CHINA
June 8th
This is going to be brief. After yesterday, I don’t feel up to writing much.
Maybe I might fill it out later…
On the plane, bound for Beijing, via Shanghai . Waved on board happily by Japanese airline people. Sitting on the plane, mostly too tired to muster the ability or urge to worry about what happens at Chinese customs as regarding my fake onward out of China plane ticket. As we get closer to Shanghai I have to conclude that I’m in the hands of the gods now. Either I get in… Or I don’t. Normally I would run through all sorts of imagined terminations of the event, but like I said… I can’t be bothered. Too brain-spammed.
The plane descends through special Chinese clouds; different from any clouds I’ve ever seen before. Weird shapes.
The plane taxis round the airport runway for twenty minutes. Nose to the plastic window, staring at the outside. In an hour I will either be out in it. Or not.
Lots of official looking people in the airport. Of course there is. It’s an airport.
Arrivals gate. A row of similarly young chaps in their twenties with blue shirts and peaked caps and ‘police’ on the tops of their arms.
Passport okay. That’s all. Off you go sir. I’m in! Walking up the long shiny welcome to China corridor to baggage collection. Buy sim card on the way.
Meet Nepali software engineer in the most spectacular maroon 70s psychedelic shirt. He’s very friendly, we chat about how Nepal is doing after the earthquake. His house was broken by it. Still not quite right. He spends eight months away from home to work. Now he is going home to see his wife and two young children.
Makes my little adventure seem trivial. Which of course it is. He’s going one way, I’m going another, so we say our goodbyes…
Collect rucksack off the carousel. They’re quite hypnotic when your tired.
Customs gate. Uh oh.
An area of serious looking baggage checkers. Scrutinising things. I make a point of casually not giving eye contact.
I’m out.
I’m REALLY out. Walking towards the exit, trying to figure out how I get to the other terminal that my onward plane to Beijing leaves from. A hand on my shoulder.
‘Excuse me sir!”
Oh shit.
‘Where are you going?’
But rather than accusation, the smiley man in the uniform wants to check if I need guidance. Which I do. Yes please which way to terminal two? He looks at my ticket details (the real ones) and gives me a look of horror. Terminal two is in a completely different airport. My flight goes in four hours. My other airport is on the other side of one of the largest cities in the world. I need to get there on the day that China embarks on a national holiday and the roads will be clogged.
Not wanting to miss my flight, I heed his urging for me to take a taxi. I never go in taxis. Too expensive. When the airport man hands me over to the taxi driver, the taxi driver is arguing that it can’t be done. Probably. I decide to go anyway. Some part of me is eager to be as far away from customs officials as possible.
Chatting with the driver who speaks reasonably good English, looking out over the surrounding city landscape of great concrete loops of motorway, and Sino-soviet apartment blocks it dawns on me that maybe getting on another plane and having to risk going through customs again would be tempting fate somewhat. And anyway, if I get out in Shanghai, I can travel northwards and see more of China whilst I’m at it.
I tell the driver not to bother with going to the airport and so whipping out the newly-purchased lonely planet to China guide on my Kobo Mini e-reader I find the cheapest hostel I can find, call them and he takes me there. In total, the ride only cost me 65pounds. Yikes. But, at least I am safely on the ground, and I haven’t just lost a whole load more money. And I also didn’t feel capable of trying to negotiate my way round Shanghai at night.
He tries wheedling me for twenty five English pounds. I give home twenty. He looks deflated. I am sure that probably has a special deflated face that he wears especially for such occasions.
I’m at an International Youth Hostel Association property, and it’s beautiful. There’s a square shallow pond with lots of happy fat goldfish zipping about in it. A few turtles turtlng about. King turtle sits on a rock surveying his tiny kingdom.
I meet some very friendly Californian guys who normally I would have loved to have sat chatting with. But as I’m talking to them, I notice that it’s all sounding a bit dribbly. I need to get into a nice cozy bed.
I shower, scraping a day of travel off. A young Chinese chap from further south wishes to talk with me. We try for a bit, me out of sheer politeness. He speaks almost no English, I speak no Chinese at all. Making effort is currently bottom of my list of things to do. I fiddle reluctantly with technology for an hour. I need to sleep. I love you sleep. Come to daddy little sleepy sleeps… Oh glorious sleeeeep….. Gnuuuuuuhhh.
June 12th
Pretty much as soon as I have arrived, I hook up with a German fellow called Dimitri, who is full of Shanghai sightseeing plans. Following his lead, we visit a enormously tall skyscraper and it’s viewing platform, offering a nighttime view of the science fiction landscape of dozens of futuristic brightly lit concrete and chrome shards. Dimitri has been in China for five months, so his experience is invaluable and saves me a lot of nonexistent brain effort. Visiting the Peoples Park near the hostel the next day, part of it has the always lined on both sides with about a hundred umbrella sellers, brollys all lined up on the pavement in a long multi-coloured line. We play badminton with an old guy, which is great fun. We discover a statue which for all the world looks like ‘the Buddha of the rugby balls’. A cheery chubby little fella, about to score a try.
The hostel is full, I can’t stay beyond my original booking, and swap to another some 3kms away. I went for the cheapest one I could find. I walk to get there, seeing a little of ordinary urban Chinese life, which has nothing in common at all with the shiny skyscraping city centre. It’s warm and a little humid, but nothing intolerable for a flaky Englishman. The streets are populated with people riding all kinds of electric bikes, scooters, micro scooters the very occasional petrol scooter.
The difference it makes being electrified rather than all petrol-driven is enormous. In Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, mopeds would squeal and roar and fart their way, way too fast, through the narrow cluttered streets, being an utter intrusion. Irritating.
