life | Andrea Censi's website

(read Part 1)

After Shangai, the next destination for Teja and I, and Lina as our teacher and guide, is Hangzhou (“heaven on earth” according to a Chinese saying). Plan A is to take the train: the station has just been built and looks like an airport.

Unfortunately there aren’t any tickets left for the night. We propose to try to buy a ticket from the people waiting, but apparently that is illegal. In the end, we end up getting on a black taxy, a private car (I’d never do that in the US!). This guy accepts to take us to Hangzhou for 100 RMB ($15), which is more or less the price of the regular bus ticket. We hop into this car that looks older than disco music. We instinctively look for seatbelts, but there aren’t any. Anyway, we relax a bit after the prospect of sleeping in the train station for catching an early morning train.

A few minutes later, we arrive at the toll station and we park on the road shoulder. There’s another group of men and cars, and it seems that our driver wants to offload us to another car. He seems not to have an agreement with these people, so he walks in the middle of the traffic stream and starts stopping cars, to see who can give us a lift. An SUV accepts. So he make us run in the middle of the freeway to get to this other car. When we get there, we find ourselves in this car with other 7-8 people. They want all the money now, but Teja and I don’t want to pay until we’re at our destination. They start arguing and yelling at Lina, who’s though, so she yells back. The situation is tense and we decide to give them all the money.