If you are of a parental nature, and do not wish to read tales of excessive drinking, read no further. You can chance it and read about halfway, but then turn off the computer. The locals won't take no for an answer when it comes to alcohol, so things have a tendency to get a little sloppy.
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For Mid-Autumn Festival, I went with C and her husband HC up to Zhangbei. It's about a three-hour drive north from Beijing on the Badaling Expressway, then a north turn at Zhangjiakou. The plan was to leave Beijing at 8:30am on Saturday and get there in time for lunch.
As we left town, we got a call from HC's Handler that the Badaling Expressway was backed up, so we would take some back roads. On that note, I went to sleep.
I started waking up about 2 1/2 hours later sure that things were not quite going according to plan. Last time I checked, three-point turns were not standard driving on the Badaling Expressway. I peeked out the window, and saw that we were at the end of some country lane, with a bunch of other cars. I ignored it and closed my eyes again. Half an hour later, as we were stopping and starting down the road, I opened my eyes again just in time to see that we had crossed the border in Hebei Province. Yeeeah.
I started paying more attention. We were on a two-lane road heading through some small Chinese village in a long line of (mostly) lorries. To the left were two lanes of lorries heading in the other direction. (Yep, three lanes on a two-lane road.) And then we stopped. And that's when C and I started to worry. All I could think of was the three-day back-up on the Badaling last year. I was going to end up spending the first day of school stuck in an SUV in a long line of lorries somewhere in Hebei Province. Great.
The driver was less fatalistic than C and I were, however. He (and the other cars stupid enough to be on the road), started weaving in and out of the lorries. The main tactic was to drive along the shoulder (soft, not hard) until there was space to cut into the access road/parking lot that lined the street. Once the parking lot ran out, the cars would either go back on the shoulder until the next break or drive across the entire road (in very rare spaces between the lorries) and drive along the parking lot on the OTHER side. Meanwhile, there were random Chinese dudes setting off giant strings of firecrackers. A couple of meters from where we were driving. Fun!
Somewhere around 12:30, C and I started taking stock of the food we had available. She had a loaf of bread, some cheese, and some butter for HC, as well as some biscuits (including proper shortbread bought in London as a gift), and some emergency chocolate. I had brought a selection of fruit (Teacher's Day!). We ate the chocolate first. Then we had bread and cheese and a pear. The driver had some water in the car. So we were set for food. What I refused to say out loud was that we'd run out of gas before we ran out of food. We passed by a few broken-down service stations, but none of them seemed to have working fuel pumps.
So we wended our way through the village. It took about an hour to make it through. (We finally remembered that C has an iPhone, so we could use Google Maps to at least see where we were. It wouldn't get us out of there, but at least we'd know where we were stranded. I think we were just east of where the G7 runs into the G6, but we weren't on either of those roads.) At one point, it took us some time to drive next to the line of lorries (our SUV being slightly wider than other sedans), so we lost the line of traffic ahead of us. After some shouting, a farmer pointed us off into the corn fields. So, we led a line of cars into the fields, only to turn around 20 minutes later, having decided the fields were a dead end. As we drove back towards town, there was a long line of cars heading into the fields and a farmer standing there laughing.
Somehow or other, we made it out of the village and onto the G6. There did appear to be a line of lorries stopped on the expressway, (on either the G6 or the G7, I'm not sure which road was which), but there was no traffic. I suspect that (because of the holiday?) the lorries were not permitted to drive on the expressway, but could take the back roads. What I'll never know is if we should have stayed on the Badaling the whole way... It was smooth sailing after that.
However, HC and his farmer colleagues had already killed a lamb and roasted it for lunch. C and I were not getting any Mongolian lamb, much to my extreme dismay. They had also managed to get HC ripping drunk. C and I were not impressed.
We arrived around 3:30. HC.'s colleagues took us out for hot pot that night (not quite the roast lamb I was hoping for) and proceeded to (try) to get my drunk. However, they' don't know how we kick it at the Yuquan Lu. We were each given a 6 oz. glass of baijiu filled to the brim, and they started toasting us. (I got to be "mei nu" all night long — beautiful woman.) That shit is nasty, and I was in serious need of a beer chaser, so after the third toast (and almost horking right there at the table), I grabbed a bottle of beer and drank it (they didn't want to let me drink beer instead of baijiu). However, once they saw I was going to two-fist it, I was given a glass for the pijiu, too.
Halfway through the meal, I decided I needed a boot and rally. (Boot=puke, rally=keep drinking) Puking is so much better when you decide to do it instead of having to do it. Did that twice during the meal, and managed to walk out of the restaurant having "drunk" 6oz. of baijiu and lord knows how much pijiu. Didn't even have a hang-over the next morning.
We left at 10am on Monday morning, hoping we would have enough time to make it back before dark... It took the three hours it was supposed to take. Go figure.
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