Here, everyone glides about silently. Much better for the sanity. It’s still a little cluttered, and still somewhat chaotic, but it’s free of the crappy noise that scooters make.
My new temporary home, is in a pokey little darkened room with no windows and too many beds. I am informed that this is how China is. My room mates are straight forward and quiet, the air-con freezing and it’s all fine. I book in for a little longer to give myself a chance to recover from the last week which has been stressful; having spent almost all my available time stuck up the arse of the internet. In China trying to even get it to work has been sometimes an unwanted effort. Yesterday I did nothing that involved a computer screen, for the sake of my sanity.
Instead I took a stroll round the local area. Cluttered street-shops full of stuff that spills out onto the pavement reminds me of India, washing hangs high above from apartments above. Scooters and bikes weave in and out, but nothing too crammed. Their is space here. Fellas sit at trestle tables drinking tea and playing mahjong and cards. Others stand round them to watch the game. Electric trikes with loads that would be illegal in boring old Europe. Scooters carry loads between the rider and the handlebars; their kids, shopping, baskets of watermelons, sacks of cement.
Shanghai has cats; something of a rarity in Japan, I am very glad to see them again. They bring a certain kind of warmth to a place. Something else Shanghai has that Japan most definitely did not and that is an abundance of fruit. Cheap, fresh, super sweet and yummy. Familiar fruits, bananas, apples, several kinds of melons, cherries, kiwis, durian, loquats and a few new to me. I am now full of vitamin C! Hurrah!
Ice cream is cheap too. And very good. Of course. Ice cream is always good.
Noodles and cabbage and runner beans in the cafe next to the hostel. Sublime spices. Cheap. Fresh. Delicious. Food here is the best I have had on this entire trip.
After a little wander around the streets, I return to the hostel and sleep for probably about eighteen hours solid.
And now it’s morning, I’ve got my mojo back and it’s noodle time…. After that, find out whether to head north on a moped, if it’s possible, or whether to go by buses and trains… First, breakfast.
Written June 14th:
The next couple of days start to fall into something of a routine. Breakfast consists of either green beans and noodles or a bag of fruit and then sitting by the busy crossroads outside the hostel and watching the morning two wheeled traffic zipping about.
The day before I check out of Shanghai is a weird one. It’s a day for taking last minute photos of scenes that have impressed me; narrow streets full of bustle below and washing above, then the decidedly touristy Yuyaun hardens with its old-style curly-roofed area which is pretty much a glorified shopping area. I visit a temple for ten yuan, sitting at its edge soaking up its what I have imagine to be a Buddhist vibe. Feels very special… Then when I look around the temple, its loaded with effigies of what seems to be local townsmen armed with swords and scowls, facing each other and all ready for a massive fight, with us onlookers standing in the middle. A big golden Buddha-y guy sits in the middle presiding over events. Is this a Buddhist temple? Confucionist? Taoist or what? I’m certainly confused, so it must be the middle one.
People outside trying to sell me all sorts of junk I don’t want. Genuine Rolex watches, plastic flying drone things. Brightly coloured plastic things that flip about and make a racket. I mean, really, do I look like I’m five years old?
A chap at a stall sells packs of themed playing cards. Two packs of chairman Mao revolutionary posters, one with a different photo of the weird and scary colonel Gaddafi… Funny, but not what I need to fill my rucksack with.
Sitting outside in a quiet spot, two young people approach me, a very chatty woman and a quieter man, they tell me that they are English teachers on vacation from Beijing. We chat and they invite me to walk with them around town, so I start to walk with them. Then she suggests we go to see ‘the ancient tea ceremony’….
This is a scam. I had previously read about it, but I forgotten about it. I am caught with my guard down.
She leads us into a department store full of gold watches and shiny jewelry, past all that and strait into the back of the store into a pokey little room where a distinctly bored looking woman dressed in some kind of vaguely old fashioned gear blah-blah-blahs her way through some pre arranged script about the tea ceremony. Sitting in the pokey little room, my new ‘friend’ rattles hastily through an explanation of how it all works, including the fact that a cup of tea will cost 49 yuan (more or less a fiver). Thinking that ‘a cup of tea ‘ means the whole thing, I go along with it. The bored woman sloshes tea across three tiny tiny cups, with about as much grace as a dog licking its bollocks. What ‘ceremony’? I can’t see one. After each of us having three cups of tea, I am asked to buy some tea. I am informed that Chinese people consider it very impolite not to buy tea after the tea ceremony so I should buy some. Err.. No. I don’t want to buy tea. And I couldn’t give a shit if you find it impolite. We are presented with a bill for 730 yuan. About 73 quid. My chatty new ‘friend’ asks if I would mind paying half, as her silent boy fired is young and doesn’t have much money. Errr…. No, I think he can pay for himself, thank you. Turtling around for the outrageous one third of the bill in my pocket, my chatty friend is very interested in how many pockets I have, and enquires as to where I might keep my passport. I have really gone off this woman now.
We leave, she asks where my hotel is, tells me I should visit them in Beijing when I go there. I’m really not interested, and make a point of going the opposite way to them when we part. I was screwed. By some ‘friendly’ young woman who looked like a student. I feel shitty, and stay feeling shitty for the rest of the day. I had been really enjoying Shanghai, and this taints it all. I go and buy six packs of cards for the bargain price of ten yuan each. The guy selling them is a nice man at least.
The next day, I’m at Shanghai south train station having now expertly negotiated my way round the subway system. I ask a young European woman how I get on my train, and the woman stands up to tell me. She’s a German neurons scientist student (a real one this time) and has a very attractive energy about her. In August she is going to Cambridge to do her PhD.
