Lynn had seen the number 5 bus at the bus stop near her new house and had a suspicion it went somewhere exciting out of the city. So we decided we should get on it and see where it went. We picked a sunny day and packed our bus passes and hopped on the number 5.
We followed the route on the map but within 10 minutes we were off the map heading into unchartered territory eastwards to God knows where. After some time the bus stopped and everyone got off. So we got off. It was not a very promising place, just a cement works. So we decided to continue our journey on bus 123.
I asked a friendly looking man at the bus in my best Chinese to point out a place on the bus timetable which would be nice to go to. He pointed to a place 10 stops down the line. Lynn and I got on the rickety vehicle, paid our 10p and after 30 minutes ourselves in the middle of Tangshan, the town for the hot springs.
I’m sure the hot springs are lovely but the town is dire – nothing pretty about it at all. We had a rummage around the back streets and found a great dog who, if you clapped would stand on his back legs for you. I quickly got out my camera but would he get up on his hind legs again???? No chance, he was so stubborn. Even his owner, a woman surely on the wrong side of 80, couldn’t persuade him to pose for the camera.
We boarded the bus with a view to heading back home. However, after we stopped at some traffic lights the bus broke and we spent a good ten minutes watching the driver trying to coax it into action again.
Getting off where we boarded, at the end of bus route 5, we spotted something that looked like a tourist spot. We walked under a concrete flyover to find only a tree lined road where we sat and ate a melon, some bananas and a couple of over-ripe mangos.
Lynn then decided, with her in-built brilliant sense of direciton, that the bus number 21 would take us somewhere really interesting and so we waited and waited and waited. All we saw was a motorised cart with a load of grass. Eventually after an age, a number 21 came down the lane.We jumped on, excitedly.
In fact all it did, much to our embarrassment and the other passengers’ amusement, was take us several hundred metres up the road to a small bus depot. We got off again!
We eventually arrived back in Nanjing without any further incidents with a felling that we had indeed been a bit intrepid. This has paved the way for another foray into the unknow, maybe next week, this time north of Nanjing.
Who knows what we will find. “There be dragons”