Finally at 1.30am, we started moving again and after a surprisingly good nights sleep, woke at 8.30am to exactly the same landscape: nothing as far as you could see part from a low battered fence running by the track. The three other people in my compartment didn’t speak a word of English and Chris was with an Italian guy called Fabio and two Chinese people who could say hello enthusiastically. Fabio was a nice guy, typically Italian in his laidback approach to life and his passion for football, coffee, music and women. He was a governor lawyer assistant who had five months holiday every year and would travel the world in this time. Right now he was slowly coming home from Asia, not looking forward to starting work again in May.
Having sent an email to the “UB (Ulan Bator) Guesthouse”, a representative had Chris’ name displayed at the platform and drove us, Fabio, an Aussie, a Korean and two Irish guys to the obscurely located guesthouse. It was set in a small square with a half rotted children’s play area in the middle and strangely random patches of dust outlined with low metal bars. It seemed to be the type of thing you imagine Russia to be by watching TV. Although a capital city, everything had a derelict feel to it; a bit of a no-man’s land but this part of the city was a little bustling with banks and currency exchange places on every corner, bars, cheap restaurants and odd shops such as one place that only sold flowers and pottery.
Back at the hostel Chris had changed his mind again and said he wanted a five day tour. I hate tours and told him that I only wanted to see a little of the countryside and then move on. Sure it was interesting to visit such an obscure place but our plan was never to spend a week in Mongolia. Over lunch with Fabio I told him my situation and after twenty minutes of consideration, told him that I’d move on with him in a few days time. I thought about how nice and safe it felt to be with Chris who did all the worrying about everything all the time but realised that his style of travelling allowed much less room for fun. That evening I told him my plan and said I’d meet him in Moscow. He didn’t seem surprised and shared a can of Mongolian beer with me. We were going to let each other go and I’m sure it was going to be for the better of us.
After chatting to a nice Aussie guy who was going to go to London to try to make it as a stand-up comedian, I told Fabio I’d go on the next day’s two day tour with him and went to bed feeling oddly liberated.
The two day tour was very simple. We’d be driven to the middle of nowhere and would stay win a small circular tent/house with a stove fire in the middle and a big metal chimney poking through a hole in the roof. We were to stay with a Nomadic family. It surprised me to hear that half of Mongolia’s 2.3 million population are Nomads although most of them don’t own a TV as this family did, which also surprised me. I was with Fabio and two girls, an Aussie and a Brit, who were nice and coincidently had been working in the same English teaching company I had in Japan.
After a lunch of rice, shredded vegetables and beef, we were dressed by the husband of the family in preparation for two hours horse riding. His name was Odka, easy to remember as it rhymed with one of Mongolia’s favourite drinks, and he dressed me and Fabio in three jackets, but didn’t give the girls so much as a hat. I could only guess men take priority in a land where farming is the only thing a populace can do. The horses were small and looked more like donkeys although they were well trained and well tamed. We were given a twenty second lesson as to how to ride one and then off we went on a two hour journey that I’ll always remember as being the coldest two hours of my life. It was already well below freezing but the harsh sharp wind made it doubly cold and after twenty minutes, everything started to hurt, to really hurt. My toes, my hands, and my face in particular. The dry barren rolling landscape, dotted with huge rock formations was amazing but I was simply too cold to appreciate it. My hands and feet started swelling after an hour and I literally couldn’t move any digits on my hands or feet. Neither could I turn my head or walk without limping once I had got off the horse. Our guide shouted “chu!” to get the horses moving and didn’t speak any English at all. He was entirely without sympathy for our cold states of being and out light trots on the way back (our resting point was a frozen lake) ensured sore arses for everyone as well. We all had the same heavenly vision in mind: the warm circular tent and hot tea. When we got back we were immediately served a beef pasta dinner with hot fruity tea. I slowly warmed up but my hands would continue to hurt for the next few days.
With nothing else to do other than sit around and chat, we did just that. Odka came back to explain his sister was having a baby that very night so he had to leave us, communicated mostly with dynamic gestures, like a game of charades. Later out horse-riding guide showed up with a bucket of coal, making gestures to explain we should put it in the fire for the night. We did so and went to bed in a very warm tent.
I woke up at around 5am, freezing. The fore had long gone so I collected as many blankets as I could find and buried myself. I woke again at around 9am and thought we really should get up so I grabbed some toilet paper and broke a few pieces to stuff under some kindling. It went up beautifully and the place warmed up quickly, making getting out of bed for the others much easier than it had been for me. Fabio and I had a train to Russia leaving at 1.50pm so we had to get moving. When we returned to the hostel we quickly changed our remaining Mongolian money into Russian roubles (nowhere in Russia would change them apparently), had a shower and bought some food for the train. The kind manager of the hostel put us into a cab and said farewell. It was truly a great hostel, as all hostels should be but rarely are: warmly welcoming, genuinely helpful and friendly.
Our compartment on the Mongolian train contained me, Fabio, a Mongolian small-business man who was a little overly keen to speak English and a shady looking guy from Kazakhstan who showed no interest in us. The Mongolian guy was a cheery character with a family and a successful business, operating a tour agency. He opened out a load of food and said that we must just help ourselves: what is him is ours, in true communist spirit. One bag contained huge hacks of beef and fat, another sweet bread rolls, another sausage, another dark malty bread and other bits and pieces.
Soon into the journey, someone dumped six large rolled-up felt blankets in our compartment and the Mongolian guy explained that one of the train attendants needed “help” to pass all these blankets through Russian customs and asked us to each claim two blankets on the customs declaration form. Though nervous at the thought of Russian officials asking why I asked two large Mongolian blankets along with everyone else in the carriage, I cast aside scenes from “Midnight Express” and agreed to it.
After eating a packed lunch included in my ticket and chatting to some other Westerners who were on the train for the full five day stretch to Moscow, we stopped just before the boarder. Our passports were checked and an hour later we rode over the boarder and stopped again for scary Russian officials to board to routinely intimidate us all. One of them came to out compartment and greeted us in Russian. I nervously repeated some Russian I had learnt years ago and he seemed to understand. He explained the boarder crossing rules to us in a manner that suggested we were all prisoners of war. He looked at Fabio’s Italian passport and said something to him in Italian.
“Oh your Italian is good” said a nervous Fabio.
“No!” said the official, “No! I do not speak Italian.” He had shouted as if someone had just asked him to stick his head in a toilet. Fabio recoiled and the tense examination of passports continued. The Mongolian guy was almost visibly sweating as his wife had accidentally washed his passport with his clothes only a few days previous and his passport looked consistent with such information. The official took our passport, explaining that he needed ninety to a hundred minutes to examine them. They all returned ninety minutes later stamped and approved. Our Mongolian friend audibly thanked God for passing through with his frazzled documents. The whole process took about four hours and finished around 2am.
Thursday 28 December 2006
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Beijing
At 6am, Beijing was cold, and with hardly any sleep, all we wanted was a bed. Some of the locals from the train showed us where we needed to go in a kind of we’d-be-better-off-without-them style but I appreciated the sentiment anyway. Eventually I said “ok, we’ll be fine from here thank-you so much” and after a short ride on Beijing’s half finished metro, we found the youth hostel and slept for about four hours.
The first thing we needed to do was to locate a large foreign bookstore in the city centre to buy a never copy of Lonely Planet’s “Tran Siberian Railway” guide. It wasn’t there and according to a couple of British travellers we met in the travel guide section, it couldn’t be found anywhere in Beijing, even though Beijing is either the start of end of one of the main routes, being the Trans Mongolian, which we planned to take. We’d have to make do with our four year old copy.
After a more-satisfying-than-it-should-have-been lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around a big glitzy mall and commented on the incredibly high prices. We had been told that Beijing and Shanghai were very different cities but capitalism seemed to have taken even firmer root in Beijing, with it’s trendy business areas, shopping malls and endless banks.
We passed a food market which sold silk worm on a stick, snake skin on a stick, lambs testicles (again on a stick) and other various animals that belonged in horror movies only. I had a contact number for a guy from globalfreeloaders.com who couldn’t put us up but was happy to take us out, so I went to one of the many public phones in a small kiosk to call him. In China, these kiosks always have a phone for public use which display the cost of a call and it is never more than ¥1. Having called him once, I paid the ¥0.6 I owed to one of the two guys behind the desk and realised I needed to call him again. The cost was ¥0.6 again so I went to pay this but the guy said I owed ¥1.2 for the two calls. Since we were the only customers, there’s no way they could have forgotten my first payment of ¥0.6 but one of the guys got really angry, throwing the phones across the kiosk and shouting at us. The extent that the Chinese will go to to squeeze a few extra pennies from foreigners made me want to puke.