After I thank her and go and sit down, I find myself unable to stop thinking about her. She was very sweet and sparkly, and her lovely vibe stays with me. It would be nice to meet her again… But for now I have a train to catch.
My journey by train to the southern town of Guilin will be twenty hours long sat crammed into one of six upright seats designed for your average small Chinese person. I am sat with five other chaps, all quite young. The guy sitting opposite me I can’t help thinking that he looks like Simon Cowell with his crewcut hair and square jawed features. But he’s clearly not Simon Cowell, so I resist the urge to blag him for enough money to go and sit in first class.
The six of us squirm and cramp our way to Guilin. One of them is intent on lying down and taking up as much space that isn’t rightfully his as is possible, which is very irritating. After a while I just squeeze him out of my way, playing him at his own game. I try sitting out by then train door where there is more space, but it’s full of men smoking cigarettes. There’s no air conditioning and none of the windows open. Yeaurgh.
At first, before nightfall, much of the landscape is filled with endless towns full of thirty storey high apartment blocks, over and over and over. What do you do with a billion and half people? Just stack ’em up! I think maybe the idea of limiting how many kids you’re allowed to have is not such a bad idea. When morning comes again, the dreary cities have gone, and mist draped hills surround paddis and drier farmland with little villages. Houses are enormous. There are no visible signs of degradation. I can’t help but think that maybe the cultural revolution, whatever its history, has done a neat job of eradicating visible poverty. In India, living in a big house was a lucky thing indeed, and very many people lived practically in the dirt sheltered by not very much at all. Chinese villages on the other hand are very well ordered. No piles of broken junk, no litter. I also notice that in a lot of places there are no cars. Must be peaceful to live here. Maybe I’m wrong. I often am.
The railway is lined with barbed wire fencing. A little ominous. I don’t know who that’s meant to stop? Regularly spaced hexagonal scaffold towers a hundred feet high with loudspeakers at the top. Maybe like Japan, they like to give villagers their early morning alarm clock calls. Or maybe to keep peoples heads filled with propaganda whilst they work? I can only imagine.
Eventually we arrive at Guilin, the nice train conductor reminding me of where my stop is. I’m a bit zombied and the forecourt to Guilin Station is a bit bonkers for my zapped mind. Flashing shop signs, taxi touts wanting my attentions. They can all bugger off. I want a wash.
It is absolutely throwing it down with rain. The hole in my left boot means soggy stinky foot. Uncomfortable to walk with, embarrassingly smelly when indoors. I need to get new boots. I also need to buy a new train ticket, and to find a post office. I could just go wherever a taxi tout wants to take me, though I suspect that it’s likely to lead to a thorough fleecing of some kind. And everything’s in Chinese. What to do?
A nice Canadian chap offers me the Chinese symbols for where I want to go next by train. I successfully purchase my onward train ticket, but the earliest I can go is tomorrow. So. Now I can add finding a room for the night to my list.
Escaping the noise and chaos of the train station I go to hide in a cafe and find my new Canadian friend again. His English friend with him turns out to be from Newbury, my home town, so that’s nice. It’s odd to talk to someone that doesn’t seem to have any accent!
They are about to book into a hostel, so I hook up with them. Saves me having to work it out too as well as them being nice people.
Originally my plan in coming here was to ride a bike for three days but I decided en route that I had gone into ‘skimming mode’ and didn’t really feel the enthusiasm to stay in the area for long.
The rain is relentless now, real monsoon stuff. There’s absolutely no way at all I would even think about cycling and camping in this. My tent wouldn’t stand a chance. It would get flattened. Four quid for a very nice room with good company at the Sun Palace Hotel is a much better option.
We go out for below-average but okay food (noodles with no sauce. All food must have sauce in my opinion) and return to the hotel to find ourselves sat on sofas surrounded by pretty young Chinese girls and one chap wanting to improve their English, so we spend the evening chatting with them. It occurs to me in the morning that possibly improving their English maybe might not have been their primary objective, but actually it all felt pretty innocent.
I chat with a tall blond Texan called Colin who’s dislocated his arm. He’s smiley and I like him, despite him being from redneck territory, speaking knowledgeably about guns (when someone else asks him). There are definitely some things about America I can’t comprehend no matter how I try, and I’m not about to try with Colin.
Where we are now is a prime tourist location. It’s the place in China where the Li river winds through an amazing landscape filled with tall pointy pinnacles of hill jutting out of the water. By rights, I should be making bee line for this tourist titbit, but I’ve already bought my ticket out for tomorrow. I take some consolation from the fact that my room mates have bypassed it too. No matter; my next port of call is the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River, so I’ll get my dose of waterworks there. Flippin’ expensive too apparently, but hey-ho, sometimes you have to splash the cash occasionally.
All along, I have been missing not being on two wheels; being able to stop when and where I like, not being locked into being inevitably dumped at some big city that I have no interest in. I will find myself back on two wheels again soon enough though. The upside is that it puts me on a more travelled road and I encounter people I can talk to and hang out with… Cycling and camping out is definitely a solo thing; I had only five conversations in all the time that I cycled through Japan. Europe will be a different story again, where many more people speak English. Yes I’m lazy. I don’t think I am going to cycle through a dozen different European countries and learn a dozen languages beyond very basic necessities….
Anyway, today is depart day, and another twenty hours of knee-numbing train terror up through the middle of China, northwards, in the direction of Beijing.
June 17th
Anticipating a repeat of the previous experience of playing sardines with reluctant strangers, the 18 hour journey proves to be decidedly more spacious this time. At one point a guy comes and sits opposite me and tries to talk to me, but I have gone into anti social mode. I’m really not up for lots of grinning and playing easing games and charades…. I just want to look out of the window. He persists, showing an interest in my electronic e-reader, he then shows me a whole series of photos on his phone of bundles of money. Does he want to change my money for dollars? Does he print fake money for a living? It all seems a bit dodgy and I just want him to go away. Eventually he does.
