12.10.2012
I am sitting in the rain, Paul packs up all our stuff while I am writing blogpost.
Thanks bro, I appreciate this.
In the night at the river ( 9-10.10.2012) I woke up with stomach ache and feeling sick. Minutes later I was outside in the rain, puking. Something was wrong with dinner, and so I asked Paul if he is alright. He didn’t seem to have any Problems and so, the next Morning Paul gets up while I still lay in bed after a sleepless night, trying to regain strength. Around midday I got up, Paul had already prepared everything for leaving and I just ha to sit on my bike and start riding.
That day we had to ride a 1500 meter pass, and although I felt sick and weak and I thought I wouldn’t make it, after being half way through, I developed the will to leave it behind me. I couldn’t eat anything but bananas that we luckily had bought the day before. Powered by this yellow fuel we reached the top of the pass in the evening. Again there was no place free for camping an in addition I didn’t feel to good so we decided to take the next best hotel. We checked in a small guesthouse in which the owner proudly presented us the luxury rooms with shower and toilet. As everything was unpacked and in our room we noticed that nothing of the interior was working, no toilet, no water, no shower. Actually I wouldn’t care to much about that, but the price of the room was just to high for these things not to work. So we asked the owner if we could take a shower somewhere else and as he denied we started bargaining about the room-rate. The owner wasn’t willing to even go down one yuen and so we did what he didn’t expect. We packed our bikes again, and left the hotel in the dark. The owner, now seeing that we meant our concern about the room serious, tried to start bargaining but I just had enough of that money-junky and wouldn’t even want to stay in that hotel if it was for free. A few kilometers further we found another little hotel, it was a little bit more expensive, the board behind the counter said 66 yuen for a night in a twin room. We checked in and Paul had to go to the police station to register our stay. The policeman doing the registration had been in the same hotel drinking with his colleagues. So Paul later told me that the procedure was rather funny.
When Paul was back we went out to get some food, rice for me and a delicious looking dish for Paul. It was a bit like a DIY-dish, something like a fondue. We sat at a big table mad from steel which had a fire burning in the middle. There a wok was put with soup and Paul had to cook his vegetables and meat himself. The advantage: the dinner was ridiculously cheap and, according to Paul, very delicious. By the way, my rice was delicious as well.
Back at the hotel I directly went to bed and Paul went to the reception to pay the bill. As he came back to the room he was angry.” This stupid idiots down there have found another trick to cheat on us”. And in deed, some if the Chinese are really inventive when it comes to making money. The receptionist had flipped the first Six of the 66 yuen room-rate upside down and so now the roomrate for a twin room was 96 yuen. Paul couldn’t believe his eyes but couldn’t prove the fraud as well. Knowing that he wouldn’t stand a chance in “turning back” the number, he gave the receptionist the hint that the dust, that was on top of the all other numbers, was sticking to the downside of the obviously recently flipped “six”. The receptionist was blushing and gave in with the price a little, Paul got away with a bill of 80 yuen. The next day we saw the ultimate prove for their fraud, but sadly it was to late to bargain by then; the room with three beds was only 70 yuen, so 26 yuen cheaper than the room with two beds. Then I even saw the receptionist dropping his broom in the backyard and sprinting to the reception as I came out of our room. I could see in the reflection of a window that he was doing something on the price-board, I can imagine what. Of course other people wouldn’t check into this hotel at a room rate of 96 yuen and so he had to change the number back every time we couldn’t see. Paul took some close-ups from the board and the receptionist got a little nervous.
But since we do not want any trouble here in china anymore, we didn’t start to argue. We just left the hotel with the knowledge that the receptionist was obviously ashamed over his behavior and knew that we knew about his fraud.
I felt much better that day and so we could even go for some kilometers. The temperature up here was quite low and more than ever before we could see the winter coming in big steps.
We drove another pass of 500 meters and surprisingly noticed that the other passes, shown on our map, didn’t exist. It was a long smooth ride with a few ups and downs from time to time. In the evening we found the best place to camp in along time. A little road lead us into the bushes and onto an old rock mine. Exhausted from the day we went to bed without dinner. We switched on our “outdoor-tv”, which is our camera in which we put some old sd-cards and watched a few “movies” from our tour.
In the morning I woke up by heavy rainfall. Paul asked me for my headlight to check if everything is waterproof.
It has been raining ever since and it doesn’t look like it would ever stop again. “We have to get going anyway, we have been through worse, Shanghai is calling”, Paul says to me to motivate me. An he is right. I guess the home run is so close now that no weather could stop me from riding.
“Give me One minute”, I say to Paul, counting down from sixty and hoping for the weather to miraculously change. I enjoy my last seconds in the dry tent knowing that soon water will be running down my chest, be it rain or sweat, I don’t know. But I want to get going.
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