10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China

Part I: The Author's Own True Tales

Chapter 5: Wudang Mountain---武当山

Chapter 5-1: Holiday Inn, a Musical---欢乐饭店,一个音乐喜剧

Fun fact: The world famous hotel is named after the hotel this 1942 Musical.

Previous Chapters 前章: Pt. 1 Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4

Apologies to the readers. I’ve split this chapter up into three shorter parts due to reader feedback on Chapter 4 that, while being good, was loooong. This is the first part of the long slog to Wudang Shan. While it’s an amusing adventure, nothing actually paranormal or quasi-paranormal happens until Chapter 5-2: A New Kind of Kung Fu—一个新的功夫.

When seeking the deep and mysterious truths of the universe, it’s the journey, not the destination that matters. Let us begin.

Elva had some stuff to do and messaged me to take a cab to the Starbucks and she'd meet me there. The taxi driver didn’t know Starbucks in either Chinese or English, nor did he recognize the logo on the business card I kept in case of just such an eventuality which really surprised me because it's across the street from the Garden Hotel, probably the most common destination of foreign visitors to Guangzhou. Fortunately he drove right by it before turning into the hotel so I was able to point it out to him.

Just as I arrived another message came from Elva instructing me to wait because she was busy doing some things. Being the anxious traveler that I am, delays and waiting, especially on trips like this where I am looking forward to setting foot for the first time on Wudang Mountain, ancient home of Taoism (道教), qi gong(气功), taiji quan(太极拳), the mysterious art of nei dan gong (内丹功), and an unknown number of immortal and mortal masters alike, and made famous by the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I was very easily annoyed.

I’d procured every foreign newspaper I could at the Shangri-La Hotel in Shenzhen before catching the train to Guangzhou so I’d have a lot to read: The South China Morning Post, The International Herald Tribune, and maybe one other. But in spite of this, my thoughts were constantly at Wudang--what would the teacher be like that Dr. Zhu, my qigong doctor, has referred me to? Who else would we meet? What would the birds be like? How many days would we spend wandering trails? What would the journey be like from Wuhan?

Ah, Wuhan. That was the first glitch in the whole plan. I told Elva we should fly as close to Wudang as we could in order to maximize our time there. Since her Chinese was obviously better than mine, we decided it would be easier for her to arrange the travel, especially since it would involve a lot of ground transportation. Maybe that was the first glitch: letting her arrange travel.

Elva could be a little bit of an airhead at times. She was also very distracted at the time getting her business off the ground. She was extremely busy dealing with galactic bureaucracy, marketing, training, traveling to meet potential clients, and so forth. The last thing she needed was to plan more travel.

She called me one day and told me the price of plane tickets from Guangzhou to Wuhan, the biggest city in Hubei province near Wudang, and the price to fly to Xiangfan, the nearest airport to Wudang. She said she couldn’t find a discount fare to Xiangfan but the fare to Wuhan was pretty cheap. And anyway one of her friends told her you can get buses from Wuhan to Wudang and it only takes a few hours to get there.

"That doesn't sound right. Have you looked at a map?" I asked.

"No I haven’t, but it's OK. The friend who told me has done it, so she knows. It’s also very cheap. Only like 15 yuan."

"That’s impossible."

"No really. We talked about it."

"15 yuan?" At the time 15 yuan was less than $2.00.

"Yes."

"Just a few hours."

"Yes."

"Well it doesn’t sound possible to me."

"Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything."

sigh! "Alright."

Now I was looking forward to a vacation of about 9 days on Wudang, but that was already squashed because of a seminar that came up that Elva had to go to on the 5th. Which meant my vacation was shortened by 4 days already. And since Elva was also my translator, I really couldn’t hang out there with my limited Chinese hoping to talk about Daoism and qigong and the mysteries of the universe with one of the Mountain Masters.