The landscape is amazing. I think if China had been my first country to visit on this trip, I would be totally gushing about how incredible it all is; a vast place, nearly all rural with hardly any cars at all. It would be a wonderfully peaceful place to cycle through. Never-ending hills and mountains mean that not only are the roads rarely straight, but neither is the railway. The lack of straight track couple with the nineteen carriages the train is pulling probably accounts for why the train never really gets up to a speed of more than about forty miles an hour.
The bizarre hills of the south, with their strange lumpy camel hump gone wrong shapes make me think of all those old Chinese paintings of mist shrouded slightly wonky landscapes. I used to think that the paintings were somehow stylised, but nope, it really does look like it does in the old paintings. In Japan the old paintings figure pictures of people with genitals the size of their entire bodies and women having sex with an octopus. I’m glad I never met them in Japan.
With so many rice paddis in the low lying areas, I can only presume at before the days of cultivation, the country must have had a lot of marshy ground. I imagine what it must have been like in times past crossing the country with very few roads. Must have been hard. It would become easy to imagine at China went on forever.
China has some of the longest rivers in the world. Heading northwards, we are first following the Li River, and then further on, we snake our way along the bank of a small length of the Yangtze. The Yangtze is the third longest river in the world, stretching from the Himalayas to the north of Shanghai for 6300 miles. Or is it kilometres? Bloody long anyway.
Arriving in Chongqing. Someone tells me the city is one of the largest in the world with a population of around 30 million. That would account for the much higher than usual density of repetitive apartment blocks and business skyscrapers. As we head closer to the city, ever increasing numbers of railway lines and roads converge upon the city, negotiating awkward hilly bits by variously sending great flying viaducts of concrete swirling around high hillsides, through mountain tunnels and back down to low ground. Concrete, as in Japan, makes modern China possible. I can’t help wondering what all this concrete is going to look like when time starts leaching lime and rust out of its pores. It’s going to look shabby. Concrete has a maximum lifespan of about a hundred years, almost no time at all in the scheme of things. There’s going to be an awful lot of places in the world some time in the future that, having depended on their growth in the first place on some sort of economic boom time, are going to find themselves on the receiving end of entropy on a colossal scale.
At Chongqing train station, apart from an initial difficulty finding subway line 6, without too much effort I manage to negotiate my way across the city to where I am roughly guessing my hostel is. I only have a slightly detail-free map from my lonely planet guide to go on, but it’s just about enough.
Having poo-pooed lonely planets guides previously when I was cycling, at a time when I was pretty much self propelled in every direction, I must now eat my words… I am finding the guide invaluable for finding my way forward, into nice comfy beds and into the friendliness of new company.
In theory, I could do what I did when I first started travelling rough India and find myself some little nook somewhere to put up my tent, but for the sake of spending four quid, missing out on a ready made bed with clean sheets, warm showers and nice food, what’s the point?
Not knowing where exactly the hostel is, I call them, make a reservation and follow their instructions to jump in a taxi, dial the hostel’s number and hand the phone to the taxi driver so they can explain in Chinese to him the complex directions. For the sake of a quid is proves to be good value too. I would never have found the place.
Somewhat upside-downed by a night of sort-of sleeping on the train, I go chill for a bit, eat and then book my passage on a tourist cruise down the Yangtze. I can choose either first class with added side trips to temples and things en route for 140 quid or go the cheap option of sharing a six bed dorm and not visiting temples for half the price. Can’t say I really fancy the prospect of scurrying up and down thousands of steps along with a bunch of other people just to look at stuff. After all that cycling, now I’m turning into a proper lazy-bones. And going on a cruise! I must be getting old!
Arrive in Chongqing midday the following day.
June 18th full moon somewhere on the Yangtze River.
Getting me travel mojo back…
The Yangtze River Hostel is a chance to meet some nice people. God I’m such a great writer sometimes… Emilio is a half German half Mexican who’s had an English grammar school education. You would never ever guess he was anything other than a posh English guy. He’s studying Chinese and linguistics at Edinburgh university, I hang out with him and a permanently grinning Mexican called Ivan. I always had Ivan down as a Russian name but whatever. We spend the evening walking out over a huge bridge over the river to see the city lights, then wander back onto land again to go for ice cream and street kebabs; grilled squid, yams, tofu, mushrooms and potatoes all liberally dosed with a yummy soy sauce. Not on the ice cream. Yeaurgh.
The following morning is an idle one spent breakfasting with Emilio and being slightly bowled over by one of the hostel receptionists, a young lady from inner Mongolia who is in Chongqing doing her PhD in English and American literature. Her favourite book is ‘On The Road’ the Jack Kerouac classic. She keeps giving me free pots of yoghurt to top up my breakfast. She’s beautiful too. Another half an hour of being in love….
At half past one I get taxied to a nearby double decker coach, very similar to the ones I used to drive myself, but amazingly, this ones even more knackered than ours were, making rather disconcerting loud clonking noises that sound like the rear axle isn’t really attached.
What I imagined was going to be a three hour drive to our destination further downstream is more like eight hours. In Japan, so awestruck was I by the loveliness of the country, I threw around superlatives like there was no tomorrow. Tomorrow came, in the form of China, and I’ve run out of superlatives. If I’d had any left, I would be using them all up right now very quickly. I love China. I have decided. Even the monstrous cities with their overload of skyscrapers exerts a peculiar magnetism over me. I guess it’s novelty. I’m pretty sure it’ll wear off soon enough though.
