Challenge 13: ACCOMPLISHED!

My Books > The Great China Quest > Challenge 13: ACCOMPLISHED!

Click here for a special zoomed-in map with each place we caught a new vehicle!

Challenge 13: Hitchhike between two cities for less than the cost of the bus fare.

Huangshan was not only one of the first places we’d been to without a train station, it was also off the main bus routes. This, coupled with the stunning rural setting, made it the perfect place to attempt our hitch-hiking challenge.

We’d both been looking forward to this challenge although to be honest we didn’t know if it was even possible. Neither of us had ever seen a hitchhiker in China, let alone a foreign one. One lady we spoke to told us, “You’ll never do it. You’re foreigners so no-one will stop because they’ll be afraid of you.”

Just to make things harder, our destination, Changsha, was over 500 miles away – that’s the same as Phoenix to Salt Lake City and more than the length of England!

We left armed with paper and marker pens for making signs for towns to aim for along the way. We also had a flattened cardboard box with the words “To Changsha” written on it by Mr. Xie, our calligraphy teacher. With no idea how long our journey would take us, we started out early from outside our hotel.

Amazingly, within 30 seconds, two newlyweds stopped their car. “We’ll take you to the next town for 80 yuan” they offered. It was an expensive start, despite bargaining them down a bit, but we were unsure if any other vehicles would stop so we hopped in. “Impossible! No way you’ll make it!” the young husband said when we told him our plan. But actually it was the start of an incredible 2-day adventure that took us all the way to Changsha.

In total we took 7 rides: 3 trucks, 2 cars, a minivan, and a 4×4. We met a fascinating and diverse bunch of people and from the second ride onwards no-one wanted any money at all. It was a very fun 2 days which gave us some great stories to tell, including one of the biggest surprises of our whole trip (and it wasn’t that we almost got struck by lightning!).

You’ll have to watch the videos on our website to find out what happened and also see the near miss with the lightning.

Challenge Progress

Photos (click on them to see the full image)

(To see captions for each picture, please visit the website)

Videos

(To see video, please visit the website)

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