MOSTLY TRUE

It was 2010, and we were somewhere in Western China trying to get to a small town on the Tibetan border. There was no bus, and no taxi would take us there. We had reservations for the night, so we started to get desperate to find a ride.

My friend Adrian spoke enough Mandarin to get us into trouble, and we finally found an unlicensed driver to take the three of us there for a reasonable price. I had never used a black cab before, but it sounded above board, and we wouldn’t pay until we arrived.

The ride was gorgeous - Western Sichuan is impossibly beautiful - and it was just us Americans and a few orange-robed monks chatting as best we could. The driver told us we could listen to our own music, so, like a good American, I put some Tom Waits on and gleefully sang along in my best gravel-voiced impression. This amused the monks to no end. They laughed and laughed before finally switching to more traditional Tibetan music.

It was at this point things started to go wrong.

Nearing a town, about halfway through the trip, we turned a corner and… police blockade/ We had to get out of the car and crouch beside the forest road on our backpacks, hearing the officer in charge arguing with the illegal driver. The car was searched and our stories were asked, while police in the background kept automatic weapons at the ready. I’ve faced down plenty of assault rifles in my day, and this time was the most nerve-wracking.

After about an hour of confusion, lecturing, and waiting, the officer explained to us in broken English that it was illegal to take a black cab and told us what to look for in a cab (a certain certificate). He didn’t say what would happen to the driver. The monks found a ride from other monks, but we would have to wait to take a cab at our expense to the nearest town and figure it out from there.

As the driver left, we tried to palm him a percentage of the fee for getting us that far, but strangely he refused. He took off and it was just us and the police, smoking Chinese cigarettes that tasted more like cardboard and stained my fingers yellow.

Eventually, the official cab showed up and we loaded in. The town was about 15 minutes away, and the new cab driver spent the entire ride lecturing us about taking illegal cabs. Until… He quite suddenly stopped lecturing and asked if we wanted our previous driver back. Nervously trading glances and whispers, we suspected some kind of trap. No, we said, we’ll find a cab in the city.

This went back and forth for a while, until he suddenly pulled over on the side of the road - and who should show up but the original driver again? The two drivers hugged and joked for a minute while we looked on in confusion… was this the plan all along?

Apparently it was, since the new taxi driver refused our payment and helped us into the original car. Laughing nervously, we took off for the rest of the journey.

Was this a con game run on the cops? Was all this known beforehand and the price factored all of this in? Were the cops involved in it also? We couldn’t speak Mandarin well enough to figure it out, but decided to lay back and enjoy riding the long trip into the Tibetan tundra.

It even turned out that the driver knew our hostel owner and they hugged too. It ended happily in a cute, muddy Tibetan town at around 4,000 meters, where I instantly made many friends with my large beard and tattoos over the next few weeks.

But that’s another story.