Glad to find that China has its own fair share of humourous wonky English on the go. In Japan I soon learned to pay close attention to the pictures rather than try to read anything when buying packaged food. This afternoon I bought what was clearly illustrated deep fried beans in a packet. I’d had them before, the Spanish have a taste for them too. When I examine the small print, I have purchased ‘ Chongqing strange-taste horse beans’. Well horse beans must what the Chinese call our broad beans. I prefer the Chinese name as it’s more poetic. ‘Strange-taste’ is nothing scary; only extra strong ginger biscuit flavour. Genius. And dead crunchy.
The other minor oddity I purchased this afternoon to keep me happy on the coach was an ‘Orthodox ice bar’. Does it taste like a frozen dour Christian? Maybe. But only if frozen dour Christians taste vaguely of bananas. Which I doubt. Never eaten a Christian. Go ask a Roman lion.
My surrounding Chinese Compadre’s frequently try to engage me in conversation, which of course always falls flat with me giving them my very best nonplussed look. I am aware that I probably nearly always look like an idiot. They laugh, and I imagine they’re saying something along the lines of ‘silly sods come here from the other side of the world and he can’t even speak to us. What a plonker’.Fortunately I’m not really too bothered. I am quite happy at the moment to just tag along and do whatever everyone else seems to be doing.
Off the coach finally. It’s ten pm, full moon and we are finally at the Yangtze River. It’s really warm and very humid. Black silhouettes of mountains rise high in the background and the river reflects the moon and the neon lights from hotels. Passing boats ride the waters, cutting through the shimmering colours.
On our ferry, in my humid cabin with an older chap about sixty. Looking out of the window having a little magic moment. Even when he turns on the TV to watch a Chinese talent show, the magic isn’t broken. There was a time not so long ago when I would have got very uptight about the TV being on. Now I don’t mind.
The talent show is a curious assortment of cats-being-strangled style singing, which for some perverse reason I love. It all seems very traditional. The show ends with a young lady and a choir of chaps behind her all in some sort of military uniform. A background video shows The Great Wall, Marching soldiers and the Chinese flag fluttering in the wind. They March vigorously in step with their enthusiastic singing. The studio audience gives them an uproarious standing ovation at the end of it.
So far, China is proving to be everything I would have wanted it to be.
I have had being on the Yangtze river as a long time fantasy that goes back to when I was a teenager. I got here. And the TV not upsetting me feels like another parallel journey too.
June 19th.
My cabin companion bears a curious resemblance to a mega cheerful version of Christopher Walken, which has a bearing on precisely nothing. He spends time sort of looking out for me, helpfully gesturing to me when to eat breakfast and suchlike and talking total gibberish all the while. I oblige him by talking total gibberish back, and trying to do whatever it is he seems to be telling me. The people on board are quite keen to make sure that everything is alright for me which is very sweet. Several times it appears to involve several people at once gabbling away earnestly with everyone pointing in different directions. For what reason I haven’t a clue. I feel slightly embarrassed that my presence seems to warrant this much effort. My total non-comprehension of Chinese seems to be the cause of it. I go and hide up a quiet end of the boat at the first opportunity.
Our cabin stinks of damp. I can live with this for a night or two. My tent didn’t smell this bad even after being in it for two months.
China is a step backwards for anyone of a sensitive disposition after Japan. Actually after Japan, anywhere would seem like a step backwards in that respect.
I Have come from a country where people are literally frightened of the sound of their own farts. Many Japanese toilets in a public place come with an arm rest with a variety of remote control buttons. One button when you press it will make the sound of a waterfall whilst another will replicate the sound of coughing, lest anyone nearby might hear the sound of your poo splashing like a whale into the pan. I don’t get it. Why not do real coughing? Surely digital coughing is just a back-firing signal to the rest of the world that you’ve got an almighty splasher coming along? That would just make me listen carefully so I could hear it. Tell me I’m not the only one that would…
Standing on the poop deck (see the clever link there?) with other passengers admiring the unfolding scenery, it’s perfectly acceptable for the gentlemen amongst us to hawk up phlegm with about as much grace as an over excited cockerel, making a raucous noise like a car crash on gravel in the process. Vile. I think Japan made me go soft, though I never ever felt the need for a digital cough.
I spend all day watching mountains roll past whilst listening to music on my headphones. Cocteau Twins mostly and Hedningarna (Swedish pagan folk music).
It starts to rain heavily, a wind kicks up and it all starts getting dramatic. A tiny woman wants me to come inside and hide from it and I refuse. The turn in the weather is refreshing. I’ve spent nearly all my time sat on my arse since ditching the bike. The rain brings me to my senses again.
After the rain, cloud wisps form in high forest, accentuating ridge edges and bringing a wonderful monochrome ethereal mingling of mountain with sky.
Decent nosh is non-existent. Strange taste horse beans seeming to be the pinnacle of dining for me at the moment. Chinese instant noodles are rubbish. I have learned to not put any of the packet ‘spice’ in in order to render them anything like being bearable to eat. Why the hell does anyone ever want to ingest something that just seems to be pure chilli and pepper. The mind boggles. Along with my horrified taste-buds. I purchase some chocolate for light relief, but I seem to have bought carob Maltesers. I don’t mind carob on its own, but this is also fairly unpleasant. Oh how I long for proper Chinese street food. Give me a skewerful of grilled rubbery tentacles and a pile of steamed pak choi any day.
Written June 22.
I spend the evening watching ever an ever darkening landscape slide by. House lights start to twinkle at unlikely altitudes on the mountainsides, replacement constellations for a cloud covered sky. At about 9.30pm, some very insistent women is demanding that I go inside like everybody else. I do as I’m told. Sometimes it’s just easier that way.
