Be Careful What You Wish For …

Hong Kong will always have a special place in my heart.

Not for the friendships I made there, which were quite wonderful and heartfelt.

Nor for the experience it provided me with social networking and alivenotdead.com.

Not even for being the place where I picked up my limited Cantonese, learned how to jog, began to appreciate traditional kung fu, or discovered an affinity for herbal tinctures and naturopathic medicine.

Hong Kong has a special place in my heart for one major reason: The HEAT.

Before living in Hong Kong, I had never been around so much heat and humidity for longer than a summer at a time, maybe 5 months, max while in Shanghai.  But in Hong Kong?  Even the winters are warm and the summers are downright ridiculous.

It wasn’t until my second year in Hong Kong that I began to acclimate to the heat (even given my increased natural insulation), and when I visited Beijing the summer after leaving Hong Kong I was amazed at how much less “muggy” and “hot” northern China felt to me than in previous years.

the reason i de-acclimated to the heat!

However, all that seems to have changed, and my exposure to the winters of Eastern Idaho and the initial cold fronts (albeit rather tame ones) in Xi’an have made my body forget exactly what it means to be truly, uncomfortably hot and sweaty.

So, when I came to Hong Kong to get my visa renewed, I was struck at just how hot and muggy it still was, in November, of all months.  Beijing had already received a light snow a week or two before, but here in Hong Kong people were walking around with flip flops and shorts.

The plan, however was pretty simple.  Stay 2 days in Hong Kong, grab the last suitcase of things from Jack’s place, and take a train back to Xi’an, arriving in time to get to Friday’s wushu class with the Shaanxi Wushu Team.

And as much as I enjoyed my time in Hong Kong, seeing good friends, including the boys at alivenotdead, I wasn’t terribly sad to be heading back up north.  If for no other reason than to be heading to cooler climes and lower temperatures.

Now this starts to fall in to the “ be careful what you wish for ” category of stories, because it went from hot to freezing (Not to mention feverish), literally over night.

From Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, I grabbed a train that would take me the 34 hours up to Xi’an.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this particular train took the Looooooong way up and we actually would go through Anhui province, which is closer to the ocean than it is to Xi’an.  Here is a map of the train route, to give you an idea …

Not exactly a direct route.  It looks more like the number 7 had a stroke.  Which would actually be accurate if it had gone through the same climate shift that I experienced during my travel.

As we left Shenzhen on the train I was lamenting that there was no a/c on the train and the staff had all of the windows on the train open.  But pretty soon it started to cool off.  In the morning I woke up and it was downright chilly on the train.  I could even see my breath when going to the dining car.  And not a small wisp of steam either.  I looked like a chain smoker with an invisible cigarette.

At around 10:00 or so we stopped at a station.  Wasn’t sure where it was.  The stations in China have very poor sinage, (unless you are standing across the street from the main entrance, which is kind of silly since most people entering a station from the front door probably know where they are) but my random guess was Wuhan (since I inaccurately assumed that we were taking a more direct route).

Practically Shandong Province!

I went to eat lunch in the dining car around 11:30 and the man who was sitting at my table said that we were in Anhui province in a town called Fuyang, and that we were stuck here because of the snow.

The snow?  What snow?  Wasn’t I just sweating to death the day before?  And what were we doing in northern Anhui?  That was practically Shandong Province!

It turns out that one of the biggest snow storms of the last 60 years happened during the night while I was sleeping and our train was stuck at the station until the tracks ahead of us could be cleared out.  Over the next 10 hours I would learn that, not only were we stuck, but our train, being a slower one, had a lower priority so we would have to wait until around 300 other trains had moved first.  (I was told that number by one of the people on the train, but I have a feeling it might have been an exageration.  Still … even 10% of that is 30 trains …)

By the time evening came around I realized that we would be stuck for quite a while. One of my cabin-mates (a nice young man from Qinghai) decided to disembark and try our luck in the city.  Actually, for him it was a matter of necessity.  He belongs to an ethnic minority in China that makes it so that can’t eat the food on the train.  He had brought enough food for the trip, but not if you factor in a day or two of waiting around in Anhui.

And you thought driving in China was dangerous in the summer??

We got out of the station, and froze our way in to a taxi.  He accompanied me to a hotel that Ruhi had been kind enough to reserve for me online.  For some reason, though, he didn’t join me in staying there.  Perhaps he just wanted to make sure I was safe? In any case, I checked in to the hotel, marveled that my room had a bathtub and soaked for about 30 minutes in a porcelain bucket of piping hot water.

All was going well so far.  I would check with the front desk on ways to go to Xi’an the next day and after a day or two in Fuyang I could be on my way back to Xi’an, hardly missing a beat.

That is, until I got a visit from one incredibly nasty case of the flu …

To Be Continued …