None of that mattered though. It was hard enough for Elva to get away for the 4 days she'd arranged and I appreciated that and was happy for the time together. I remembered our journey to Lijiang exactly one year ago and how smoothly it went. Not once did we argue. We were never bored with each other's company. And we stumbled into some marvelous adventures that are not on any tours.

We got to Wuhan early that evening. The airport was pretty primitive for such a big city. It was more like an oversized bus station. No McDonald’s. No Starbucks. No coffee at all, not even packets of instant in a snack shop. About the only Chinese food was instant noodles at the snack shop that didn’t have any packets of instant coffee. This was in a provincial capitol's international airport. I've heard they built a new one since.

Elva was tired and wanted to stay overnight. I wanted to push on to Wudang, but she begged me, and I could see how tired she was. So what the hell? It’s a vacation together, and that was as important to me as going to Wudang. She actually didn’t really want to go. The only reason she was going is because she loved me. And that's a fact. She didn’t even make me promise to go somewhere else "next time." She was just happy to be with me doing what made me happy.

So we started calling hotels listed in the Lonely Planet guide, considered the Bible for travelers in China. All wrong numbers.

She insisted on a place with a pool so I told her the Holiday Inn would probably have one. Holiday Inns always have a pool. According to Lonely Planet, the rooms were around 600 yuan, but that was affordable for one night. We got the phone number at the airport reservation service, confirmed the existence of the pool and discovered they were only charging 350 yuan.

They said the hotel was in the heart of downtown Hankou district and told us what bus to take not to get there. Yes, that's right. I mean, why should a bus go from the airport to downtown? When you stop to think about it, such a service is virtually useless. It’s far better to just stop at some industrial outskirt of the city and dump people in a deserted parking lot of some abandoned industrial facility and then lie to them about where their hotels actually are. Isn’t it?

I swear I am not making this up. There were truthfully no buses to downtown from the airport. They did actually dump us and all the other passengers at some abandoned industrial facility where a few taxis were waiting for suckers.

The bus left us at place that looked pretty much like this

Elva told one driver we were going to the Holiday Inn, and the taxi driver refused to take us. He pointed across the way and said, "It's right there. 5 minutes walking."

So we schlepped our bags “over there.” I could tell it wasn’t a Holiday Inn before we got there. It was a run-down Chinese hotel called the "Holiday Hotel" and was in no way a four star hotel. We dodged a lot of traffic to get there. Wuhan is a city of honkers. Drivers don’t stop, they honk.

When we got up to the hotel, it was closed for remodeling. Now, someone was lying to us. Either the taxi driver sent us to the wrong hotel, or the girl at the reservation desk lied to us about this being a Holiday Inn. In China it is perfectly possible that a hotel could be closed for business, answer the phone, tell you they have a pool and room and the going rate for that room, but not tell you they are currently closed because YOU failed to ask.

Well I was pretty pissed. I’d been living in Shenzhen too long. It was almost civilized there. Fortunately, the security guard was friendly enough and told us where the actual, real Holiday Inn is.

We hailed a taxi and he knew the destination. His cab also smelled like ass. We literally had to hang our heads out the window to survive the ride and wondered how the hell he could sit there smiling away as he negotiated traffic. The only time we pulled in our heads was to avoid oncoming traffic which fortunately wasn’t very often. God were we glad to arrive! Holiday inn! An oasis of civilization!

The Holiday Inn we were looking for. Looks pretty old, doesn’t it?

They did in fact have our reservation and it was in fact only 350 RMB. And they did in fact have a pool but it was CLOSED FOR REMODELING!!!!! Elva collapsed in my arms. The one thing she wanted to do that night, if nothing else, was go for a swim. Welcome to China.

