The Taxi Driver’s Tour: Gaoligongshan to Weishan
Taxi rides in China are incredibly cheap. Coming out of every train station, we’re mobbed by taxi drivers. Ert smiles. He relishes the haggling process — and a few kuai more or less is not a lot regardless of the outcome. 100 kuai is about $15, and we’ve gotten fairly long rides for as little as 10 kuai for the five of us and our packs.
In nearly any little town, as long as there is a road, there is someone who is interested in driving us. There are few opportunities missed to make a buck in China.
This story is the continuation of a series that begins here.
The same holds true the morning after Gaoligongshan: the young owner of the hotel loads us into his leather-seated new SUV and happily drives all morning.
We’re surprised to learn that the area we’ve hiked into is all coffee plantations. China leans more Nescafe 2+1 than dark roast arabica, but the hills here are covered with thriving coffee plants with clusters of green and red coffee berries all down the branches. Our driver tells us it’s all for export.
Down the road, we take a driver-suggested detour to a famously old bridge over what’s known as the Angry River. The boards creak, and some are rotted out, but the suspension chains let it swing pleasantly over the water. Our driver, walking with us, obligingly takes our group photo.
We start on towards the nearest big city, where we’ll catch our train. Our driver stops at a roadside stand and, unasked, brings back bottles of water for each of us. He gives us Mentos from his car stash.
I think he’s enjoying the drive, long as it is. He and Ert are chatting in Mandarin, and he has played every song he has with English lyrics, some twice: early Taylor Swift, an obscure Ed Sheeran, some club-type songs.
As we approach the city, he decides to take us on the particularly scenic route. He turns up the wrong side of a divided highway, which puts Eileen on edge but on the whole seems like an okay thing to do in China. Then he left turns abruptly onto a bumpy dirt road between farmers’ fields.
He went to school here, he says; he used to go this way all the time.
Farmers give us perplexed looks; when the road bends around a house, I see a man watch dubiously as our car barely misses his building. We parallel the airport on a road that’s really not wide enough to support traffic in both directions- which it has.
We pull out onto a bigger road, but it seems someone has constructed an aluminum wall there. We pause, and our driver looks perplexed. But there’s a parked car in front of us that appears to have been similarly annoyed. As we watch, they dismantle a couple of panels of the wall, dragging them to the side. They get back into their car and drive off. We follow, and eventually get back onto a main road.
It feels like a proper goodbye when we reach the train station and our driver leaves us for the long drive back home.
We board our train, then bus out to our next town: Weishan.
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