We needed to buy a ticket for our next train: Beijing to Ulan Bator (Mongolia’s capital) so naturally we went to the main ticket office in the train station, but couldn’t find an English speaking desk. A few people told us to go to the “international hotel”. What did this mean? A hotel was the only way to get this ticket? So we walked in the vague direction of someone’s pointing until we saw a huge slab of a building, concave in shape and very grand-looking. Sure enough there was a travel agency on the second floor and although it was closed, a woman gave us a price list. It would cost us ¥600 (about £45) and the journey would take 32 hours.
The guy from globalfreeloaders met us at 8pm with some friends, a nice group of creative people: graphic designers and photographers, and took us to quite a posh restaurant for our first taste of true Peking/Beijing duck, which was nice but very gristly. Chris was feeling sick so we returned home early.
Our first full day in Beijing was a bit of a non-event as Chris stayed in bed all the time, occasionally leaving to bless the squat-style toilet with a large dose of poo-moose. So it was up to me to get things done: namely buy the train tickets and organise some free accommodation by meeting with a Chinese guy who called himself “George” who I found on globalfreeloaders. He kindly picked me up from the hostel and we drove to a café that he owned where we sat and discussed the next few days over some Coca-colas. He was an older guy, about forty-something, and had a family. He ran a small air-conditioning company and had invested in the café, buying the land outright when he was particularly successful some years ago. Now the café just acts as a meeting place more than anything, mainly for his friends, to discuss travelling. He seemed to have been to every country in the world and had brought back various artefacts from each one, all of which were on display in the café: African masks, Turkish pottery, Australian road signs, French football scarves, Italian opera masks, Indian tea pots, Russian plates to name a few. I told him we’d move in the next day for three nights as Chris was currently ill, and that was it sorted.
So I then went back to the ominous international hotel, brought the tickets and went to the toilet in a toilet with an attendant who I didn’t know needed tipping or not. He didn’t do anything apart from watch me so what should I have tipped him for? Maybe he didn’t even work there.
That evening the hostel was very restful and peaceful for me. I got dinner in a small restaurant attached to the hostel and met a young American girl who sat across from me on the same table even though there was plenty of space. Sensing that she wanted to talk to someone, I struck up a conversation and she burst into a breathless speech about her two weeks travelling in China. Then I spoke to an older Korean lady who had been travelling for seven months and would go back home the next day. Seven months? How can you return to normal life after that? But then again, she didn’t seem like she had a normal life. Then I just wandered around and settled in the café area, writing in my diary and chatting to the new guy in our room.
Chris was still sick the next day but well enough to move to the cafe4, under the kindness of George. After settling, I set out into town to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square. Within minutes of getting off the bus, two not-so-young girls came up to me, asking where I was from and all the other usual questions.
“Would you like to come and have some tea with us?” they said with a little too much urgency, too early on in our acquaintance. I asked what their jobs were,
“oh, we’re students”. I replied that I just wanted to walk around and that they were very welcome to join me. After a suspicious pause one of them said “sure, we want to talk English with you.” I asked their names: Tina and Susan. I laughed a little and explained that I didn’t trust anyone who approached me in China.
“That’s terrible” and Susan, who did most of the talking and had ridiculously thick bright turquoise eye makeup, “why don’t you trust anybody?” I explained how almost everybody just wanted my money “included you I suspect” I added. Susan stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me with a little disgust, “how did you lose your trust in other people? That’s sad.”
After some more semi-tense chatting, during which she frequently commented how handsome I looked, I asked how old they were.
“That’s a terrible question” replied Susan.
“No it’s not” I said, knowing full well that to ask a woman’s age in China doesn’t have the same taboo as back home. They both looked over thirty and I’d already had many women come up to me claiming to be students to go with them and be enticed into spending outrageous amounts of money.
“OK then” I said to Tina who looked the oldest, “what did you do before university?” This clearly had her stumped.
“Er… high school” she muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said, “but you’re too old! You’re telling me you were in high school three years ago?”
“Yes” she replied. Then Susan spoke in fast Chinese to Tina, turned to me and said “do you want to have some tea with us?”
“Sure” I answered, “if it’s cheap, maybe about ¥10.”
“No” she said firmly, “we like expensive tea, cost you ¥200.” I just stared at them, “so you are just trying to get my money?” and they walked away. Within minutes of walking away, still chuckling to myself, another pair of girls said hello but much more passively than the previous couple. They asked the same old questions, I gave the same old answers but they didn’t say they wanted me to do anything. Upon my questioning they explained that they were English students. It fitted: they looked young and seemed eager to learn new words from me.
“Why are you in such a touristy area if you live here?” I asked, my suspicions dissolving away.
“Because it’s the weekend and we’re out shopping” said the girl with a yellow Addidas tracksuit and a dark Thai-style complexion. So I just followed them around for an hour or so, enjoying the company of people who weren’t after anything. After a quick photo, within minutes of departing, another two girls came to me and said hello. They asked the same questions but in a much more ‘just passing’ style and I soon rejoined my own company to wander through the surprisingly large square. There were many kits being sold and flown of all types and heights, some impossibly high like distant planes. Salesmen were everywhere, selling more cheap junk, and connect to chairman Mao in some way.
That evening George took Chris to the local hospital during which he waited five minutes to be seen, had an immediate blood and poo test, got the results within ten minutes and was prescribed and given drugs ten minutes after that. In a country where the maimed and starving bed for anything in all the cities, the health service still beats England’s by miles. This hospital was very simple. Things were just getting done without fuss or complaint. However, it looked much more basic, less well facilitated, and the Chinese spat on the floor which is surely a bad thing to do anywhere let alone in a hospital. In fact, the Chinese seem to hold no ground exempt from spitting. As we walked down a carpeted hallway in an office building, a dirty-jacket man spat on the floor, looking strangely pleased with himself afterwards.
“The Summer Palace”, one of Beijing’s major sights, was to be the next day’s plan for me. About 2.5 km square, it acted as leisure ground for one of China’s old Emperors when it was summer time and too hot to be indoors. It was beautiful. Willow lined paths between two lakes, rock garden patches, archaic decorative bridges and many traditional old Chinese buildings. Included in the entrance fee was admission to many small museums within the park, some ridiculously boring (as the young daughter of a British couple put it: “it’s just a bunch of chairs”) and some fascinating, if for no reason but the age of some of the relics which surpassed 3000 years. But Beijing’s eternal haze hung over the park, making it hard to see objects across the lake (although the lake was large) and at around 4pm, I could stare straight at the sun which then looked more like the moon: pale and misty.
Beijing is the place to see the Great Wall of China, well, at least where you need to catch a bus from. After a seventy minute journey we excitedly past patches of the wall itself before pulling up into tourist hell: “T-shirt one dollar, one dollar, postcards, book, T-shirt one dollar” was the local mantra yet again but our faces showed we had already experienced almost three weeks of this and were sick of it, although Chris still had to stop to look!
We first went to the Great Wall cinema which showed a film about the history of the wall in 360˚, using eight projectors, technology and film alike being about thirty years out of date. And it was only in Chinese with no subtitles. Crazy for such an international tourist attraction.
We wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find the way onto the wall and eventually found an absurdly tiny sign. Although the wall covers some 6000 km, you’d never guess it because of the bloody Beijing mist. The tower sections at every 200 metres or so consisted of a series of tiny tunnels you had to squeeze through although some Chinese considered these areas fit to have a piss. I noticed one woman doing herself back up, a puddle just below her.
It was extremely steep in places and the height of the coarse steps varied from around 10 cm to 50 cm. It was so busy that at one point people were crushing each other by one of the thin steep stairwells, seemingly unable to simply let one go at a time. 90% of the crowds were Chinese. The relative expense of China’s tourist attractions make it harder to enjoy them. You certainly get a sense that it’s just all about the money and this must surely be China’s biggest threat to a dwindling tourist industry. Surely no one who leaves China could forget the constant money grabbing, can’t-get-enough, tourist preying mentality and prevents me from recommended China to anybody. Whether you’re on a big budget or not, the persistence of the Chinese to trick, con and mislead foreigners is simply too much to create a fulfilling experience. Bottles of water were on sale on the wall for ¥10. A bottle of water in a shop was about ¥1.
So we got on the wall, walked about a mile, took our pictures and came off. There were no signs to tell you where to go, no information about the wall, no guides, no maps and no organisation. Things didn’t improve when we went to a restaurant in the city centre, as reviewed by the now utterly useless Lonely Planet, in which prices had risen by 50%. A half of a duck ¥100. We ordered a half between us and out came a serious looking chef with a meaty-looking half duck. He asked us how we’d like it cup up and proceeded to cut small slithers of meat and skin and serve it up on a small plate. Although the meat on this duck looked barely touched, he served up the small plate and left. This was it. Our ¥100 half duck. It barely enough for a sandwich. Sure it was tasty especially the oily skin, I’d never tasted anything like it but we couldn’t forget about the bill. It turns out that ¥30 is a fairly standard price in Beijing for a whole duck. Sure enough, our restaurant was full of fat Americans and glitzy foreigner business people.
