You probably remember that I mentioned Drama wasn’t on our flight. Why is a fair question. It is a quintessentially long story. I hesitate to relate the story because it reflects unflatteringly on our travel partner. But to omit it or pretend that everything went off perfectly would be to omit a major undercurrent of our of half our travels and neglect to learn from the experience. So I’ll try to relate the sequence as it happened. Of course, this is only from my perspective. Going from her behavior, she probably had a completely separate experience.

 

As I said, we planned to travel together. I’d met Drama earlier in the year and found out that she wanted to travel and try out hiking. We wouldn’t mind having someone who could speak Chinese come along and I was hoping to get to know her better anyway. It seemed like a mutually beneficial plan.

 

We finally met to plan the trip right after I returned from the first round of volunteering at a student activity. Since there would be only a few weeks left in the summer before our classes started up again, my proposed itinerary was at few days at each place: Beijing, Guilin, Hunan, and Xi’an. She suggested Yunnan. I agreed. It was a great idea. The new plan: Yunnan, Hunan, Xi’an, Beijing. She was supposed to find tickets while I was away at the second volunteer event in another city.

*Saturday: I return to Jilin and text to ask if we can meet to buy tickets. No reply.

 

*Sunday: I say I’m going to buy them. She replies, agrees and insists that I book her ticket because she is new to all this and afraid we won’t be on the same flight. I stupidly agreed to help her out if she promised to pay me back. But I can’t get the tickets without her info, so we have to meet up. I don’t remember why she couldn’t tell me over the phone.

 

*Monday: She hints that she might not be able to go.

I scooter over to her workplace after her shift ends at 10pm.

She says her budget is only 2000rmb ($307) and so she can’t go.

 

Feeling bad for her, I suggest we go to one place together that would be within her budget.

She says she can’t go at all – she mentions driving lessons. No worries. It was a fun idea although by this time I was having doubts that it was actually a fun idea.

 

After getting home around 11:30pm, I stay up until 4am changing plans and buying James’ and my 2 tickets before the time slot I want books up.

 

*Tuesday: She calls me at 8:30am to say that she can go with us – the whole trip – because her dad will pay.

 

I text her multiple times trying to get her information. The flights I want leave in 4 days. 

I stay up until after midnight waiting for her replies. She has fallen asleep in the middle of our conversation.

 

I send her all the flight info. She agrees. Then she sees a cheaper flight. She decides she wants that one – it seems very important to her. So I redo everything.

 

12:54am, I say g’night

 

*Wednesday: 7:51am she says thanks and asks if we are on the same flight…

3:46pm, she asks if it’s easy to return a ticket –  “no reason.”

4:31pm, I tell her CTrip doesn’t do refunds and that she needs to be up front with me about whether or not she can go.

4:33, she tells me “take it easy. Everything is ok.”

 

*Thursday: I drive to the mall at 4:30pm to meet and review the itinerary. She is 1 hour late. Then she shops for another hour while I begrudgingly follow her around. Then she wants to go to dinner after I said I wasn’t planning on having dinner out. She spends most of the expensive dinner on the phone with her mother’s best friend who is trying to convince her mother to let her go on the trip. 

 

By 9:00pm she tells me she can’t go at all. Her mother doesn’t want her to go because of driving lessons and the recent earthquake on the opposite side of the large province of Yunnan. Drama will have to pay for the ticket but not go.

 

*Friday: She will go if the ticket can’t be refunded – but if the plane is delayed and she can cancel, she will not go. I have stopped caring.

 

*Saturday: We fly to Kunming.

 

*Sunday: She arrives late in Kunming. Apparently her flight was delayed in some way but she came anyway.

One would think that bringing along a Chinese-speaking companion would make traveling in China easier. Apparently that’s not a hard rule. You would think that taking the positive with the negative, it’d come out favorably. But I’m just not sure. Oh, it’s true, she could chat up the taxi drivers and get good restaurant recommendations… though she didn’t seem to be able to get lower prices than we usually got. Of course, a travel app or random English speaking person can pretty much also do that.

 

But is a little chatting worth the three extra hours per day that she cost the group? No joke, I speak with a realistic average. At first it was asking my help to book her tickets back home. No huge problem there. Then it was her trying to change the pre-discussed itinerary again and again. And in-between it was her arriving late, walking stunningly slow, taking wrong turns, adding errands and then insisting we come along (one night this meant we didn’t get dinner until almost 11:00pm). And is that small local insight worth the heaps of stress?

 

 

Mentally, having to answer the same questions and explain the same concepts over and over became taxing (I don’t think I had to repeat myself primarily due to language. Her English was pretty good. It seemed like she was waiting until she got the answer she wanted).