My room is still unbearably damp. Christopher Walken is on a top bunk. Maybe it’s less awful up there. A wind had kicked up during the day, and had blown rain and river spit into the inside of the boat. The thin floor carpet is slightly soggy. I continue my scenery observations from my bedroom window which rattles such that it is threatening to fall out of its socket. Eventually I give in to sleep, leaving the door and window open allowing the air of occasional passing smokers and noise of the rumbling engine in. Eventually we dock somewhere and everything calms to a halt.
In the morning at 7.30 everyone gets themselves and their luggage off the boat. Ascending a rusty old cable car thing, everyone rides the hundred feet up the steep bank and head for coaches. We are at the three gorges dam. People pile in and I’m not sure what’s going on. So far on this ‘three day river cruise’ we’ve spent eight hours on a coach, overnighted on the boat twice with actual boat movement in between. Very generously I think you could call that two days. Now I am told that the trip is over. I had also understood (wrongly) that I had the choice of either a free bus or a ten yuan bus to Lichang. The only option I am offered is a 250 yuan taxi.
I am Mr. Stroppyface, and I don’t care who sees it. Serves my right for just drifting along, not knowing any Chinese and just presuming it would all work out okay. Ultimately of course, it will all work out okay. But it would still be better if I could do it without letting myself get so monumentally ripped off in the process.
In share a taxi with three others and after an hours drive find myself at the train station. A helpful young couple from Beijing (uh-oh) attempt to help me buy a ticket until they conclude what I’d already found out which that their was no train for Pingyao until 9.30pm, a whole twelve hours away.
I whole away my day reading up on future destinations and finish my current Terry Pratchett book.
Some stunted chat with very nice locals in the park… It seems to be that once one or two people try to talk, after about five minutes it is very likely that a crowd will form. If I spoke Chinese my time here would so be so much fuller. But I don’t. I think we could probably have some very enlightening conversations. Potentially.
Just before my trains due out I meet Daniella a luscious lovely lady from Chile and her very nice chap Axel from Barcelona. We are both travelling on the same train. Well we will do, once it decides to arrive. Chinese trains, famously totally punctual normally, ours is delayed until 01.15am . it’s been a long day doing nothing much. I’m glad I have some new friends to chat with. Our reclined on the floor soiree attracts a fascinated crowd of about twenty. Noticeably they are nearly men and it’s clear that it’s Daniella’s lovely form that is possibly the most interesting thing around.
The train arrives after no explanation of the delay. Probably flooding, as there’s been a lot of it on the news. I have opted for a sleeper whilst my new friends are doing the hard seats. When I see them again in the morning the difference is apparent. I feel quite refreshed, whilst Daniella is gibbering deliciously whilst Axel is having problems coordinating his eyelids.
Through the day the lush green mountain passes dissolve into sandy low lying terraces of corn mostly. Hills evaporate and reappear looking sometimes like sandy ridges of giant termite mounds in their thin upright slab pointyness. In hillsides caves have been scraped out all with archway entrances, many have brickwork facings which resemble the fronts of similar houses in nearby villages. Always the brick frontages come in threes, the archways being only six feet high, three together is enough to make a house.
I find it curious that the people here base their lives so fully on being able to dig. They dig the ground for their food, they dig the hillsides for their houses and they dig the ground for their coal and their money. Where would we be without the humble spade eh? Maybe this is a Chinese dwarf town. I’ve been reading too much terry Pratchett.
Villages become scrappy but characterful coal towns with yards with vast piles of the black stuff at odds with the otherwise sandy terrain. Chimneys and conveyer belts to pointy coal piles rise high and tarp covered trucks scurry everywhere like giant ants. Shanxi, the province we are in, provides China with a third of its coal.
Axel and Daniella are getting off one stop up from me, and we are all heading to Mongolia. Maybe we’ll meet again? Who knows. Things change so rapidly when you’re on the move. A day is spent happily chatting, Daniella communicating via a phone with a funny shy Chinese girl. If they had goths in China, she would have been one.
Towards the end of things, I attempt to ask a man if the next station was my stop. He assures me that it is. After getting my bag together it becomes clear that it isn’t, and the man finds this very funny. Life is so different when you have tits. Yes I know that definitely has it’s drawbacks too…
The train guard makes sure I am getting off in the right place, but first he sits me down at the end of the carriage along with ten other blokes who are all staring at me whilst he attempts the usual travellers cross examination. One of he men puts his shoe next to my boot and finds this hilarious. My boot looks like a brown clowns shoe compared to his dainty shiny black shoe, a whole one third bigger. Well, you know what they say about Englishmen with big shoes. ‘Crikey look at the size of them clod-hoppers!’, only in Chinese of course.
I’m not exactly comfortable with so many eyes on me. It’s as if they are expecting me to do something amazing, though I’ve no idea what. They find it funny at I can’t talk to them. I find it frustrating. One of them who after trying talk to me was laughing because of my blank expression, gets a dose of the same in return. I try out something which had worked somewhere in Himachel Pradesh when feeling rather pressured.
I do a long-winded non-stop stream of verbal which along with appropriate hand gestures goes something like:
‘You see the thing is that this man here goes “blah blah blah” but I’ve got no idea what he’s saying; I look blank and he thinks it’s really funny but when I go “blah blah blah” back he looks just as confused as me and it’s me that’s laughing, except I’m not because I’d rather be having a conversation so I jut carry-on going “blah blah blah” and he can’t understand me and he goes blah blah blah in return and I’ve go no idea at all what’s going on but I can just talk and talk and talk and everyone ends up laughing even though the conversation is pretty much worthless.’
Done in a suitably ridiculous way everyone is laughing, and it’s the nearest I’m likely to get to real communication given my high level of linguistic laziness.
