To the site

I might as well start finishing this unending series of stories about my trip to China. So, the last day, after visiting the western end of the Great Wall, we went back to the hotel; the ones who had to leave on that day, such as me, checked out; we had lunch; and boarded the buses to go to Jinta, the place where we had the permits to see the eclipse. We were asked for our papers a couple of times the days before, I guess to write down our names in the list of people who could enter the site. The so-called security. GPS devices were not allowed and we were repeatedly asked the question if we had any GPS gadget. My answer was always the same: the more advanced thing I have on me is my (analog) watch.

The bus ride through almost completely desertic places, specially in the last part, was another show of the condition of the roads (not so bad as one could imagine) and the general driving style. Chaotic.



We were stopped for a long time in a road control before reaching Jinta. There were many buses, full of tourists, and somebody from each had to go to some tables set under some parasols, where policemen checked all the permits. Everything went ok until we reached Jinta, where it looked like, for some reason, they didn't want to let our bus through, when the other bus of our group had just gone by without any problem. After a while, a policewoman arrived with a car, did something and we went on some 500 m, where another control did not want to let us go into the parking zone. Immediately, the same policewoman arrived and they let us through. I asked some of the taiwanese what had happened, specially because of their comments only in mainland China, because I could not understand anything that was said, of course. It looks like the first control found that even if our bus had a permit to go to the site, it didn't have a parking permit. In the second one, they complained that there was a stamp missing in the paper we had been given two minutes before. Oh, well.


As soon as the bus stopped, people started setting up the telescopes and the supports for the cameras

and we prepared ourselves to wait a couple of hours before the eclipse began. Meanwhile, well, time to take pictures, to go up and down —I was not allowed to go to see a small reservoir that was nearby; I think I was to western-looking for my own good— and to hide from the scorching Sun of that afternoon. Fortunately, we had some food and drinks (cans of chinese stout beer?) and between jokes and stories it wasn't too bad.