pace.
When we got to the highway where we were due to catch it, the driver told us it 'may be 10 minutes, may be 20 mins, may be half hour' so we sat watching the large screen TV that was set into an antique looking statue in the middle of the road and appeared to be showing a documentary on Pingyao. It seems the Chinese like an impressive TV stand so I'm waiting for Matt to start getting even grander ideas than the time he wanted to set a telly in the side of the shed.
The bus was reasonably comfortable but constantly vibrated but made our fat bits feel a bit weird. Matt was entertained by watching Chinese films whilst I took advantage of the long journey to write the blog. I stopped after my eyes went funny and just sat back to watch the incredible scenery. We passed cave-dwellings, plains, terraced fields, bodies of water and bridges.
At Xi'an, we thought for a moment they were going to drop us off at a petrol station nowhere near the bus station we were expecting to get to. They didn't but they didn't drop us off at the right bus station either. As we looked at the crappy lonely planet map and tried to locate where we were, we were 'helped' by lots of locals.
We'd tried too call the hostel several times earlier in the day to let them know that we were arriving a day early but each time someone picked up, spoke Chinese and then put the phone down on us. We tried again and this time, if we really shouted, they could hear us. They told us which bus to get on and a friendly local confirmed that it was going in the direction that we needed. A further not-quite-as-friendly local helped us to pay our busfare; he doubled the fare from 1 to 2 Yuan (20p) and split the proceeds with the driver but he did tell tell us where to get off so we didn't care. Meanwhile, Matt discovered that there was protective film over the microphone of the mobile and so that should avoid further screamed conversations in the street.
When we arrived at Hang Tang hostel, it was a hive of activity. We had arrived on 'dumpling night' and the current guests were milling around making dumplings and drinking beer. We were pretty hungry but by the time we'd dropped our stuff off in our room and changed out of our stinky clothes there were only 2 left. They did let us eat them though so we decided we liked them.
We joined one of the groups and spent a really nice evening chatting to a great group of people who were all staying at the hostel but travelling seperately. There was Jordan, an Australian snowboarder who used to work at the hostel where I stayed in Sydney; James, an animated Australian chatterbox who had left his obscenely high earning Deli counter manager job to travel; Emma, a beautiful, sincere nurse who knew a whole manner of interesting facts about things and was also Australian, and Mike, who maintained maps of fibre-optic cables within Manhatten and barely got a chance to get a word in edgeways.
We stayed up late chatting to James and then were chuffed to find that we were sharing a room with Emma and so finished off the evening with a lovely sleepy chat in bed.
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