The non communication with the locals seems to be standard with most of the travellers I am meeting. The only ones who are grasping it even slightly are the ex-pat teachers who’ve been here a year or longer.
I feel sorry for the Chinese. I’m sure they’d love to know what we’re really about.
Getting off at the correct station at the wrong end of the big for finding hostels, I collar two gay Finns and tag along with them to their pre-booked hostel. We share a couple of beers before turning in.
Pingyao is an old walled town from the Ming dynasty(1600s) which the communists town planners forgot to flatten in the fifties. It’s a beautiful place, with intricate woodwork and high rammed earth walls. The rise of communism must have been utterly heart-wrenching watching their heritage getting destroyed so systematically.
I spend the next day tootling round the walled town on a hired bike. It’s interesting but there’s only so many tourist tat shops I can take. After a very tasty but over costly noodle and broccoli lunch I head out in a straight line, out through the nor gate, up a coal truck filled main road, out into normal like. Shaking off the shackles of tourist town feels good. I feel like a real person again. The main road clings to busyness so I take a side road into fields of corn and follow its windings. A man is swimming in a dammed up river. The water is a bit green but it’s the thing to do on a very hot day. More giant anthill shapes where some past river has carved away a shallow gorge now filled with corn and grass. Further up, the sounds of men chatting to each other whilst they work hidden in a vast tree nursery. More corn fields. Peace and quiet. I stop. I haven’t felt peace and quiet since the northern end of Hokkaido in the mountains. Breathe again; surface from the racket of towns and people and Stuff.
Burial mounds and gravestones in the fields. Where else would a non religious system put its dead if not in a church graveyard? Curious.
The fields become a village of houses joined like British Victorian terrace houses, each with a high walled yard. Doing a loop, I return to the busy main road, crunch downhill
slowly, rescue a mans carrier bag of pak choi that has fallen from his scooter when he went over a small pothole. Back to town, back to my current usual. It’s good to have a break sometimes.
Just outside the gateway of the old town is a small stage with seating. A group of oldies have got together for some homespun music. An orchestra of octogenarian baldies are hitting blocks and percussive things off to one side, and on the other, another group is playing bowed Chinese violin things in a front manner. In the middle, a woman of about sixty is indulging the audience but possibly mostly herself with her traditional cat-strangling high pitched tones, amplified to distortion levels with a truly rock n roll degree of reverb. Together the whole lot is like Indonesian gamelan with death metal vocals.
After a few minutes, it seems that somebody has rushed home and come back with a stereo and is doing their best to drown out the live performance with some equally loud Chinese disco.
That’s quite some soundclash. Pity the poor sods sat in the middle who thought they’d come out for a break in the park.
Once satiated with this monstrous extravaganza, I wheel myself to the relative peace and safety of the tourist tat markets.
Talking with Axel and Daniella, they had cycled through a large part of south America and they too had mourned the loss of their bikes. I console myself that I still have my Europe bike trip ahead. They too had found the possibility of riding an scooter through China too difficult. I’m am so glad I have met them. It put me at ease to meet people who had had similar experiences feelings of how they travel with or without two wheels.
Today, Beijing by bus. Hopefully not on two wheels.
I couldn’t find bus timetables online so I’ll just have to hoof it when I get to Beijing.
The local bus to Taiyuan takes two hours then I get on a sleeper bus to Beijing. At every stage of the journey, I am faced with almost no clues as to where I am supposed to find the bus stations, which buses to get, when they might arrive and where exactly. I can’t even find a toilet. Fortunately, all I have to do is stand around looking sufficiently confused and within minutes some random person will come and help me out, usually using their translation app on their phone. All I need to do is figure out if the person offering help is a taxi driver, which twice today they are. The first chap offers me a ride to the bus station in Taiyuan when I can’t find it. It was only just down the road. If he had just pointed in the appropriate direction I could have walked there in five minutes.
Getting off the bus somewhere totally random in Beijing, my phone has died, refuses to recharge and I have no map and no hostel booked. I was supposed go meet Dimitri the German chap I met in Shanghai, but he hasn’t contacted me.
A taxi driver takes me to the nearest metro station. I’ve got 15 minutes to get to the centre of the city. Plugging my phone in at a wall it magically decides to function. The next five minutes is me juggling as fast as I can whilst finding my way round the underground. Calling the only hostel that I have satnav directions for, they are fully booked. Now I’m stuffed.
The chap sitting next to me offers me help, urging me to get off the next stop with him as he knows a hostel nearby.
He could be anybody, with any motive. I follow him up an unlit alley… I have absolutely no idea where I am.
Following Ma as he introduces himself, he takes me to a cheap hostel he knows. But when we try it, it’s banned from hosting foreigners. Further down the road the same story in four places he tries. He offers to let me stay at his house. But he lives with his parents and they don’t want some random guy air son has picked up off the streets in their living room for the night.
Then he follows the suggestion of a hostel receptionist and calls the police, as they will be bound to help. I have my doubts…
The police are too busy catching criminals and nicking drunks to deal with me, thankfully. Right, time for Plan D; head for the nearest park.
Ma takes to a small park and my new home is found. Exchanging emails and selfies as the young people do these days, he leaves me and I scout out a suitable bush to pitch my tent next to.
June 24
My morning begins with a parkful of people walking an earnest circuit of the park. In the middle. Where once people would have done Tai Chi, now they do Sumba to some awesomely cheesy Chinese disco. What a way to start my day. Welcome to Beijing.
Written June 28.
Using the Shanghai metro was practice for Beijing. Getting across the city is pretty simple, even for a reluctant city dweller like me. I have booked into the first hostel listed in the lonely planet next to the Forbidden City. As I climb the stairs coming out of the metro at Tian’anmen East Station right next to the Forbidden City, two women present themselves, telling me they are on holiday, that they want to practice their English and can they walk with me?
