The same Chinese
lady and her husband walk back early the next morning, and have a good laugh at
Joe and I as we sit outside the car drinking our morning coffee, looking out
over the valley of cornfields. She has a five minute conversation with us
(which we don’t understand) about how her son owns the big house on the hill,
and she’s going over there to pick peanuts, she also says that she’ll bring us
back some peanuts if we’re still there when she comes back, but we have to go. We
drive to Xi’an all day, with the usual near death experience of expressways –
people pulling crazy overtaking manoeuvres then slowing down to take a photo of
Bob, nearly killing everyone in their path.
We
arrive, at our wits end, in the rain and darkness at our hostel. Thinking all
is well, we park BOB on the street outside – just 20 meters or so from the
hostel front door, and head out for dinner. We opt for a busy restaurant and
are ushered upstairs where a big table of friends and laughing and yelling and
downing Baijo (rice wine), but as we’re getting ready to leave, things get
ugly, and the friends turn on each other and start a punch up, blocking the
exit for about half an hour. It’s still pouring rain as we run back to the
hostel, so we don’t do our usual final check of Bob. We’ve dropped our guard, which
is the biggest mistake we’ve made yet
