Beijing 2018 |The Excursion

Call me a fool, or just morbidly curious, but I once asked my wife about the division of duties in our marriage.

You know, the split on the wife-husband workload.

She’s a trained certified public accountant who handles complex multi-million accounts, while I’m a thumb-sucking newspaper feature writer. She dabbles in the realm of high finance; I write little stories.

Why, then, am I the one tasked with managing our checking accounts, responsible of keeping track of the monthly bills?

“Well,” she said patiently. “In the corporation that is our marriage, I’m the chief financial officer and you’re a clerk. That’s a clerk’s job.”

Alrighty then.

As said CFO, my wife believes she possesses this grand global perspective, a seer able to gaze out at a complex world and develop strategies.

My role is to carry out her vision.

A step-and-fetch-it.

The theory plays out in our travels: Once a holiday destination is determined (the one detail we usually decide in congress), I do all the heavy-lifting; making reservations, sorting out the details.

As a journalist, that’s what I do. I research things. I enjoy it, actually.

Until it comes to organizing trips in China.

Many rural destinations here exist off the map of most American travel sites. Oftentimes, the best you can do is find some archaic Chinese government website, it’s original Mandarin translated into horribly-stilted English. The result are sentences that have the amazing capacity to contain absolutely no useful information.

This year, I warned my wife that we needed to start our research on any side trips before we even landed in Beijing. Booking in advance, we could claim better rates.

She decided on a weeklong trip to the Yangtze River in Hubei province, where we could visit the city of Wuhan and tour the scenic mountains near the ancient village of Enshi.

Okay dear, I said, your wish is my command.

I checked train and flight schedules, compared hotels in several of our stops, looked for the best sites to visit. In the end, I came up with a pretty good itinerary.

I booked nothing, of course.

I knew better.

Just days prior our departure from San Francisco, the grand visionary changed her vision. We would go to a different site in a different province: The mountains of Zhangjiajie in Hunan province are where she really wanted to go.

There was no time to develop any new plan; we’d have to do it once we arrived in China.

So, the other day, I sat at the dining table at my in-law’s apartment and scrolled through various dull government tourist sites. Actually, Zhangjiajie was pretty cool. There are mountainous parks with granite monoliths thrusting through the fog, like in some ancient Chinese painting. The Hallelujah Village in the movie Avatar was inspired here.

I got to work: The flights from Beijing were fairly cheap. There were some nice hotels in nearby Zhangjiajie city and the bus station with transportation to the various surrounding parks was centrally located.

After a few hours of planning, my wife got another brilliant idea:

Why plan the trip ourselves, like a couple of peasants? Why not hire a tour company and let them do all the work?

I was skeptical. She didn’t have a very good track record here. She was out of her league as a trip planner.

A few years ago, on an excursion to faraway Xinjiang province near Tibet, I left it to her to organize a several-day jaunt to the countryside outside the capital city of Urumqi. (Pronounced, hilariously enough, Your-Room-Key.)

Without access to a computer, I couldn’t look over her shoulder.

So, what’s there to see, I finally asked.

Her inarticulateness was stunning. All she could come up with for us to see and do on the trip were what she called the “three wows!”

That was it; the sum of her research.

We went. I looked in vain for anything that resembled a wow.

And call me jaded, but I tend to avoid tours like I would Legionnaire’s Disease. Just the idea of seeing a bus pull up at a destination and open its doors to disgorge a waddle of squabbling tourists makes me want to stay at home.

My idea of travel is to plan yourself, go yourself.

But then, I’m just a clerk.

Okay dear, I said, giving in, let’s hire a tour guide.

An hour later, it was all arranged. Hotels. Tickets to sites. Meals.

I asked my wife if any of the places I’d originally researched were on the itinerary. She couldn’t say, insisting that it was difficult to translate the Chinese into English.

I asked for an itinerary. She made a call. What we received was something laughably stilted, with language like this, not a whole lot better than the “three wows!”:

“The downhill time is freely controlled by the guests. You can talk to the tour guide and play for a while on the top of the mountain. Because the plane is late, it’s not in time.”

If you say so.

So, we’re off. If I never return, it’s been nice knowing you all.

Because as we all know, if the plane is late, it’s not in time.