Onwards into Mongolia the next day, leaving at 7.40 am, the longest railway journey I’d ever taken. It was a Chinese train and each compartment had four beds, two bunks on each side with a small table in the middle against the window. Me and Chris were in separate carriages as there weren’t many beds left which was a good thing in my mind. After a few hours of relaxing, listening to Eddie Izzard comedy CDs I ventured tot the restaurant carriage where I sat on an empty table. Within seconds the miserable Chinese “waitress” ushered me over to a table already occupied by a middle aged Scottish couple. I gave my order from a choice of the two items that were actually still available on the English menu (or so she said: I saw Chinese people eating fried rice and prawns which didn’t even feature on the absurdly concise menu) and happily chatted to the couple. I don’t know if the Chinese waitress was merely trying to save tables or had been administered the job of social ambassador, but I was pleased for the blunt introduction.
At the China/Mongolia boarder the wheels of the train were physically changed to ride the differing Mongolian tracks. The whole boarder process took about four hours, during which I decided to get off and couldn’t come back on until the process was finished. I had no idea what country I was in when I got off, a fairly unique feeling, until I saw everything priced in Chinese yuan in a small supermarket that most of the travelling Aussies and English were over-stocking on beer in. Having had our passports carefully checked by the Chinese for two hours, the train ran for ten minutes and the whole process was repeated by Mongolian. A young Mongolian woman official in ridiculously large oval hat scrutinised my passport and called some other officials over just to add to the drama of what would otherwise be an incredibly dull job. Having spent five minutes inspecting my battered passport like it was a nuclear bomb, she returned it with an air of contempt that said “just this time I’m not going to send you to a Siberian slave labour camp.”
The first thing we needed to do was to locate a large foreign bookstore in the city centre to buy a never copy of Lonely Planet’s “Tran Siberian Railway” guide. It wasn’t there and according to a couple of British travellers we met in the travel guide section, it couldn’t be found anywhere in Beijing, even though Beijing is either the start of end of one of the main routes, being the Trans Mongolian, which we planned to take. We’d have to make do with our four year old copy.
After a more-satisfying-than-it-should-have-been lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around a big glitzy mall and commented on the incredibly high prices. We had been told that Beijing and Shanghai were very different cities but capitalism seemed to have taken even firmer root in Beijing, with it’s trendy business areas, shopping malls and endless banks.
We passed a food market which sold silk worm on a stick, snake skin on a stick, lambs testicles (again on a stick) and other various animals that belonged in horror movies only. I had a contact number for a guy from globalfreeloaders.com who couldn’t put us up but was happy to take us out, so I went to one of the many public phones in a small kiosk to call him. In China, these kiosks always have a phone for public use which display the cost of a call and it is never more than ¥1. Having called him once, I paid the ¥0.6 I owed to one of the two guys behind the desk and realised I needed to call him again. The cost was ¥0.6 again so I went to pay this but the guy said I owed ¥1.2 for the two calls. Since we were the only customers, there’s no way they could have forgotten my first payment of ¥0.6 but one of the guys got really angry, throwing the phones across the kiosk and shouting at us. The extent that the Chinese will go to to squeeze a few extra pennies from foreigners made me want to puke.
We needed to buy a ticket for our next train: Beijing to Ulan Bator (Mongolia’s capital) so naturally we went to the main ticket office in the train station, but couldn’t find an English speaking desk. A few people told us to go to the “international hotel”. What did this mean? A hotel was the only way to get this ticket? So we walked in the vague direction of someone’s pointing until we saw a huge slab of a building, concave in shape and very grand-looking. Sure enough there was a travel agency on the second floor and although it was closed, a woman gave us a price list. It would cost us ¥600 (about £45) and the journey would take 32 hours.
The guy from globalfreeloaders met us at 8pm with some friends, a nice group of creative people: graphic designers and photographers, and took us to quite a posh restaurant for our first taste of true Peking/Beijing duck, which was nice but very gristly. Chris was feeling sick so we returned home early.
Our first full day in Beijing was a bit of a non-event as Chris stayed in bed all the time, occasionally leaving to bless the squat-style toilet with a large dose of poo-moose. So it was up to me to get things done: namely buy the train tickets and organise some free accommodation by meeting with a Chinese guy who called himself “George” who I found on globalfreeloaders. He kindly picked me up from the hostel and we drove to a café that he owned where we sat and discussed the next few days over some Coca-colas. He was an older guy, about forty-something, and had a family. He ran a small air-conditioning company and had invested in the café, buying the land outright when he was particularly successful some years ago. Now the café just acts as a meeting place more than anything, mainly for his friends, to discuss travelling. He seemed to have been to every country in the world and had brought back various artefacts from each one, all of which were on display in the café: African masks, Turkish pottery, Australian road signs, French football scarves, Italian opera masks, Indian tea pots, Russian plates to name a few. I told him we’d move in the next day for three nights as Chris was currently ill, and that was it sorted.
So I then went back to the ominous international hotel, brought the tickets and went to the toilet in a toilet with an attendant who I didn’t know needed tipping or not. He didn’t do anything apart from watch me so what should I have tipped him for? Maybe he didn’t even work there.
That evening the hostel was very restful and peaceful for me. I got dinner in a small restaurant attached to the hostel and met a young American girl who sat across from me on the same table even though there was plenty of space. Sensing that she wanted to talk to someone, I struck up a conversation and she burst into a breathless speech about her two weeks travelling in China. Then I spoke to an older Korean lady who had been travelling for seven months and would go back home the next day. Seven months? How can you return to normal life after that? But then again, she didn’t seem like she had a normal life. Then I just wandered around and settled in the café area, writing in my diary and chatting to the new guy in our room.
Chris was still sick the next day but well enough to move to the cafe4, under the kindness of George. After settling, I set out into town to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square. Within minutes of getting off the bus, two not-so-young girls came up to me, asking where I was from and all the other usual questions.
“Would you like to come and have some tea with us?” they said with a little too much urgency, too early on in our acquaintance. I asked what their jobs were,
“oh, we’re students”. I replied that I just wanted to walk around and that they were very welcome to join me. After a suspicious pause one of them said “sure, we want to talk English with you.” I asked their names: Tina and Susan. I laughed a little and explained that I didn’t trust anyone who approached me in China.
“That’s terrible” and Susan, who did most of the talking and had ridiculously thick bright turquoise eye makeup, “why don’t you trust anybody?” I explained how almost everybody just wanted my money “included you I suspect” I added. Susan stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me with a little disgust, “how did you lose your trust in other people? That’s sad.”
After some more semi-tense chatting, during which she frequently commented how handsome I looked, I asked how old they were.
“That’s a terrible question” replied Susan.
“No it’s not” I said, knowing full well that to ask a woman’s age in China doesn’t have the same taboo as back home. They both looked over thirty and I’d already had many women come up to me claiming to be students to go with them and be enticed into spending outrageous amounts of money.
“OK then” I said to Tina who looked the oldest, “what did you do before university?” This clearly had her stumped.
“Er… high school” she muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said, “but you’re too old! You’re telling me you were in high school three years ago?”
“Yes” she replied. Then Susan spoke in fast Chinese to Tina, turned to me and said “do you want to have some tea with us?”
“Sure” I answered, “if it’s cheap, maybe about ¥10.”
“No” she said firmly, “we like expensive tea, cost you ¥200.” I just stared at them, “so you are just trying to get my money?” and they walked away. Within minutes of walking away, still chuckling to myself, another pair of girls said hello but much more passively than the previous couple. They asked the same old questions, I gave the same old answers but they didn’t say they wanted me to do anything. Upon my questioning they explained that they were English students. It fitted: they looked young and seemed eager to learn new words from me.
“Why are you in such a touristy area if you live here?” I asked, my suspicions dissolving away.
“Because it’s the weekend and we’re out shopping” said the girl with a yellow Addidas tracksuit and a dark Thai-style complexion. So I just followed them around for an hour or so, enjoying the company of people who weren’t after anything. After a quick photo, within minutes of departing, another two girls came to me and said hello. They asked the same questions but in a much more ‘just passing’ style and I soon rejoined my own company to wander through the surprisingly large square. There were many kits being sold and flown of all types and heights, some impossibly high like distant planes. Salesmen were everywhere, selling more cheap junk, and connect to chairman Mao in some way.
