April 11
Our train arrived and we walked the Main Street, trying to find the bus station. We found it after no help from anyone and then took it to Yangzhou, an hour bus ride away. We got to our hotel and booked a boat tour today to see the famous mountains along the river. We took a van to the boat and the boat workers tried to get everyone to buy super expensive meals, but we just walked passed them and went to the top. After an hour of cruising, we got to the famous part of the river where there were very steep, pointy mountains that lined the sides of the river. It was a neat sight. After the boat tour, we walked far on a dirt path to a bus that took us back to Yangzhou. Once back, we tried to find a bus/train ticket office. Travel agents here are so stupid. The people don’t understand the concept of connecting trains. As a traveler here, you need to know how to get where you want to go and then teach the travel agents how to do it. For example, we wanted to go to Zhangjiajie, which is the other most famous part of China for mountains. The travel agents had no solutions for how to get there. We had to explain to them that there is train station there. They said that there is no direct train though. We said, yeah but there is a station that we can connect through to get there. They were surprised but we were right. Who knew that train stations connect through a network and that there are more than one path to major places? Shocker. After two hours of trying I figure this simple puzzle out, someone tried to book it, and the train system was down. We went back to our hotel, decided to skip the mountains and fly right to Shanghai tomorrow. We walked around the town and tried to calm ourselves down from our day of interacting with incompetent people. We ate some dinner and hung out in our hotel. Very frustrating day.