Yeah okay. If you really must.
Walking along, they seem to be heading in a very specific direction and don’t seem to be interested in whether I might want to go a different way. They want to go for teas and coffees in ‘a high class cafe’. I want cheap noodles. I still haven’t had breakfast.
I stop at a noodle bar. They keep walking. Okay, bye! That was slightly weird. I guess they were on some sort of blag. Over the course of the next three days, if I sit down somewhere near Tiananmen Square, I get people stopping and sitting right next to me. It’s way too hot for me to be bothered to be polite. I can’t be bothered to work out if they are genuinely wanting to chat or just wanting to ‘Hello! My friend!’ their way into my pockets.
I meet up with Dimitri who I met in Shanghai and we walk around the forbidden city for a day. A vast enclosure of sterile constructions, which I doubt very much that they are more than fifty years old. Everything looks perfect sugar n a concretely kind of way. It’s 35 degrees and half a million people with umbrellas for sunshades are traipsing round the place at almost no miles an hour and lots of them shouting for no reason while the do it. A symmetrical arrangement of ‘palaces’; the palace of heavenly contentment, the palace of eternal balance, all those kinds of names. Mostly they seem to be filled with artifacts such as Ming pottery in glass cases and paintings. It’s all a bit dull. In the corners of two of the ‘palaces’, a large plasma screen TV showing an endless reel of a military parade in Tiananmen Square right next door. Lots of serious goose stepping and missile launchers. A very cheery sight for the patriotic Chinese no doubt.
They like to show these reels outside train stations too. Actually, on the metro I was able to watch a sizable amount of ‘Sean The Sheep’ a film made by the Wallace and Gromit people. All that plastacine dry stone walling reminds me of home. Marvellous.
The next day is spent visiting the 798 art district (very interesting) and Beijing zoo which cost all of about two quid to get in. We’ve got an hour and a half before it closes so we head directly to seem the pandas which are very cute. Not a fan of zoos. Various animals designed to run at high speed through vast areas trapped n a stupid little concrete enclosure. Sad tigers pace about. Other smaller more sociable animals in groups like lemurs seem reasonably happy. The monkeys all seem violently angry. And wouldn’t you too?
During this time, Britain leaves the EU. Nigel garage admits ‘to making a mistake’ over his claim that the leave campaign would give 350 million to the NHS currently paid to the EU. He reneges on it the day after his campaign wins. It’s nice to see the future safety of Europe has been compromised on an item of fraud. The British have been hoodwinked, and you can be certain that nothing will be done to rectify it. Only a lot of panicking. Oh how I look forward to going home.
Mongolia next.
The day before yesterday I saw a Mongolian phrase book in an English language book shop. The next day I went to purchase it but they didn’t seem to have it anymore. No-one in the shop could go look in the storeroom to see if they still had a copy, because nobody in the English language book shop spoke English. Frustrated? Yes, with swearing.
Galloping across the city to the bookworm book shop and cafe proves equally fruitless.
Today I will head out of Beijing and on the overnight sleeper bus to Erlian the border town to Mongolia’s Zamyn Uud.
So far on my trip I have relied on my electronic gizmos for, diary writing, finding my way and being able to book into hostels and find out when buses and trains go. I about to find my use of these objects limited for the next month. People in Mongolia don’t speak English, and currently I don’t speak Mongolian. So far, I have been able to get away with not speaking the locals language, but I don’t know how Mongolia is going to turn out. It’s land filled with very friendly people and dangerous drunken neo-Nazis by all accounts.
Should be fun then.
My attempt s to book myself onto some sort of volunteering project have been hampered by the wonderful Chinese internet moving at a total snails pace or not at all with some websites. Many websites work fine, but Mongolian volunteering? Nah.
I would like to be in the landscape rather than just cities. China has been the opposite of how I prefer to travel. In China all I have done is skip from tourist sites in cities on trains. Using a motorbike is illegal for foreigners, a bicycle too slow. I feel frustrated by it. Can you tell?? I really hope that being in Mongolia somehow comes to reflect the dream I’ve had of the place. I don’t want to go on a tourist package thing, all bound up in cotton wool. I guess I may have to go into the gloriously random mode of hitch hiking where surprises and magic can happen.
Written July 5th Muron, Mongolia…
At the bus station where I am to ride the sleeper bus to Erlian, the border town in Chinese inner Mongolia, I get hijacked by a tout who asks me if I want to go to Erlian. I follow her down some dodgy looking alley, through a marketplace and into a scrappy looking yard where some pretty OK looking coaches are sitting. Some Mongolians have been on a shopping spree; they unload a van full of polythene wrapped packages into the luggage hold, leaving precisely no space whatsoever for anyone else. I hook up with an Israeli guy and we travel together. The driver puts us at the back of the coach, where it is bounciest.
Arriving in Erlian, we meet some friends of his, and we book ourselves into a hotel. We spend the day look in for shoes for me, traipsing up and down five alleyways full of shops. After trying numerous not quite right boots, I plump for just getting the soles relayered by an old guy who happily bangs a load of one inch nails into my boots. After a couple of heel puncturing goes, he gets it just right until I now have Almost good as new boots for not very much at all.
In the evening Axel and Daniella magically turn up. It is very lovely to see them again.
The next day is border crossing day, the previous day the border had been closed due to Mongolia having a general election.
A mini van bundles all seven of us and our mammoth pile of rucksacks across the slightly labyrinthine mass of incomprehensible immigration booths.
On the other side at Zamyn Uud, I am feeling rather bussed out and go hide under a tree while the others go get food.
We’re in Mongolia!
Richard Terry 