That evening George took Chris to the local hospital during which he waited five minutes to be seen, had an immediate blood and poo test, got the results within ten minutes and was prescribed and given drugs ten minutes after that. In a country where the maimed and starving bed for anything in all the cities, the health service still beats England’s by miles. This hospital was very simple. Things were just getting done without fuss or complaint. However, it looked much more basic, less well facilitated, and the Chinese spat on the floor which is surely a bad thing to do anywhere let alone in a hospital. In fact, the Chinese seem to hold no ground exempt from spitting. As we walked down a carpeted hallway in an office building, a dirty-jacket man spat on the floor, looking strangely pleased with himself afterwards.
“The Summer Palace”, one of Beijing’s major sights, was to be the next day’s plan for me. About 2.5 km square, it acted as leisure ground for one of China’s old Emperors when it was summer time and too hot to be indoors. It was beautiful. Willow lined paths between two lakes, rock garden patches, archaic decorative bridges and many traditional old Chinese buildings. Included in the entrance fee was admission to many small museums within the park, some ridiculously boring (as the young daughter of a British couple put it: “it’s just a bunch of chairs”) and some fascinating, if for no reason but the age of some of the relics which surpassed 3000 years. But Beijing’s eternal haze hung over the park, making it hard to see objects across the lake (although the lake was large) and at around 4pm, I could stare straight at the sun which then looked more like the moon: pale and misty.
Beijing is the place to see the Great Wall of China, well, at least where you need to catch a bus from. After a seventy minute journey we excitedly past patches of the wall itself before pulling up into tourist hell: “T-shirt one dollar, one dollar, postcards, book, T-shirt one dollar” was the local mantra yet again but our faces showed we had already experienced almost three weeks of this and were sick of it, although Chris still had to stop to look!
We first went to the Great Wall cinema which showed a film about the history of the wall in 360˚, using eight projectors, technology and film alike being about thirty years out of date. And it was only in Chinese with no subtitles. Crazy for such an international tourist attraction.
We wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find the way onto the wall and eventually found an absurdly tiny sign. Although the wall covers some 6000 km, you’d never guess it because of the bloody Beijing mist. The tower sections at every 200 metres or so consisted of a series of tiny tunnels you had to squeeze through although some Chinese considered these areas fit to have a piss. I noticed one woman doing herself back up, a puddle just below her.
It was extremely steep in places and the height of the coarse steps varied from around 10 cm to 50 cm. It was so busy that at one point people were crushing each other by one of the thin steep stairwells, seemingly unable to simply let one go at a time. 90% of the crowds were Chinese. The relative expense of China’s tourist attractions make it harder to enjoy them. You certainly get a sense that it’s just all about the money and this must surely be China’s biggest threat to a dwindling tourist industry. Surely no one who leaves China could forget the constant money grabbing, can’t-get-enough, tourist preying mentality and prevents me from recommended China to anybody. Whether you’re on a big budget or not, the persistence of the Chinese to trick, con and mislead foreigners is simply too much to create a fulfilling experience. Bottles of water were on sale on the wall for ¥10. A bottle of water in a shop was about ¥1.
So we got on the wall, walked about a mile, took our pictures and came off. There were no signs to tell you where to go, no information about the wall, no guides, no maps and no organisation. Things didn’t improve when we went to a restaurant in the city centre, as reviewed by the now utterly useless Lonely Planet, in which prices had risen by 50%. A half of a duck ¥100. We ordered a half between us and out came a serious looking chef with a meaty-looking half duck. He asked us how we’d like it cup up and proceeded to cut small slithers of meat and skin and serve it up on a small plate. Although the meat on this duck looked barely touched, he served up the small plate and left. This was it. Our ¥100 half duck. It barely enough for a sandwich. Sure it was tasty especially the oily skin, I’d never tasted anything like it but we couldn’t forget about the bill. It turns out that ¥30 is a fairly standard price in Beijing for a whole duck. Sure enough, our restaurant was full of fat Americans and glitzy foreigner business people.
Onwards into Mongolia the next day, leaving at 7.40 am, the longest railway journey I’d ever taken. It was a Chinese train and each compartment had four beds, two bunks on each side with a small table in the middle against the window. Me and Chris were in separate carriages as there weren’t many beds left which was a good thing in my mind. After a few hours of relaxing, listening to Eddie Izzard comedy CDs I ventured tot the restaurant carriage where I sat on an empty table. Within seconds the miserable Chinese “waitress” ushered me over to a table already occupied by a middle aged Scottish couple. I gave my order from a choice of the two items that were actually still available on the English menu (or so she said: I saw Chinese people eating fried rice and prawns which didn’t even feature on the absurdly concise menu) and happily chatted to the couple. I don’t know if the Chinese waitress was merely trying to save tables or had been administered the job of social ambassador, but I was pleased for the blunt introduction.
At the China/Mongolia boarder the wheels of the train were physically changed to ride the differing Mongolian tracks. The whole boarder process took about four hours, during which I decided to get off and couldn’t come back on until the process was finished. I had no idea what country I was in when I got off, a fairly unique feeling, until I saw everything priced in Chinese yuan in a small supermarket that most of the travelling Aussies and English were over-stocking on beer in. Having had our passports carefully checked by the Chinese for two hours, the train ran for ten minutes and the whole process was repeated by Mongolian. A young Mongolian woman official in ridiculously large oval hat scrutinised my passport and called some other officials over just to add to the drama of what would otherwise be an incredibly dull job. Having spent five minutes inspecting my battered passport like it was a nuclear bomb, she returned it with an air of contempt that said “just this time I’m not going to send you to a Siberian slave labour camp.”
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Datong
At Datong, our destination, we decide to push onto Beijing as quick as we could. The next train out was 10pm, a seven hour journey and all we could get was another hard seat. It was 2pm so we had eight hours to spare. We spend a few hours in an internet café (in which hotmail couldn’t load again. What was going on?!) and the rest of the time in a “Mr Lee’s Beef Noodle” shop, which featured red and white signs and a stark picture of some old Chinese guy, smiling brightly, wearing a bow tie. And I thought China didn’t want to be like America.
The train wasn’t as bad as the last one but this time there was no chance of an upgrade. After chatting to some of the locals around us, entertaining them by showing some English and Japanese money I had, I tried to sleep but ended up just counting the hours away with my eyes close.
The train wasn’t as bad as the last one but this time there was no chance of an upgrade. After chatting to some of the locals around us, entertaining them by showing some English and Japanese money I had, I tried to sleep but ended up just counting the hours away with my eyes close.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Taiyuan
After ten minutes sleep it was time to get off and I could barely walk straight because of the pain that flushed through my body. Suddenly our new Chinese friend showed-up again and kept telling us to stay in a cheap hotel near his college in Taiyuan, our destination. We declined at first and the three of is went to a cheap hotel by the station as recommend in the thoroughly useless Lonely Planet, which stated that dorms were from ¥25 a night. The miserable looking receptionist muttered ¥50 to our new Chinese friend (who was called Young) so we contested that we were once again being conned. After a brief speech from the miserable lady, Young turned to us and translated:
“she says that you have to pay a high rate because you can’t share with other Chinese people in a dorm.”
“What?!” we replied, and he continued:
“because she says it is the law of China, so you have to get your own room.” Having never before encountered such disgustingly unashamed racism before, we marched straight out swearing out loud in our unrecognisable English.
So we followed Young to the hotel near his college. “We need to get a bus” he explained”, “only ten minutes”.
After a twenty minute bus journey we started walking through his college. “It’s a three minute walk, only a short walk.”
Ten minutes later, we arrived at the hotel were Young told us it was ¥58 for a double room. Oh great, at last. Having been so sick and drained of all my regular senses, it was a relief to find somewhere to crash. As we got ready to pay, Young explained that the ¥58 would cover us for only twelve hours.
“But it’s now 9am” I said, “so we would have to leave at 9pm or pay another ¥58?”
“Yes” confirmed an increasingly useless Young, “well, you could stay at my place if you like. I have spare beds.”
“Really?” I said, a flood of doubt flowing over me, “two spare beds in your university room?” I just couldn’t imagine it but sure enough, when we entered his room, we found four sets of bunk beds, as well as a wet concrete floor, rubbish and books everywhere, and two spare beds. The dorm hallway stunk of urine and sewage. None of the taps in the bathrooms worked and all of the squat-style toilets had crap smeared on the floor.
Chris went out for the day while I dozed on and off all day, trying to get over the food bug. I got up at six o’clock in the evening to buy some pure juice at the local supermarket (it seemed to be a rare and expensive product) and a small loaf of bread, being the first bit of food I’d eaten in 24 hours. Chris returned and I went back to bed.
