The Knight Bus

The last several weeks have been some of the craziest and greatest days of my two decade long life. Four days after returning home from Bejing, we traveled to Guilin and Yangshuo. I loved Yangshuo a great deal and will post many photo's. First, however, I must explain how we got to Guilin. I have been on many 12 hour long road trips but none of them were quite like this. We decided to take a sleeper bus because it was relatively close and the bus was inexpensive. The bus was quite remarkable. There were three rows with beds stacked two high. There were about 42 beds on that bus that were asian sized which means that I was about 6 inches too tall for them. On the way there, there were extremely sketchy blankets on all the beds that I had to use because of a tragic incident with my fruit juice that I will not go into detail about. Here are significant things about the bus and our bus ride. 

1. When entering the bus, you can see a very large "No Smoking" Sign that is ignored and apparently not enforced. It was a very smoky ride.

2. When entering the bus you must take off your shoes and put them into little baggies. I suppose the goal of this is to help keep things clean but I wonder where the cleanliness the are trying to retain is. I am not sure how much good removing your shoes does for the already filthy bus. Nevertheless, I complied and removed my shoes every time I got on the bus. 

3. There were TV's on the bus that played extremely strange Asian movies at loud volumes. Randomly, on the way there they played the new Twilight movie which was a bit sad to me. Even on a sleeper bus in the middle of China I cannot escape the mayhem that is Twilight. 

4. The bus ride was the bumpiest, craziest and most beautiful ride I have ever been on. We weaved in and out of mountains and winding rivers. It looked like I had pictured China to look like. I loved looking out the window. 

5. I officially vow to never complain about bathrooms in America again. I went in the shadiest bathrooms I have ever been in on the bus ride. The bus would stop and the man in the front would smile and wave to us which meant that we could get off to go to the bathroom. We would be led to strange places that resembled bathrooms. There was not one bathroom that had doors on the stalls and most of them resembled troughs. I survived. That is all. 

6. The bus ride there took 11 hours to go to Guilin and when we came back from Yangshuo, which is 2 hours closer, it took 13 hours. We are not sure how that works but, when we are talking about this bus, it makes sense somehow. 

7. I am rather sure that there are very few foreigners that ride on that bus because they seemed very confused and befuddled by our presence. 

The bus was a good experience and made me feel like a Chinese person. That is always a nice thing.