Misadventure on the highway.

This blog is longer than usual, but I need to be give you the dirt, literally.

Last Wednesday I got through Beijing Airport customs at midnight, expecting to be picked up by my company driver who didn’t quite show up. (apparently he forgot…)

Being smartened up by 1.3 billion people, I RACED  to the taxi stand (still, millions of them in line) to hail a cab.

Problem is, Beijing drivers would never take people going out to the other cities because they would lose money coming back. But I told him I’d pay the return.

So we drove 2 hours on the highway… poll after poll. Then only to realize that we were lost.

He tried frantically to exit the highway, but we kept driving toward an exit, only to find none of it! No Exit sign, no Street Lamp, nada. Yup, panic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ended up in 东丽开发区 (Dong Li region) – further east of Tianjin – I know it because the factories of Airbus etc are somewhere there. But China is so f***ing big, we could only see the city from the lights in the horizon. (yup, that’s now dark the night was.)

And, we were practically tossed around by HUUGGEE trucks (twice those of Singapore’s) carrying steel and sand bags etc. I tell you, at 3am in the morning in a little Beijing cab, I started to feel a certain bonding to my taxi driver.

Finally, he found a small generator in the bushes, where two guys were peeing or something. He asked for help. (Imagine, City boy gets lost in his own countryside with a foreigner and 3 mammoth bags and 1 big blue box.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So after like 3 dead ends, and 3 hours on the highway, we finally found hope. (Actually what I was most freaked out about is to drive on a highway, and realize the road is incomplete and we fly into midair. I swear it could happen!)

It was in the form of a Tianjin cabbie who was hiding on the side road sleeping in his car. The Beijing cabbie didn’t give a damn. He ran out, knocked on his window and woke him up.

Before I knew it, the two small guys hauled my stuff into the Tianjin cabbie’s car, and I was home in 20 mins. That was 0330hrs in the morning. Poor Vincent came down in his pyjamas to drag my shit back to our cozy cot.

 

Folks: Home is not truly where the heart is until you’re lost on a highway in China. Perhaps only in China.