A Day in Guizhou, part 4

We were pretty tired by this point, but still in relatively good spirits. Now that I had money, we could be lavish enough to hail a taxi to take us to the hotel the couple on the train had told us about. This time we were going to make sure that it was the right place. One eye on the taxi, one eye on the hotel, we eased toward it and found that it was closed.

The taxi driver made up for the other one. He left his car in the street and came over to figure out what the problem was. No one was there. No problem, he said, I know this other hotel nearby. In Guiyang taxis are a flat rate for anywhere in the city, so if he would take us somewhere else he'd be doing it for free. We drove to the one he was thinking of--too expensive. We drove to another one--no availability. I didn't mention that Friday was a national holiday and it seemed like all of China was traveling, so hotels were scarce.

We drove to three or four more, and each one was either too expensive or all full. Finally we arrived at one that seemed appropriate, said goodbye to the taxi driver, and started to pay for the room. Then we discovered that the price was for one person, and that we would have to pay double for both of us to have somewhere to sleep.

It was 1:30 then and we just wanted to go somewhere. As far in the past as it seemed, we had woken up in Guiyang that morning, so we did know of one hotel that wasn't too expensive. We took our third taxi of the night to get there and discovered that they had rooms available! The first night we stayed there it was 139 kuai, but now they only had 159 kuai rooms. The extra 20 kuai got us a sitting room and larger bathroom. The shower wasn't as good, and since we weren't planning on having guests over to our hotel room, the sitting room seemed superfluous. But we had finally found somewhere to sleep.

We woke up in Guiyang, went to Anshun, the waterfall, the caves, and back to Guiyang, had an ATM card eaten, and then past 2 am we went to sleep. Needless to say, I don't like Guiyang very much. What a day.

When Alex went to the bank the next morning, they happened to be open, and we could fly home like normal. This is a picture of me and him at the caves pretending to be bridge-guarding dragons.