See now, this is puzzling. Why would hotels close for remodeling during a peak travel weak? You’ve got the whole year to do your remodeling, and they decide it needs to be done during the May Holiday. One of China’s “Golden Weeks” at that time, one of three weeks out of the year Chinese could go on vacations. Well it was pretty obvious to us that Wuhan was not a popular travel destination. The hotel was offering rooms at almost half price. The Lonely Planet guide gave this city maybe two pages of coverage. The whole section on Hubei province was shorter than the section on either Kunming or Chengdu alone. Plus, it was a city of noise, eyesores, and distinctly unfashionable people. This was Elva’s chief objection to the place. This is her main yardstick for measuring civilization, and though you in the west may protest, it has merit in China.

That night we went to the food street on Minsheng Lu. All Chinese towns and cities have food streets. They’re just basically streets lined with restaurants, often for pedestrians only. The food street here in Wuhan was well lit and lively when we arrived. We paid the taxi and struck out through the big decorative gate.

Immediately we were assailed by hawkers wanting us to eat in their restaurants. They were anxious, noisy and alert. They also groped, pulled and shoved at passersby to maneuver them into their respective establishments. We strolled, er, make that swerved and dodged our way down the street which, for a city the size of Wuhan, was pathetically small. Back in the trenches of Guigang, a 4th tier city in Guanxi, we had bigger food streets.

The restaurants weren’t remarkable in any way. They were mediocre places serving local cuisine. The local cuisine gave them a sort of cultural value to the tourist. But what really mattered was the spectacle and cacophony.

Not only were people being jostled, grabbed, shouted at and punched by touts, the touts in turn jostled, grabbed, shouted at, and punched one another. Meanwhile, a hellish chorus of sound from amateur (and I use the term lightly here) musicians endeavored to entertain the diners.

These people were horrible. And we took a front row seat to get the best performance of it. We chose a busy, noisy restaurant at the head of the food street that was the biggest and brightest there. As soon as the waitress walked away we were accosted by musicians, or should I say, people with musical instruments, trying to sell us a song or two.

What they didn’t realize is that we didn’t have to pay for this service. The others were so loud, all we had to do was sit and listen. Oh, they'd smile eagerly and pleasantly as if nothing would please them greater than to give you a song. Some had song lists in English, and others didn’t. They were as bad as the touts in the street. If you didn’t respond to them, they'd shove the list in your face. If that didn’t work, they’d play a few notes of a bad song like Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters or How Dry I Am.

I am not making that up. They actually, really, did play How Dry I Am. I burst into hysterical laughter. Elva had no idea why. Then I sang my drunken Looney Toons cartoon version of "How Dry I Am" for Elva so she could laugh. She of course asked me why that song is so funny and I gave her all the pertinent cultural background I had available on it.

For those of you who don’t know it, here it is:

Now, it should’ve been obvious to these people that we were trying to have a private and semi-romantic conversation, but that didn’t matter. Some of the musicians were so obstinate, the waitress would have to come and clear them out.

The worst part of it was the competition. There had to be 20-25 different combos playing the cafe all at once and each one wanted to be heard over the others. There were basically two types--those with traditional Chinese instruments and those with a guitar and saxophone. And the worst part of all these was a male female duo with a guitar and sax. The girl hollered pop tunes, hollered them, while strumming the guitar. It didn’t sound like singing at all and you couldn’t even hear the guitar. The only time you couldn’t hear her sing is when the guy drowned her out with his sax playing.

What you have to understand is that people were paying for this. They paid good money to hear these people scream. Or to have a sax bell stuck in their faces while blaring a bad rendition of How Dry I Am or Suwannee River, the old Stephen Foster standard from 1851! This is the same guy who wrote Oh, Susanna.

In case you’ve never heard Suwannee River (Also called Old Folks at Home), this guy plays it better on the carrot (红萝卜) than the dude in Wuhan could play it on the saxophone. Yes, on the carrot (红萝卜).

The other problem is, I can never hear Suwannee River played in any way, without thinking of Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton in The Honeymooners.

This is just the sort of thing that can ruin a good meal if it weren’t for the power of laughter.

Look how happy we were after that meal!