It Begins for Real
Posted by robynh | Filed under Total Solar Eclipse: Live from China
It’s 2:00 am and I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for the last seven members of our crew to arrive. A group of young ladies is just leaving the karaoke club and the hotel guard is waving his metal-detecting wand like a baton.
It’s a 26-hour journey from San Francisco to Urumqi. I know how hard it is to arrive in a foreign place in the middle of the night, so I figure seeing a familiar face will be reassuring (and I need to tell them that they have to be on the bus at 8 am instead of 10 as we had planned). I had hoped they could get a little sleep and a long shower before the 10 hour bus ride to Yiwu, but XJTV said we could join their caravan: it’s too good an offer to refuse. We will be following two satellite uplink trucks and a production van….and led by our own police escort! The local police have instituted a new, slow speed limit, but with our escort, we’ll be allowed to speed along. There will be at least two checkpoints along the way where our bus will be boarded and our baggage searched. I’m hoping that as part of the caravan we may get waved through.
Sleeping on the bus is important, as XJTV wants to interview everyone on the crew at 10 am tomorrow (Wednesday), and then we will begin setting up our telescopes.
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