I felt better the next morning and ready to tackle the three to six hour journey to Wu-Tai-Shan, a sleepy village built around Buddhist temples and monasteries (according to the Lonely Planet). Having spent an hour trying to get to the right bus station, we found ourselves constantly harassed by a dirty looking man in a jacket who wanted to do everything for us. I was deeply suspicious, especially when he led us to the only battered minibus that was parked amongst a row of gleaming small coaches. I didn’t want to get on it. I could foresee us stopping off in every tiny town and going to Wu-Tai-Shan via the most roundabout route possible. And that’s exactly what followed, for six hours.
The dirty jacket man got on our aging minibus and shouted at everybody we passed, trying to convince them that they wanted to go to Wu-Tai-Shan. He looked like a moron. The driver didn’t look any better. In fact he was more moronic: as we drove up the mountains, riding in thin mountain-edge roads that plummeted into mist, he was using his cell phone, driving at full speed with one hand which contained a lighted cigarette which he was also smoking.
Each sharp corner had a large rounded mirror, vital to see if you were safe to turn into the corner without hitting anyone from the opposite direction, but all of these were smashed. How the hell did they get smashed all the way up there? UFOs? Angry birds?
There was a gate to the entrance of Wu-Tai-Shan town, and we needed to pay a ¥90 entrance ticket. Now, everyone else on the bus had paid ¥45 but for some reason, we had to pay ¥90 which I later discovered was for the previous year’s peak-season ticket. It read ‘2005’ when we should have paid ¥45 for this year’s off-season ticket. Ripped off again. I was getting very tired of it. It just wasn’t funny anymore.
We checked in at a hotel that was pleasantly situated by a river filled with rubbish and went for a walk around. We climbed a small hill and found ourselves in the most peaceful and genuinely moving area so far. It was a Buddhist temple, of which we peaked through the huge wooden doors at a troop of monks in ceremony, chanting and walking into the main temple room while other monks hit drums gently. We were away from all the craziness and clutter, and for that sort moment, I was so happy to be there.
The next day was infuriating. We got nothing done, didn’t see anything and got ripped-off even more. The Chinese will rip you off and it’s not a case of being wise against it, they simply leave you with no other choice. In other words, they won’t allow you to pay the same as the Chinese or they’ll make it virtually impossible for you to do so.
We spent most of the day trying to locae a bus station and a computer room which were marked on the almost useless Lonely Planet map of Wu-Tai-Shan. Every other person shouted “hello” to us and tried to get us to buy something or get in their taxi. People trying to get us to use their taxi was the funniest. As if we’d spontaneously decide to take a taxi somewhere because someone said “hello”.
We eventually found the one computer room in the town and when we started to use them, we found we couldn’t access hotmail at all. After trying for ten minutes we returned to the fat woman who we had to pay up front, and asked for our money back. She refused to fully refund us and after twenty minutes of reasoning, nothing changed. Then we had to pay ¥60 for a ¥45 coach ticket to our next town from the hotel because we never found the bus station. The only nice things that day were a climb up a few hundred steps to a nice view of the town, and dinner.
After dinner, I started really thinking about Aki and burst into tears as I thought about how lonely she might be now and how I made her happy. I felt so guilty for leaving her. Although we both knew there was no future to our relationship, she gave no impression of really believing that, and that really cut me up. Me and Chris talking about her and he calmed me down as he relayed the facts to me straight: she wanted to get married and have a baby. I wanted to do so many things in my life first. She was 29. I was 25. In Japan, marriage values are more traditional and the pressure to be married with kids was much higher for a 29 year old woman in Japan than in England. We had a great time together, and really loved each other, but it couldn’t last.
The bus left at 8am and again, people were being rounded up and convinced they wanted to go to wherever the bus was going. We had to change buses halfway. Moving from an uncomfortable bus to a more uncomfortable bus. We passed through the mountains again, making precarious turns on small mountain roads across plains of indented hills, with huge ridges, like giant steps.
“she says that you have to pay a high rate because you can’t share with other Chinese people in a dorm.”
“What?!” we replied, and he continued:
“because she says it is the law of China, so you have to get your own room.” Having never before encountered such disgustingly unashamed racism before, we marched straight out swearing out loud in our unrecognisable English.
So we followed Young to the hotel near his college. “We need to get a bus” he explained”, “only ten minutes”.
After a twenty minute bus journey we started walking through his college. “It’s a three minute walk, only a short walk.”
Ten minutes later, we arrived at the hotel were Young told us it was ¥58 for a double room. Oh great, at last. Having been so sick and drained of all my regular senses, it was a relief to find somewhere to crash. As we got ready to pay, Young explained that the ¥58 would cover us for only twelve hours.
“But it’s now 9am” I said, “so we would have to leave at 9pm or pay another ¥58?”
“Yes” confirmed an increasingly useless Young, “well, you could stay at my place if you like. I have spare beds.”
“Really?” I said, a flood of doubt flowing over me, “two spare beds in your university room?” I just couldn’t imagine it but sure enough, when we entered his room, we found four sets of bunk beds, as well as a wet concrete floor, rubbish and books everywhere, and two spare beds. The dorm hallway stunk of urine and sewage. None of the taps in the bathrooms worked and all of the squat-style toilets had crap smeared on the floor.
Chris went out for the day while I dozed on and off all day, trying to get over the food bug. I got up at six o’clock in the evening to buy some pure juice at the local supermarket (it seemed to be a rare and expensive product) and a small loaf of bread, being the first bit of food I’d eaten in 24 hours. Chris returned and I went back to bed.
I felt better the next morning and ready to tackle the three to six hour journey to Wu-Tai-Shan, a sleepy village built around Buddhist temples and monasteries (according to the Lonely Planet). Having spent an hour trying to get to the right bus station, we found ourselves constantly harassed by a dirty looking man in a jacket who wanted to do everything for us. I was deeply suspicious, especially when he led us to the only battered minibus that was parked amongst a row of gleaming small coaches. I didn’t want to get on it. I could foresee us stopping off in every tiny town and going to Wu-Tai-Shan via the most roundabout route possible. And that’s exactly what followed, for six hours.
The dirty jacket man got on our aging minibus and shouted at everybody we passed, trying to convince them that they wanted to go to Wu-Tai-Shan. He looked like a moron. The driver didn’t look any better. In fact he was more moronic: as we drove up the mountains, riding in thin mountain-edge roads that plummeted into mist, he was using his cell phone, driving at full speed with one hand which contained a lighted cigarette which he was also smoking.
Each sharp corner had a large rounded mirror, vital to see if you were safe to turn into the corner without hitting anyone from the opposite direction, but all of these were smashed. How the hell did they get smashed all the way up there? UFOs? Angry birds?
There was a gate to the entrance of Wu-Tai-Shan town, and we needed to pay a ¥90 entrance ticket. Now, everyone else on the bus had paid ¥45 but for some reason, we had to pay ¥90 which I later discovered was for the previous year’s peak-season ticket. It read ‘2005’ when we should have paid ¥45 for this year’s off-season ticket. Ripped off again. I was getting very tired of it. It just wasn’t funny anymore.
We checked in at a hotel that was pleasantly situated by a river filled with rubbish and went for a walk around. We climbed a small hill and found ourselves in the most peaceful and genuinely moving area so far. It was a Buddhist temple, of which we peaked through the huge wooden doors at a troop of monks in ceremony, chanting and walking into the main temple room while other monks hit drums gently. We were away from all the craziness and clutter, and for that sort moment, I was so happy to be there.
The next day was infuriating. We got nothing done, didn’t see anything and got ripped-off even more. The Chinese will rip you off and it’s not a case of being wise against it, they simply leave you with no other choice. In other words, they won’t allow you to pay the same as the Chinese or they’ll make it virtually impossible for you to do so.
We spent most of the day trying to locae a bus station and a computer room which were marked on the almost useless Lonely Planet map of Wu-Tai-Shan. Every other person shouted “hello” to us and tried to get us to buy something or get in their taxi. People trying to get us to use their taxi was the funniest. As if we’d spontaneously decide to take a taxi somewhere because someone said “hello”.
We eventually found the one computer room in the town and when we started to use them, we found we couldn’t access hotmail at all. After trying for ten minutes we returned to the fat woman who we had to pay up front, and asked for our money back. She refused to fully refund us and after twenty minutes of reasoning, nothing changed. Then we had to pay ¥60 for a ¥45 coach ticket to our next town from the hotel because we never found the bus station. The only nice things that day were a climb up a few hundred steps to a nice view of the town, and dinner.