 

Emotionally, I was tired of being played. 

 

I know that travel companions usually keep pretty well together. But after a few days of all the drain James and I decided an evening alone would help us be better people the next day. It had been a long day anyway: we were coming back from Jade Dragon Snow Mountain soaked and quite chilled besides the fact that we had had to hitch hike and then find our old driver because she neglected to mention that the driver we hired was going to leave – with our stuff in his van. 

 

So on the long walk back to the hostel I proposed the idea that we separate for the evening and get all our respective errands run (we all needed to buy plane tickets and she wanted to go get a temporary tattoo…I wasn’t too excited about the prospect of helping her on that one since I objected on moral grounds to the image she wanted). 

 

I explained it to her but she kept asking when we were going to have dinner together. No dinner together tonight, I said. So she asked when we’d be done with showers. I didn’t know (steaming hot showers and dry clothes were definitely in the plan). 

 

So when were we free for dinner? Again, no dinner. We all had things to do and not enough time if we went together. Then she got all huffy and said she was in a bad mood. Naturally, her mature response almost made me change my mind. But since we had a new hostel that night, I helped her figure out where her room was and how to use the key…because apparently she couldn’t ask the staff?

 

She now wanted a shower too and bemoaned the fact that there was no complementary soap. I suggested she check out the convenience store right across the alley.

 

I thought all was settled for the night. But just as I was about to head to the shower a knock came. Could she borrow our shampoo and soap? With the noise from our shower running in the background (it took time to heat up), I squeezed out some shampoo for her into a little baggy. She also wanted our soap but we were just about to be clean out, ha ha.

 

A minute later, another knock. I quickly put my clothes back on. Her key was stuck. I was having trouble believing that anyone had this many needs and problems on accident but I bit my tongue and pretended to be nice. 

 

During my shower she texted to ask what I was doing “right now” (I didn’t reply). And just as James and I were putting on our shoes for a relaxing dinner out, a knock and the crowning moment came: were we going to dinner and did we want to go together?

 

My face must have betrayed my shock, my astonishment, the bewilderment. I’d literally gone over this five times with her. 

 

Some words fell out of my mouth about us planning to go alone and her needing to get errands run but she just stood there expectantly staring at me. I was backed into a dilemma – the only way out was either acquiescence or rudeness. With one last pleading look at James (tacitly answered with an, “are you even kidding me right now?”), I said we could go together if she wanted – she did – BUT we were planning on Korean BBQ and the night before she’d said she didn’t like BBQ.

 

Tonight she liked it. 

 

 

After those shining deposits into my trust account, she asked me to  “tell her my secrets,” asked me to write her a post card (meaning I didn’t have time to finish my own cards to family), asked for copies of all my photos (thousands), constantly asked me to take pictures of her, wanted to use my computer again because she “went to bed too late and got up too early to use the hostel’s computer” – whatever that meant. Anyway, we were 2 hours late again.

 

And the funny thing is that she seemed to think that we couldn’t very well get along without her. To be fair, her translation came in handy a few times. And I’m not disputing that. I’m just asking if 3 resolved situations earn a net gain of 21 hours of delay and bundles of stress every day. 

 

After Tiger Leaping Gorge, Drama went back home for university stuff.

 

The day after James and I had the most relaxing day and best food of the trip up to that point. 

 

Otherwise, having a local doesn’t guarantee better travel. After all, would you make a good guide to Wyoming if you’d never been there even though you speak the native tongue?

 

Knowing the language is only really useful if you know the right questions to ask and certainly doesn’t make up for doing research. Most of the time I knew more about the places we were going than Drama did. 

 

On the other hand, I was reminded that communication takes time and patience. Differing cultural expectations and modes of travel can cause piles of confusion. Chinese tend to be less direct; Westerners tend to call that lying. Perhaps she considered my directness rude. 

 

Later that school year I related some of this story to a few of my best students and they were appalled. In their opinion “she had problems” that couldn’t be excused as cultural differences, which made me feel good inside.

 

So did Drama ever come through and give us a glimmer of hope by paying me back for that $300+ plane ticket etc.? Not a chance. She performed consistently throughout. Honestly, after a few months of texting her about it and even trying to go through her school adviser I thought I couldn’t possibly be astounded again, but like always, she came through with a doozy:  if I needed money, she told me, then my own family should pay me for her debt.

 

I didn’t get the logic either. The long 10 month string of text messages are incredible to read but far too long to relate here. I know you want to hear all about them – but really, you’ve suffered enough already.