Bad Guides

"So you're not coming with us," my aunt said to our tour guide, Kevin. It wasn't a question.

"No, he's coming with us," I assured her.

"No," said our guide. "I'm not."

I finished slurping my noodles through sunburned lips and winced. "You're not?" I was the only person in the room naive enough to still be phrasing my sentences like questions.

"Something has come up," he non-explained passively in that thick Chinese accent that always sounds too dynamic to our Midwestern ears. My aunt looked unsurprised by this completely unexpected turn of events. Then again, she'd never really liked Kevin and we always suspect the worst of people we don't like.

Sometimes with good reason.


"Mr. Wang will take you to the train station and make sure you get on the right train to Turphan. I have given him all the information."

Mr. Wang (pause for inevitable name-induced snickering) was our driver, who we had met with Kevin two and a half days previously when we arrived in Dunhaung, China. Of course, I suspected Mr. Wang's name was as fake as Kevin's, and that the tour company recycled through these Chinese-sounding names that Americans can pronounce only so the Americans know they don't speak English. English-speaking Chinese people always have English names. Like Kevin.

He was now re-explaining that it would take two hours to drive to the train station, as if to imply he couldn't spend the next four hours of his life driving through the desert and back again. As if he wasn't getting paid to do exactly this.

He ended his pointless explanation by meekly asking, "Would you mind taking a picture with me?" He held up his phone.

"Oh sure," said my aunt, her voice dripping with forced sincerity. "Only if we can take one too." She held up her camera, the one we had to pry open with a toothpick since she'd dropped it in the sand.

My aunt and I stood on either side of Kevin while Mr. Wang took the pictures, both of us refusing to so much as put our arms around Kevin in a posed gesture of comradere.

As we crammed ourselves in the back seat of the car with our backpacks, Kevin opened the passenger door. For a moment, I thought he'd changed his mind, that he wasn't abandoning us at the last possible moment when my aunt was paying him to take care of us.

"Here is my phone number, if you need to call." He handed us a slip of paper, apparently forgetting our American phones don't work in China and we were about to drive through a desert with no signal.

"Thank you," my aunt said dismissively, taking the paper and setting it on the hump seat between us. At least the bastard had the decency to look conflicted as he ducked out of the car. I pocketed the number as we drove out of Dunhuang, thinking if nothing else it would be fun to prank call him from a hotel.

As we drove, I found it hard to believe that so many Chinese people are atheist, considering the landscape is the kind that makes you pray to God that you don't blow a tire and die a slow painful death. I tried to distract myself with a book, but the barren scene outside the window was mesmerizing in the kind of horrific awe-inspiring way that gives you an existential crisis. Maybe that's what causes all the atheism.

After about half an hour of questioning the meaning of life, we pulled into a gas station. The driver stopped about fifty feet from the pumps, got out of the car, opened my aunt's door. The hot desert air rushed to greet us as he gestured for my aunt to get out. My aunt and I exchanged confused glances before she turned to the driver to say, "I don't understand," with an exaggerated shrug. Mr. Wang continued to urge her out of the car, pointing to a small vegetable garden on the outskirts of the gas station parking lot. We looked to where he pointed. A tiny woman wearing a scarf around her hair was perched on a stool.

"I don't understand," my aunt repeated more slowly. Mr. Wang's smile had officially grown what you call "forced" and he desperately implored the scarfed woman to come over.

"This is definitely not the train station," I said, just to make sure this fact was completely obvious to everyone. Mr. Wang and the scarfed woman shared some words in Chinese. My aunt and I shared some confused looks of panic. I fished Kevin's phone number out from between the pages of my passport--if we were going to be left in the middle of the desert because someone had gotten the words "train" and "gas" confused, Kevin would certainly be held responsible for picking us up.

The little woman was now also gesturing for my aunt to get out of the car. Finally, after one more puzzled glance at me, she slowly stepped outside. Mr. Wang smiled and nodded reassuringly, shut the door, ran around back, and opened my door. I looked at my backpack.

"All our stuff is in the car," I thought out loud. The scarfed woman was leading my aunt to her stool in the garden.

I considered my options. I could refuse to get out of the car and we could sit here until we (a) missed our train or (b) Mr. Wang got back in the car and drove us to the station, or at least back to Dunhuang. Or I could get out the car and risk being abandoned thirty-five miles from the nearest town. Even though the first option seemed like a better deal, I considered the fact that my aunt had gotten out of the car. Although not a perfect human being (who is?), my aunt has visited nearly every country  on the planet dating back to a self-guided European tour she'd taken when she was eighteen. She is the definition of world traveler. If she got out of the car, that should at least influence my own decision. So I double checked my fanny pack for everything not easily replaceable (passport, ticket, money, Kevin's number), and got out of the car.

Relieved, Mr. Want shut my door, hurried into the driver's seat, and started driving.

Time stopped, and I considered what exciting eulogy would be spoken at a funeral for two American women abandoned at a gas station in the middle of Western China. A gust of dry wind rumpled our shirts. The scarfed woman gave up trying to get us to sit on her stool. We watched pulse-less as our hired car and worldly belongings rolled away. Fifty feet later, the car stopped at the pumps. Mr. Wang pumped the gas.

It was about this time that we noticed others standing parallel to us near the gas station exit. All were dressed at least business casual and seemed perfectly at ease. My aunt suggested there must be no way of guarding people from petrol fumes, so maybe people with drivers are safer standing to the side.

And indeed, one by one the standers were picked up and driven away, ending with us and Mr. Wang. Looking back, I think about how frustrated Mr. Wang must have been dealing with these two idiot Americans who wanted to risk dying of a gas explosion rather than wait in the heat for a few minutes. I suppose this thing is bound to happen when you're stuck with bad guides who leave you with some poor soul who can't communicate in any way other than gestures and smiles.

Now some of you may be thinking, "Why did she start the tales of her Amazing Asia Trip with that story? Not only did it happen right smack-dab in the middle of her trip, but it sounds like a nightmare." Well I'll tell you: because this trip was one of journeys, not destinations. While we saw some pretty mind-blowing sites (which I do promise to talk about eventually), the majority of the trip was spent in lines: lines for cars, trains, train stations, airplanes, and airports. It was spent watching the tumultuous land and people around us and struggling to keep up with it all. In this way I will say that Asia made me more of an adult than a young adult, no matter how many times the men at customs refused to believe I was twenty one.

But more on that later.