Eight days in a backpacker’s oasis in Wuhan, China

Most of the time in China, you’re fully aware that you are in fact in China. The whole place feels, smells, looks, tastes, and sounds like China at all times. It really is its own private world.

However, in Wuhan, Masayo and I stayed at a youth hostel that was in a setting so typical of world hostels that we might have forgotten what country we were in if it weren’t for the noodle shops and the fact that we were planning our Yangtze River cruise.

Wuhan (武汉) is in Hubei Province, and it’s the biggest city in central China. That means that everything you want is available, but also that navigating the city can be a mystifying and smog-ridden affair.

Luckily, we were staying at Wuhan Pathfinder International Youth Hostel, in the Wuchang district which used to be a separate city before being combined with two others to create Wuhan.

Pathfinder Hostel was set back a little from the highway in a nice, nearly-bucolic wood and brick building. A surfboard out front propped in the ground gave the hostel’s name in Chinese: 武汉探路者国际青年旅舍. Say that three time fast.

Our private room had its own cold-water shower and Chinese-style floor toilet, and the common room had big tables and good wifi. Graffiti from other travelers, and assorted other stabs at art, decorated the walls.

Very youth hostel-y. So much so that it felt like a really modern and even Western resort right in the middle of the country. A place for homesick budget travelers to convalesce.

For the eight days we stayed in Wuhan, all we really did was work online, cross the big scary highway (with no intersection) to go to the grocery store or noodle restaurants, and walk around the immediate area of the hostel to stretch our legs a little.

Two aspects to our stay at the Wuhan hostel stick out in my mind, and they’re both musical in nature:

1. A young Chinese guy with thick glasses and spiky hair sat in the common room every day using his computer. He would play the same stupid pop song over and over and over all day at high volume. It was breathtakingly inconsiderate, not to mention brainless. Finally, one day I retaliated: on my own computer I played “Symptom of the Universe” by Black Sabbath, with its gruesome, muscular opening guitar riff, at full volume. The kid seemed startled but got the message; he didn’t torment us with his own music any more. Perhaps he learned self-awareness.
2. The girls who staffed the hostel were also playing some pop music over and over, but it started to grow on me after a couple days. It had a dense, psychedelic feel, sophisticated and cool and creative. I quite liked it, and finally asked what it was. The girl said Asteroids Galaxy Tour, a new Danish band. I got a copy of the album and continued to listen after we left Wuhan.

The main thing we accomplished in Wuhan (besides winning the music wars) was booking tickets for a three-day boat tour along the Yangtze River, the legendary and world-reknown waterway which in fact runs near the hostel.

So Wuhan was a nice little oasis on the China trip. I’ve been enjoying the trip a lot, and wasn’t looking for any respite from it, but the Pathfinder Hostel in Wuhan was like a little pause button anyway.

The travel gods work in mysterious ways. Maybe Wuhan was something we needed that we didn’t know we needed? Whatever. I don’t argue.

How do you take a break while on a long-haul trip? Do you find you ever need to “get away from it all” even while backpacking?

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