On Day 9, we drove four hours (in that DAMN BUS!!!) from Tralin to Dawan, home of the Huatai newsprint mill. This mill uses 100 % deinked wastepaper to produce newsprint for domestic and international consumption. Amazing...they have one machine that is the largest and most modern newsprint machine in the world. 11.25 meters wide....running at 1600-2000 meters/min, dilution headbox, gap former, twin shoe presses. They are making 450,000 tons per year right now on one machine, but their target is 3,000,000 tons per year by 2010 on multiple machines. You could have eaten dinner off of their operating floor.
We were not permitted to take many photos. This is their anaerobic wastewater treatment system. They use a very advanced 4-stage system, which removes even color.
On the tour, they showed us their new employee housing on site. It was amazing -- looks like Cary condos...
Afterwards, of course, we had another 12-course lazy susan lunch, courtesy of the mill.
After lunch, we took another 2-hour ride on THAT DAMN BUS to the Jinan airport. This is a medium-sized airport in the Guangdong airport. We had an early-everning flight to Beijing. There was a 3-hour wait for our flight, so we amused ourselves as best we new how.
Cards, beer, and souvenir shopping. All was well. Little did we know that all was NOT well.
Okay, so here's where it got bad. All day, as we drove on THAT DAMN BUS for hours and hours, we noticed a persistent fog all over the place. It did not feel like typical fog weather, so we assumed it was pollution. As the day wore on, the fog grew denser. What we did not know was that a cold front had moved in from Mongolia, creating an air inversion that was trapping all moisture, particulates, smoke, and pollution at ground level. As we waited for the plane to depart, the fog grew denser and denser. It became so prevalent that it entered the terminal and began to accumulate in the upper part.
Naturally, flying planes in dense fog is not a good idea. So they cancelled our flight about 30 minutes prior to departure. This left us in a strange situation -- Dr. Chang had already left by car to go to his next appointment. We had no one that knew Mandarin. We knew that waiting for the next day's flight would not be a sure thing -- what if the fog were still around the next morning? What if we lost an entire day of our limited 2-day Beijing tour? As the flight cancellations began to accumulate, the citizens in the airport began to yell, to scream, and to fight. Lou Boos and I began to worry -- how to keep our students out of harm's way? We struck up a converstation with a Chinese businessman standing at our gate. and he said that the train to Beijing was probably already full (people were streaming out of the airport toward the train station). Our only option was bus. ANOTHER DAMN BUS!!!!
We called Dr. Chang in distress. He contacted a local NCSU alum in the area, and -- by some miracle -- he was able to scratch up a tour bus and driver to take us to Beijing. Now THAT'S what I call influence....
Here's a photo of students waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for the bus. They were remarkably patient and good-humored, even though they knew that they were about to spend another 6 hours of time on another cramped tour bus, after being on one for 8 hours on the previous day and 4 hours today.
Well, we loaded up the bus (it was so small that we had to line luggage down the isle). And what transpired next was certainly the most harrowing, the most surprising, and honestly the most frightening part of the entire trip. It was surreal. The driver drove up to the toll gate leading onto the highway to Beijing - all lanes were showing CLOSED. They closed the highway? And that's when I thought to myself, "Hmm...if a plane can't fly because visibility is less than 3 feet, does that mean driving a bus is a good idea?" Then our bus driver took off at a crazy speed down some unlit side streets, through neighborhoods looking they were bombed, backing up when the road ended and finding another way through. What we found out, later, is that he was taking a short cut to the next entrance to the freeway. But I was a mess...the students were sleeping ( a defense mechanism, I think).
We finally got onto the freeway...and OH MY GOD it was a steady, endless stream of heavy trucks moving at about 35 miles per hour. You could not see anything around you. But our bus driver took up the charge, driving on the shoulder and median to thread his way around these slow-moving trucks. For those of us awake, it was like some bizarre video game. I will never forget it. We stopped at some unlit, scary rest area at 3 am, praying for water or soda. We found it, sold to us by a young girl who looked at us like we were aliens.
It took us about 8 hours to make the 6-hour drive to Beijing. As the sun began to rise, students began to stir and look out on the massiveness of the fog. We all realized that staying at the airport would have been a mistake. Our guide was waiting at the hotel, and we decided to give the students 3 hours of washing/sleeping time and drop two of the sights we had planned for the day.
My gosh, what an experience. I promise you that the students will never forget it, ever. We drove the equivalent distance between New York and Miami.
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