After dinner, I started really thinking about Aki and burst into tears as I thought about how lonely she might be now and how I made her happy. I felt so guilty for leaving her. Although we both knew there was no future to our relationship, she gave no impression of really believing that, and that really cut me up. Me and Chris talking about her and he calmed me down as he relayed the facts to me straight: she wanted to get married and have a baby. I wanted to do so many things in my life first. She was 29. I was 25. In Japan, marriage values are more traditional and the pressure to be married with kids was much higher for a 29 year old woman in Japan than in England. We had a great time together, and really loved each other, but it couldn’t last.
The bus left at 8am and again, people were being rounded up and convinced they wanted to go to wherever the bus was going. We had to change buses halfway. Moving from an uncomfortable bus to a more uncomfortable bus. We passed through the mountains again, making precarious turns on small mountain roads across plains of indented hills, with huge ridges, like giant steps.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Xian
We were being waited upon at Xian station, as the youth-hostel we booked the day before had sent a woman to the station with a somewhat Slavic spelling of my name: “KRAVOR”.
This place had a great review in the Lonely Planet, but the more we used the Lonely Planet, the more useless it became. This youth-hostel was just a big money sucking tourist machine, ran by an overly cheerful Chinese guy who called himself Jim Beam. Once we arrived there, Chris needed to wash his clothes, “OK, ¥10” said one of Jim’s overly smart henchmen.
“That’s a bit expensive” said Chris, not unfairly, since this would have paid for five beers in China.
“OK, ¥8” said the cheeky Chinaman. Chris settled on ¥5 but we still wondered how low we could have gone. The problem with haggling is that the British aren’t much good at it (Chris especially it has to be said) so they feel embarrassed to haggle and usually end up paying at least three times what a Chinese person would for the same thing. Since we had arrived at about 6.30am, we took a rest and then walked about.
Xian is a smaller city but still has huge buildings, big roads, McDonalds, KFC and shopping malls. But unexpectedly, it also has a large Muslim population, along with a large Mosque (although it looks just like a regular Buddhist temple).
As we wandered through the many markets, a kind lady started chatting to us and showed us some of her art-work, which were paintings of the four seasons on silk paper. Midway through our chatting, she started to name prices and it felt really wrong. This kind-looking lady had invited us into her studio, told us about her life and now just wanted money. As with most of the stall holders, she focused her attention on Chris and not me, as Chris’ face is one of “oh I feel like buying something” whereas I know mine is more like “well, this is all very amusing.” I did however buy an ice-cream and when I asked how much it was, the young lady said “fifty” and assuming this meant five jaio (there’s 10 jiao to ¥1), I gave her a ¥20 note and she only gave me ¥5 change. Now, ¥15 for an ice-cream is absurd. I previous day I bought one for ¥2, but she wouldn’t give me any more change. So I waited another customer to come to see what they would pay and I think I could guess what they were saying.
Clerk: Hold-on. This strange foreigner is watching us.
Customer: Why?
Clerk: I charged him ¥15 for an ice-cream and now he’s pissed-off. Would you mind coming back in a minute or two?
That night Chris showed me his plan for us to go to a mountain, climb it, stay on the mountain over night, then get a train to another city, climb another mountain, and then go to Beijing. He had adapted the plan from a suggested route in the increasingly annoying Lonely Planet. I went along with the idea but commented on how difficult the travelling would be. Chris disagreed and I couldn’t help but realise a little stubbornness in his voice. Oh dear I thought, will we be parting ways so early in this epic trip? I hoped not.
We spent the rest of the evening chatting to two Norwegian girls who were coming to the end of three months travelling across the world.
The Terracotta Warriors was to be the big theme of the next day. These were thousands of clay figures, set in the earth in a remote part of Xian, as a kind of memorial to the death of China’s first ever emperor. But in the morning we had to get our train sleeper tickets for the mountain-climbing leg of our journey.
Chris carefully wrote out the Chinese for each railway journey we needed and I managed to shove it in the tiny money hole for the clerk to see before some dirty Chinese guy tried to shove his cash in for his ticket. Almost immediately, the stern looking woman (who’s ticket booth included a sign that read “English assistance”) said “No. Only Xian here. This no. This no” and after a gentle enquiry from me as to how we could buy these tickets that run between stations other than Xian, she burst into the usual frantic Chinese, interjected with “I don’t understand” and “I don’t know.”
We needed a new plan but now we put travelling difficulties to one side and headed on a rickety old bus to the Terracotta Warriors. Since me and Chris had decided before that we wouldn’t hire nay English speaking guides, I confidently walked passed the small group of “official” guides who verbally barked at us, claiming how vital they were to learn anything about the Terracotta Warriors. If I hadn’t have decided already, their sales pitch alone would have been enough to discourage me from wanting to be led around by another person who was after my money. But to my amazement, Chris stopped and listened to her.
The most terrible thing about these guides is that they try to make you feel guilty for not hiring them.
“You’ll only come here once in your life”, “you need me”, “you won’t learn anything about it without me.” But I could watch Chris’ confidence seep into the dusty ground as he haggled a mere ¥5 off her original offer of ¥50 to ¥45. Pissed-off, I approached him and said “what are you doing?” and then he repeated the same gobbledygook that the guide had just given him.
“OK” I said, “I think now’s a good time to separate for a while. I’ll meet you back in the hostel tonight.”
They were certainly worth seeing and I enjoyed walking around by myself, peering at the English and Chinese inscriptions and occasionally muttering to myself. Originally these life-sized clay soldiers were painted in bold colours and held real life-sized weapons. But now the colours had faded, the weapons were stored out of public sight (why?) and two thousand years of fire, water leakage and theft had reduced many of these models to great piles of clay, with the occasional head or arm poking through.
Over 2000 years old, the most astounding thing was how many of these models were yet to be uncovered. It reminded me of walking through the Egyptian museum in Cairo as I glanced at objects that had been made in an age impossible for me to imagine.
Another small but equally amazing feature was how some of the Warrior’s weapons on display (there were only a few) were perfectly smooth and sharp, like they had been made the day before. Apparently they had been preserved with chromium 2000 years ago, a method of preserving metal that was invented just after the second world war! As I did in Egypt, I got the sense that our current age of technology is not the same one as that of 2000 years ago. So what happened between now and then?
I met Chris at eight o’clock that evening back in the hostel and then I went on the internet for a couple of hours, writing long messages to Aki and Maki. Me and Maki kept darting around the same subject but neither of us could quite bring ourselves to ask the obvious question: were we going to be a couple when we live in London?
I was happy to read that Aki was doing OK, getting on with life and spending more time with her friends. I went to sleep thinking once again about these two completely different people.
Chris really wanted to hire bicycles and cycle round the city. I wanted to meet Leo, a Chinese guy who was a part of the global-free-loaders.com group. This is basically a network of people form all across the world who are willing to let travellers stay at their place for free, no strings attached. In response to a request for accommodation, he replied saying that he no longer had his own flat so we couldn’t stay with him but he’d be happy to show us around Xian. Chris was determined to cycle by himself, so I met Leo by myself. He came to the hotel and we immediately fell into a nice friendship of honesty and gentle cultural comparisons. First we got a bus to a restaurant to meet two of his friends where I tried a delicious rice and pineapple dish served in a pineapple.
One of these friends of his worked in a new bakery in the centre of town, which his aunt owns. It was a flashy place with young assistants ready to give advice on your choice of cake. Leo told me that it had only been open for just over a week and was already popular with students, who apparently have a lot on money and can therefore afford this bakery’s inflated prices.
We then walked to a couple of local universities and just sat and chatted. Leo was a really interesting guy with a great flare for English. He was fluent and could easily understand me even though he had never left China. He told me about his dreams to live abroad but every time I said “why not?” he would list a hundred and one reasons why it would never work out and I explained that most of these reasons were either fictitious, highly unlikely or easy to solve.
China’s a strange place. As we walked past the university fence, I noticed all these stencil-sprayed adverts, all with a phone number and Leo told me they were people offering fake diplomas and exam results. He informed me that it was almost “English Corner” time, when many students would gather in the main square to talk in English. Rather looking forward to the prospect of being a superstar, I wanted to stay but Leo said I’d just be asked the same questions all the time, which I knew would be true, so we moved into a new area having once again visited the bakery for some free strange oily coleslaw sandwiches.
We walked into a really pretty open area lined with new old-style buildings (with the curled roof corners and all) which Leo assured me had a musical fountain display every day at 8pm. We walked to a large flat polished marble square with coloured lights inset in the ground, about 8- metres by 80 metres.
“Oh this is nice” I commented as we continued walking through the square.
“It continues down here too, to the water over there” said Leo, and I realised that this fountain square was just one of six 80 by 80 metre squares that stretched right across the park. By now it was dark and almost 8pm, so we got in a position that Leo told me would keep us dry, and sure enough the music started and all six squares lit up and I watched one of the most dazzling and beautiful sights in my life. The water shot up in rhythm to the music, moving diagonally, in circles, in ovals, in waves, in any pattern you could think of, all with different coloured lights. The water made shapes you could never imagine it could make and the whole thing was truly breathtaking, and also free.
