Chinese fruit smuggling and the bus ride from hell

While I’m in Baku for the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup, I thought it’d be fun to rework some posts from the old blog I kept during my time in China and publish them here. You get new posts, and I get to focus on football and stuffing my face with Azerbaijani food. Win-win.

Today’s flashback took place in April 2008. I was living in Dalian at the time, and wanted to visit a good friend who was teaching English in nearby Taiyuan. While only a 90-minute flight away, I was 18 and cheap and thought I’d try the long-distance bus. It turned into a 21-hour ordeal that included many, many boxes of fruit and zero bathrooms.

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The trip was doomed from the beginning. That morning, I arrived at the Dalian bus station two hours early to buy a ticket to Taiyuan — only to learn there was no ticket booth.

Tickets had to be purchased on the buses themselves, so I followed a questionable-looking tout who nearly led me to buy a ticket and board a bus headed to Kaiyuan. After explaining that I wanted to head to Taiyuan, I was a shot a variety of dirty looks and everyone around me muttered something I’m sure was about tones.

After buying the right ticket — 350 yuan, or 50 USD at the time — I was told to come back at 11:30 to board the bus. At said time, I stepped onto the bus only to hear from the driver and his ticket wench, “We don’t recognize you. We don’t recognize this ticket. Who sold you your ticket?”

I pointed to my ticket-seller.

“Nope, not possible. Don’t recognize you; get off this bus.”

I began freaking out — was I just ripped off 350 kuai?! Luckily, someone came running over and confirmed I had indeed purchased the ticket.

But thanks to this hassle, bus ticket lady decided she did not like me. She wasn’t happy to let me on, then I wasn’t happy that I had to take my shoes off to board the bus; she wasn’t happy that I wasn’t happy about the whole shoe situation.

So just as I settle into a bunk, she tells me to get up. Ticket wench then points to a mattress in the very back of the bus.

“You get that one,” she orders.

I move my bags over, make peace with my surroundings — staring, smelly men and a pile of discarded mattresses — and we’re finally off to Taiyuan.

———

Not long after we depart, the bus pulls over. The crew load some unidentified cargo into the bus hold. No big deal.

Half an hour later, we pull over again. And then again.

Soon there’s no room left down below, so everything must be moved onto the bus itself. That’s when we learn what the precious cargo is:

Boxes…upon styrofoam boxes…of FRUIT.

I later figured out they were nectarines — I had plenty of samples to analyze as the crew kept nicking handfuls from the boxes and feeding them to everyone, presumably to keep us from griping about the situation. (“Who cares if we’re running four hours behind? I have FREE NECTARINES.”)

By the time all the damn fruit had been loaded on board, the boxes took up a good third of the back of the bus. Every free space, every nook and cranny was filled with fruit. Green leaves were dangling everywhere. 

Now these buses are cramped to begin with — imagine a regular-sized coach bus, but throw in three rows of bedframes with an upper and lower bunk in each row. I went from having a liiiittle space to maneuver, to having absolutely NONE.

The crew kept moving boxes until my bed was surrounded by fruit — not only from the back to the front, but also from the floor to the ceiling. It felt very Cask of Amontillado-ish.

You know what a terrible, horrible noise styrofoam makes when pushed against other pieces of styrofoam, right? Now multiply that by 300. And try to fall asleep to that lullaby.

I’m then informed there aren’t enough beds for passengers coming on at a later stop, so a mattress must be placed in the space between the fruit boxes and me. The mattress was wider than the space available, meaning it cut into my personable bubble.

Needless to say, the woman who arrived later to to find her bed nearly on top of mine was a bit shocked.

She complained quite a bit, so to make her feel more comfortable the bus crew placed a mattress atop a pile of boxes in the aisle, and she slept between two people — instead of between one person and a stack of fruit boxes ready to fall and crush her at any second.

Lucky for the alternate bus driver, this woman’s move meant he got a cozy little place to nap in between drives. Unlucky for me, this arrangement meant that every time he moved, I got elbowed in the face. I was also uncomfortable sleeping that close to a strange man, so for a while I slept sitting up, with my head in my hand and my elbows on my knees.

Besides being sleep-deprived and driven crazy by the sound of squeaking styrofoam, by this point I also really needed to pee. They wouldn’t let us off the bus during previous fruit-loading breaks, so I was anxiously waiting for the next rest stop, which took place in the middle of the night.

Of course, the next stop was also a police checkpoint.

When the crew found out officers were coming on board for a routine check, they raced to throw blankets over all the boxes of fruit (because floor-to-ceiling blanketing that obscures almost half a bus does not look suspicious in the least).

Of course, they first chucked a few nectarines into my hand to buy my silence. I didn’t eat them for fear of my bladder exploding into my intestines.

Two hours later, we were allowed to continue on our merry way down the dark highway to Taiyuan.

———

The bus had left at noon the day before and was due to arrive at 6 am. Thanks to the fruit loading and checkpoint delays, we did not pull into the station until 10 am, at which point I had been holding my bladder for 15 hours. I ran into the station bathroom — the first and only time I’ve ever not cared about being in a door-less bathroom, surrounded by twenty women watching me pee.

To be fair, I don’t know if we actually were part of an illegal fruit smuggling operation. I don’t even know if fruit smuggling is a lucrative business. But judging by the secretive actions of the bus crew, especially when the police came on board, I’m guessing there was something not completely legitimate about their fruit transportation.

Regardless, it was a long time before I ate a nectarine again. To this day, the sight of them makes me hear faint squeaks of styrofoam in the distance…

What’s your worst transportation story? Is fruit smuggling a thing? Share your thoughts in the comments!