Delayed Departure (Friday)

Delayed yet again.

Delayed departures seemed to be the recurring theme of this trip. Our flight from Nanchang to Beijing was delayed over an hour. That created an issue because we were already arriving in the evening, and we had a motorcycle sidecar tour scheduled for about 8pm. We would have made it on time but for the last couple of blocks before the guest house. We’d arranged to stay at a “Hutong Guest House” in downtown Beijing. The pictures and reviews looked good. What they don’t tell you is that getting to the guest house is an adventure all its own. We made it from the airport to within a couple of blocks of the guest house by about 7:50pm. Not bad, or so we thought. Hutong streets are very narrow and wind around in the neighborhood. We were in a minivan that was just barely small enough to make it down the streets under the best of conditions. However, there were other cars parked along the street, pedestrians walking, scooters scooting, and other vehicles coming the opposite direction. When this happens, one of the vehicles has to back up to a point where there’s enough room to move over and let the other car pass. The first time this happened it was a work truck offloading something. The truck had to move back a little after we moved onto a sidestreet. Then a BMW came down the street from the other direction, so we had to work our way around that car, too. The worst one happened after coming around a corner. We met another car just after making the turn, and knew that the last place open enough for us to get out of the way was back quite a ways. So we started to back up in this narrow alley with cinder block walls tight on both sides and cars parked wherever there was room. At the corner there was just enough room, if we went as far as possible to the left, for the other car to tuck in right at the corner and each vehicle jockey a few inches at the time until we were past one another. Just a block from the guest house (although we didn’t know that at the time) we met two more cars coming the other way. This time there were a bicycle and a motor scooter parked in the road preventing us from passing. Our guide got out and started asking who owned them. A lady came out of a store and gave her permission to move the bike. Only after several minutes did a man who was sitting at a table about ten feet in front of the van get up to move the scooter. He’d obviously seen what was happening and made no attempt to get up and move the scooter. Once he did move it, he sat back down at the table with his friends, just inches from where we’d have to pass. He never made any attempt to scoot his chair in, even though the street was too narrow for us. We did eventually make it past that obstacle and Charlotte started looking for house numbers to locate our guest house. Well, we ended up back out on the main street we’d left almost 45 minutes earlier before starting our hutong driving fiasco. It turns out we missed a turn (one I don’t think the van could have made anyway) and had to carry our luggage several blocks anyway…hutong blocks, not city blocks, there is a difference…to the guest house.

Hutong Guest House Pictures...