On the way back to the bakery, we walked through a beautiful newly built area that consisted of small squares of grass and carefully positioned decorative trees, lit with subtle lighting. I commented to Leo, “you know, this would be wrecked within weeks if it was in England.”
“Why?”
“Well, because there are a lot of dickheads in England with nothing better to do.” The sheer fact that he couldn’t imagine why anyone would purposely wreck something like that made me think about one of England’s worst elements: vandalism.
Back at the bakery we chatted more about Leo’s possible future as a tour guide or Mandarin teacher abroad and I left extremely happy to have met such a nice guy. When I got back to the money-sucking hotel/hostel, Chris and I chatted about our day and although we had originally planned (well, Chris had) to climb a mountain the next day, I told him that I wanted to see Leo again. Getting to know the locals was more important than following tourist trails for me. He seemed a bit stumped and told me that he wasn’t very good at changing plans. Bloody hell I thought, had Chris really ever been travelling before?! Isn’t not having a plan the very essence of real travelling?! I could see now that we’d be spending more than a few days apart from each other over the next five weeks or so.
And so I spent the next day with Leo, just following him around on his daily schedule. Fortunately for me, he didn’t have a day job, just some English teaching assistance in a small English school an hour away from where he lives. With his great English skills, he could be doing so much more so I persisted with reminders of his own dreams, as he had told me about the day before.
I met the aunt of his friend who owned the bakery, an interesting lady who had lived in America for six years, but Leo’s English was better than hers. She kept asking him when she didn’t know a word, and her Chinese accent was thicker. She drove us to an industrial estate and we walked into a graphic design studio where they were designing paper bowls for a new fruit, ice and bean product to be sold in the bakery, which is apparently common during Chinese summers. They asked for my help so I gave my opinion, and they changed the design to follow it! So it seems I will leave my mark in China in a pretty unusual way.
After another free meal at the bakery, which had seemed to become my Xian base centre, we got the bus to Leo’s small English school and met the main teacher, a good friend of his called Austin. Austin was one of those instantly likeable, full-of-enthusiasm-for-everything guys: perfect for an English teacher. I sat in on the class, which consisted of four girls, the youngest about sixteen, the oldest about thirty, Leo and Austin. Each student spoke a very different standard of English to the next, and what with the amount of Chinese being spoken (with Leo interpreting), I was not sure how useful the lesson really was. After a ¥3 ride back into own on a rickety old noisy tricycle taxi thing, I walked back to my hostel and chatted to Maki on the internet while I wrote a long email to Aki. A strange situation indeed.
The next day I met Leo for lunch in a restaurant that served “waist” noodles. These are huge fat noodles, which you order a few at a time, about 4cm wide and 40cm long, which you mix into a soup of herbs, tofu, tomato and other unidentifiable things.
We took a leisurely stroll through the city, passing hundreds of shops, many with techno blasting out the front, some with cute girls with microphones doing some promotion. It’s easy to see the entire range of China’s economic classes by simply standing on the corner of a street. There are rich couples with designer handbags, tiny phones and huge cars which drive past hoards of day-time shoppers in more casual clothes, either walking or on electric or petrol powered mopeds. Then you have the “jacket” class. These are men dressed in tatty clothes with filthy hands and inconsistently dark faces, but all wearing a jacket, usually riding bicycles. These men were either carrying, eating or cooking food on the street. And finally there are the beggars and the dodgy street sellers, which seem to be one and the same. I’m quite sure a man selling franchised labels of water and soda who looks like he hasn’t smelt clean water in a year isn’t an official representative of Coca-Cola products.
We went to the main public library and I browsed in the English books section while Leo dozed on a table. After some more walking around, trying to get him to promise me that he’d get going on getting a job abroad we said goodbye, which really just felt like more of a ‘see you later’.
I met Chris in the hostel and picked up our bags, which the hostel tried to charge us ¥10 just to hold them for seven hours. I argued the price down to nothing. After buying four large beers to help knock us out (we were going to be on hard seats on twelve hours), we rushed to the station, grabbing some fried vegetable rolls on the way from some random street stall. It was absolute bedlam at the platform, just chaos. People were pushing into other people cramming into door, guards blowing whistles and gesturing aggressively and a sense of panic was everywhere. I just held onto the knowledge that we actually had seats, unlike many of the others.
The journey was just awful. The train was filthy, nothing like the other trains we had got on before. Dirty people, well, 99% men, were sprawled about everywhere: on the floor, against doors, on the wash basins. People were actually perched on the sinks trying to sleep on them. And everyone looked miserable. People were smoking under the “no smoking” signs, spitting in the aisles and always coughing great hacking coughs that sounded like their intestines would be revealed at any moment, and shouting at each other.
And then I started to feel sick, more and more so. My stomach started swelling to the point that I’d run out of holes to reposition my belt buckle. What was happening?! Was I going to explode like a balloon? I couldn’t stop burping awful pungent burps. I felt like I just needed a crap and then all would be fine but when I tried to go (there were no people sleeping in the toilet which kinda surprised me), I just couldn’t.
I felt worse and worse and I noticed how horrible my environment was more and more. Some fairly respectable looking young Chinese guy had started chatting to Chris, who wasn’t really (understandably) in the mood to listen to yet more enthusiastic broken English. But he turned out to be a big help as he helped us to upgrade our tickets so we could get beds and I desperately needed to lie down. Midnight passed and we had just settled into our new beds and I was starting to feel like I wanted to vomit. I didn’t get any sleep as I kept going to the toilet and dry gagging, unable to vomit-up anything, constantly sipping water to try to control my feverish body. As I watched the first morning light drain into the dank sleeper carriage, I finally vomited a thin-carrier bag full of vomit which was a tremendous relief as the previous dry retching, when I sounded like some kind of deranged animal, coughing up air, was hideous, but I only felt a little better.
This place had a great review in the Lonely Planet, but the more we used the Lonely Planet, the more useless it became. This youth-hostel was just a big money sucking tourist machine, ran by an overly cheerful Chinese guy who called himself Jim Beam. Once we arrived there, Chris needed to wash his clothes, “OK, ¥10” said one of Jim’s overly smart henchmen.
“That’s a bit expensive” said Chris, not unfairly, since this would have paid for five beers in China.
“OK, ¥8” said the cheeky Chinaman. Chris settled on ¥5 but we still wondered how low we could have gone. The problem with haggling is that the British aren’t much good at it (Chris especially it has to be said) so they feel embarrassed to haggle and usually end up paying at least three times what a Chinese person would for the same thing. Since we had arrived at about 6.30am, we took a rest and then walked about.
Xian is a smaller city but still has huge buildings, big roads, McDonalds, KFC and shopping malls. But unexpectedly, it also has a large Muslim population, along with a large Mosque (although it looks just like a regular Buddhist temple).
As we wandered through the many markets, a kind lady started chatting to us and showed us some of her art-work, which were paintings of the four seasons on silk paper. Midway through our chatting, she started to name prices and it felt really wrong. This kind-looking lady had invited us into her studio, told us about her life and now just wanted money. As with most of the stall holders, she focused her attention on Chris and not me, as Chris’ face is one of “oh I feel like buying something” whereas I know mine is more like “well, this is all very amusing.” I did however buy an ice-cream and when I asked how much it was, the young lady said “fifty” and assuming this meant five jaio (there’s 10 jiao to ¥1), I gave her a ¥20 note and she only gave me ¥5 change. Now, ¥15 for an ice-cream is absurd. I previous day I bought one for ¥2, but she wouldn’t give me any more change. So I waited another customer to come to see what they would pay and I think I could guess what they were saying.
Clerk: Hold-on. This strange foreigner is watching us.
Customer: Why?
Clerk: I charged him ¥15 for an ice-cream and now he’s pissed-off. Would you mind coming back in a minute or two?
That night Chris showed me his plan for us to go to a mountain, climb it, stay on the mountain over night, then get a train to another city, climb another mountain, and then go to Beijing. He had adapted the plan from a suggested route in the increasingly annoying Lonely Planet. I went along with the idea but commented on how difficult the travelling would be. Chris disagreed and I couldn’t help but realise a little stubbornness in his voice. Oh dear I thought, will we be parting ways so early in this epic trip? I hoped not.
We spent the rest of the evening chatting to two Norwegian girls who were coming to the end of three months travelling across the world.
The Terracotta Warriors was to be the big theme of the next day. These were thousands of clay figures, set in the earth in a remote part of Xian, as a kind of memorial to the death of China’s first ever emperor. But in the morning we had to get our train sleeper tickets for the mountain-climbing leg of our journey.
