No Rooms Available: Lijiang to Tengchong via Baoshan
After a hike, a van ride, three hours on a train, and three more on a bus, we arrive in Baoshan at 10:30pm. We’re very ready for sleep. Fortunately, Ert has reserved rooms for us at one of the brightly lit hotels near the bus station.
Vouchers in hand, Ert walks up to the front desk and begins the usual lengthy check-in process. We walk around the lobby, which is oddly also a showroom for massive wood carvings, clever wooden vanity chests, and jade jewelry.
This story is the continuation of a series that begins here.
A group of men comes up and chats with Ert, ashes from their cigarettes falling on the white marble floor. They are boisterous and jovial. They say ni hao to me as well, but I’m too tired to practice Chinese conversation.
After fully half an hour of paper shuffling and passport checking, the woman behind the desk tells us that there are no rooms available of any kind. Our reservations have been cancelled. We will have to stay somewhere else.
Jon wants to check online for other hotel options, but Ert knows already that only two hotels in all of Baoshan have an online presence. We will have to take our chances walking down the street.
There are lots of hotels within view of the bus station; the problem is that most are not equipped to rent rooms to foreigners. Government regulations require hotels renting to foreigners to take copies of our passports and register them to central information, for both tax and tracking purposes.
This is true for bus and train tickets as well; we are forever pulling out our passports to be examined and photographed, sometimes cell phone photographed by guards who then text them somewhere.
Here in Baoshan, however, we have a stroke of luck. A woman eating a cup of convenient noodles calls out to us as we seek hotels from the sidewalk. She runs a hotel, and would be delighted to rent rooms to us.
The place is well-located but not very clean in the lobby. The lobby is open to the street. Part of it has the feel of being her living room, complete with coffee table, rice cooker, and well-used couch.
She says we can go see the rooms before deciding, if we’d like. We troop up to the fifth and sixth floors with our backpacks on and take a look into the open doors.
The carpet is a little sticky, the walls have brown splotches from water damage, the bathrooms are squat toilets with disconnected shower heads on the walls. But the sheets on the bed are crisply white and clean, so it’s good enough for the night. We’re leaving on a bus first thing in the morning.
Ert goes back down the five flights of stairs to purchase our rooms, and Jon and I stand in the hallway, waiting. A few guests emerge from their rooms on evening errands of their own, and stare at us like we might be ghosts. We stare back; they walk on.
Ert returns up the five flights of stairs with keys. There’s one window in Jon’s and my room, and it faces the hallway– adding no light, but removing some of the privacy and sound insulation. We pull the curtains. There’s a place where there used to be a hole in them, but it looks like someone has shoved a plastic bag into it and held a lighter around the edges to fuse the synthetic curtain fabric to the melted bag. It works. We go to bed.
In the morning, we say goodbyes to the very friendly hotel owner, eat spicy rice noodles for breakfast, and head back to the bus station. Before noon, we are in Tengchong.
The walk to the place we’re staying in Tengchong is short. We’re on the edge of town, and the sun is shining. A small bridge crosses a manmade lake, and in the lane there is a neighborly crew out pruning the ginkgo and ficus. We find our Holiday Villa under a canopy of bougainvilleia and a climbing orange flower.
Our hosts (there seem to be many) welcome us like we’re family, chatting and inviting us up onto the pavilion for coffee and tea. There are two black birds in cages, which respond if you whistle at them. They’ll puff up and sing short birdsong melodies, or sometimes croak out “ni hao”.
Our rooms are a connected set of three, with the softest beds I’ve yet encountered in China (the typical style is quite hard). Big windows open out two sides onto courtyards, and they’ve provided the fixings for tea. We’re happy to be staying two nights.
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