As I prepare to travel next week, I started thinking about taking the taxi in Cozumel to head to a place called Chakanaab that my friends suggested. But as I thought of taxis, I was reminded of this story that I experienced once in China:
It was probably mid-October. Saebra and I had just finished our trip to Chengdu to see the pandas and were nearly home. Our plane landed at the airport around midnight, and we headed outside, tired and hungry, to grab a taxi home. As we approached the parade of taxis we handed them the paper our liaison had given us with our address. The first taxi driver took the paper, glanced at us, and held up his fingers, "Sam bai quai!" (three hundred yuan??!). No. Way.
We knew very well from experience that it was 40-45 yuan MAX to get home, even in bad traffic. We showed him this with our fingers, and tried to gesture at the meter in his car, but he just walked away. We headed to another driver, who had seen the whole thing, and gave him the paper. He looked at it and scratched his beard... then grinned as he held up his fingers. 280 quai. No. Way.
Frustrated, Saebra and I looked around for another driver, but they were all huddled around us, watching. It's kind of hard not to draw attention to yourself when you're Americans in China. The lowest price we found was 200 yuan. None of them even spoke English, and a lot of them, we were pretty sure from their mannerisms, didn't even know where the address was.
Finally, Saebra said, "I don't care if we spend the night in the airport. There is no way I'm spending 200 yuan (which is about 35 dollars) to get home."
I followed her as we made our way back inside. We were about halfway, when we heard a shouting and turned around. A man ran up to us and held out his hand for the paper. We handed it to him and he read it. He looked a little confused, then looked up at us, then offered sixty quai.
Sixty. Saebra and I looked at each other. I told him fifty. He held up his hand and said sixty again. Then grabbed Saebra's luggage and, still holding our address, walked off. Of course, we followed and let him pack our stuff in the car. Hungry, tired and frustrated, we succumbed to the tourist tax. After all, he was driving a blue and yellow taxi which were supposed to be the best. The greens we weren't supposed to trust as much.
I sat in the front, and the driver began to go. He looked at me and said some stuff in Chinese and I just shrugged my shoulders. A few miles down the road he stopped the car at an intersection. He pointed in a direction and asked me something in Chinese. Again, I shrugged my shoulders as he decided that direction must be right and kept driving. He then pulled out his phone. As he spoke to the unknown person on the other line I distinctly heard "mei guo da" which means "American" so I knew he was conversing about us. I also heard him say the name of the Hotel right by our apartment.
He started yelling at the person on the other end. Surprisingly this didn't surprise me since Chinese people often appear to be a lot angrier than they really are. Then he hung up. Then he lit a cigarette. Then he apparently said something funny in Chinese again to himself because he started laughing.
Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. It was only about thirty minutes to the airport. I knew we must be getting close. Forty minutes... fifty.......
The man slowed a little more. We were on some giant highway all by ourselves. He looked around, confused. I started to look around too, desperate to recognize SOMETHING in this foreign country. And then, I saw it! High rise apartment buildings just like the ones where we lived. I pointed excitedly and said "duay!!!" which is a form of saying "correct." I was so thankful I had bothered to learn that word.
He looked at me, confused, and then got off at the next exit to head down there. As he went, I recognized more and more and directed him, asking him to turn, only pointing and saying "duay" as that's all I knew. I didn't know the roads, but I knew the direction I wanted to go and I just went from there. Finally, we went past the school, and just a moment later we pulled up to the hotel which was just down the road from where we lived. I gave him his sixty yuan, which was probably well deserved for going so far out of his way. It was now more than an hour since we had left the airport and I was ready to be done with taxi drivers.
He pulled our stuff out of the trunk and went to walk into the hotel with us. We shook our heads, stood at the entrance of the hotel and waved goodbye to him. It took him a minute, but he finally got the message. He smiled and waved before getting back in his car and driving off.
We were finally home.
Or so we thought. After that ordeal, we dealt with being locked out of our complex because it was the middle of the night, our liaison's phone was turned off, we awoke a street security guard who took off running after we showed him we were locked out, then a drunk guy came up to us to try and help. The drunk guy grabbed our luggage and we ended up following him to get home.
I couldn't make this stuff up, people! It's a miracle I'm alive today. That's all I'm saying.
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