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An Eternal Holiday
It never rains but it pours
Well I got the visa. And all it took was the completion of six hundred forms, a few dozen photocopies, the odd fax and an awful lot of queuing. The foreign affairs bureau in Beijing seems to exist largely to employ countless members of staff. I had to queue for visa consultatation, queue to get an application form, queue to get an application for an urgent visa (I wanted mine same day rather than the standard 5 working days). I then went off to persuade a friendly local travel agent to photocopy some documents for me and receive a fax with my Tibetan permit on it. Then back to queue to have my photo taken (must be on a light blue background), queue to pay for the photo, queue to have the photo printed out, queue to get for urgency form signed (I picked a rather harried supervisor who looked as if he didn't care) and then queue to make the actual visa application. To my utter relief the offical told me I could pick the visa up at 3pm that day. But then out of the corner of my eye I saw her alter my form slightly. She'd changed the exit date from 26 August to the 10 August. She'd only given me a same day turn around as she'd thought I was leaving the country soon. Thank goodness I persuaded her to change it back and it was just a 3 hour wait to come back queue to pay for the visa and queue again to pick it up. Fantastic. Now I just had to book some flights, get some money and relax. Evening was spent missing the flag lowering ceremony at Tiananmen Square and falling for a classic scam of two students inviting me to have a meal with them (Peking duck in case you were interested) and then leaving me with the bill. As I'd even read about this earlier that day it was perhaps a little foolish to get caught out. Nice duck though.
Another flight, another problem taxi (this time it was a tetchy female driver and her mountain of receipts) and a bus ride and I was able to catch the group in Turpan. To my surprise I was greeted not with the hottest place in China (up to 49 degrees it is claimed) but the first rain they'd had for over a year. This was to cause a couple of problems as we left on the truck this morning (it arrived here at exactly the same time as I did) , got a mile out of town and found a flash flood had blocked the road. Maybe I'll get to Tibet one day....
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