Chris carefully wrote out the Chinese for each railway journey we needed and I managed to shove it in the tiny money hole for the clerk to see before some dirty Chinese guy tried to shove his cash in for his ticket. Almost immediately, the stern looking woman (who’s ticket booth included a sign that read “English assistance”) said “No. Only Xian here. This no. This no” and after a gentle enquiry from me as to how we could buy these tickets that run between stations other than Xian, she burst into the usual frantic Chinese, interjected with “I don’t understand” and “I don’t know.”
We needed a new plan but now we put travelling difficulties to one side and headed on a rickety old bus to the Terracotta Warriors. Since me and Chris had decided before that we wouldn’t hire nay English speaking guides, I confidently walked passed the small group of “official” guides who verbally barked at us, claiming how vital they were to learn anything about the Terracotta Warriors. If I hadn’t have decided already, their sales pitch alone would have been enough to discourage me from wanting to be led around by another person who was after my money. But to my amazement, Chris stopped and listened to her.
The most terrible thing about these guides is that they try to make you feel guilty for not hiring them.
“You’ll only come here once in your life”, “you need me”, “you won’t learn anything about it without me.” But I could watch Chris’ confidence seep into the dusty ground as he haggled a mere ¥5 off her original offer of ¥50 to ¥45. Pissed-off, I approached him and said “what are you doing?” and then he repeated the same gobbledygook that the guide had just given him.
“OK” I said, “I think now’s a good time to separate for a while. I’ll meet you back in the hostel tonight.”
They were certainly worth seeing and I enjoyed walking around by myself, peering at the English and Chinese inscriptions and occasionally muttering to myself. Originally these life-sized clay soldiers were painted in bold colours and held real life-sized weapons. But now the colours had faded, the weapons were stored out of public sight (why?) and two thousand years of fire, water leakage and theft had reduced many of these models to great piles of clay, with the occasional head or arm poking through.
Over 2000 years old, the most astounding thing was how many of these models were yet to be uncovered. It reminded me of walking through the Egyptian museum in Cairo as I glanced at objects that had been made in an age impossible for me to imagine.
Another small but equally amazing feature was how some of the Warrior’s weapons on display (there were only a few) were perfectly smooth and sharp, like they had been made the day before. Apparently they had been preserved with chromium 2000 years ago, a method of preserving metal that was invented just after the second world war! As I did in Egypt, I got the sense that our current age of technology is not the same one as that of 2000 years ago. So what happened between now and then?
I met Chris at eight o’clock that evening back in the hostel and then I went on the internet for a couple of hours, writing long messages to Aki and Maki. Me and Maki kept darting around the same subject but neither of us could quite bring ourselves to ask the obvious question: were we going to be a couple when we live in London?
I was happy to read that Aki was doing OK, getting on with life and spending more time with her friends. I went to sleep thinking once again about these two completely different people.
Chris really wanted to hire bicycles and cycle round the city. I wanted to meet Leo, a Chinese guy who was a part of the global-free-loaders.com group. This is basically a network of people form all across the world who are willing to let travellers stay at their place for free, no strings attached. In response to a request for accommodation, he replied saying that he no longer had his own flat so we couldn’t stay with him but he’d be happy to show us around Xian. Chris was determined to cycle by himself, so I met Leo by myself. He came to the hotel and we immediately fell into a nice friendship of honesty and gentle cultural comparisons. First we got a bus to a restaurant to meet two of his friends where I tried a delicious rice and pineapple dish served in a pineapple.
One of these friends of his worked in a new bakery in the centre of town, which his aunt owns. It was a flashy place with young assistants ready to give advice on your choice of cake. Leo told me that it had only been open for just over a week and was already popular with students, who apparently have a lot on money and can therefore afford this bakery’s inflated prices.
We then walked to a couple of local universities and just sat and chatted. Leo was a really interesting guy with a great flare for English. He was fluent and could easily understand me even though he had never left China. He told me about his dreams to live abroad but every time I said “why not?” he would list a hundred and one reasons why it would never work out and I explained that most of these reasons were either fictitious, highly unlikely or easy to solve.
China’s a strange place. As we walked past the university fence, I noticed all these stencil-sprayed adverts, all with a phone number and Leo told me they were people offering fake diplomas and exam results. He informed me that it was almost “English Corner” time, when many students would gather in the main square to talk in English. Rather looking forward to the prospect of being a superstar, I wanted to stay but Leo said I’d just be asked the same questions all the time, which I knew would be true, so we moved into a new area having once again visited the bakery for some free strange oily coleslaw sandwiches.
We walked into a really pretty open area lined with new old-style buildings (with the curled roof corners and all) which Leo assured me had a musical fountain display every day at 8pm. We walked to a large flat polished marble square with coloured lights inset in the ground, about 8- metres by 80 metres.
“Oh this is nice” I commented as we continued walking through the square.
“It continues down here too, to the water over there” said Leo, and I realised that this fountain square was just one of six 80 by 80 metre squares that stretched right across the park. By now it was dark and almost 8pm, so we got in a position that Leo told me would keep us dry, and sure enough the music started and all six squares lit up and I watched one of the most dazzling and beautiful sights in my life. The water shot up in rhythm to the music, moving diagonally, in circles, in ovals, in waves, in any pattern you could think of, all with different coloured lights. The water made shapes you could never imagine it could make and the whole thing was truly breathtaking, and also free.
On the way back to the bakery, we walked through a beautiful newly built area that consisted of small squares of grass and carefully positioned decorative trees, lit with subtle lighting. I commented to Leo, “you know, this would be wrecked within weeks if it was in England.”
“Why?”
“Well, because there are a lot of dickheads in England with nothing better to do.” The sheer fact that he couldn’t imagine why anyone would purposely wreck something like that made me think about one of England’s worst elements: vandalism.
Back at the bakery we chatted more about Leo’s possible future as a tour guide or Mandarin teacher abroad and I left extremely happy to have met such a nice guy. When I got back to the money-sucking hotel/hostel, Chris and I chatted about our day and although we had originally planned (well, Chris had) to climb a mountain the next day, I told him that I wanted to see Leo again. Getting to know the locals was more important than following tourist trails for me. He seemed a bit stumped and told me that he wasn’t very good at changing plans. Bloody hell I thought, had Chris really ever been travelling before?! Isn’t not having a plan the very essence of real travelling?! I could see now that we’d be spending more than a few days apart from each other over the next five weeks or so.
And so I spent the next day with Leo, just following him around on his daily schedule. Fortunately for me, he didn’t have a day job, just some English teaching assistance in a small English school an hour away from where he lives. With his great English skills, he could be doing so much more so I persisted with reminders of his own dreams, as he had told me about the day before.
I met the aunt of his friend who owned the bakery, an interesting lady who had lived in America for six years, but Leo’s English was better than hers. She kept asking him when she didn’t know a word, and her Chinese accent was thicker. She drove us to an industrial estate and we walked into a graphic design studio where they were designing paper bowls for a new fruit, ice and bean product to be sold in the bakery, which is apparently common during Chinese summers. They asked for my help so I gave my opinion, and they changed the design to follow it! So it seems I will leave my mark in China in a pretty unusual way.
After another free meal at the bakery, which had seemed to become my Xian base centre, we got the bus to Leo’s small English school and met the main teacher, a good friend of his called Austin. Austin was one of those instantly likeable, full-of-enthusiasm-for-everything guys: perfect for an English teacher. I sat in on the class, which consisted of four girls, the youngest about sixteen, the oldest about thirty, Leo and Austin. Each student spoke a very different standard of English to the next, and what with the amount of Chinese being spoken (with Leo interpreting), I was not sure how useful the lesson really was. After a ¥3 ride back into own on a rickety old noisy tricycle taxi thing, I walked back to my hostel and chatted to Maki on the internet while I wrote a long email to Aki. A strange situation indeed.
The next day I met Leo for lunch in a restaurant that served “waist” noodles. These are huge fat noodles, which you order a few at a time, about 4cm wide and 40cm long, which you mix into a soup of herbs, tofu, tomato and other unidentifiable things.
We took a leisurely stroll through the city, passing hundreds of shops, many with techno blasting out the front, some with cute girls with microphones doing some promotion. It’s easy to see the entire range of China’s economic classes by simply standing on the corner of a street. There are rich couples with designer handbags, tiny phones and huge cars which drive past hoards of day-time shoppers in more casual clothes, either walking or on electric or petrol powered mopeds. Then you have the “jacket” class. These are men dressed in tatty clothes with filthy hands and inconsistently dark faces, but all wearing a jacket, usually riding bicycles. These men were either carrying, eating or cooking food on the street. And finally there are the beggars and the dodgy street sellers, which seem to be one and the same. I’m quite sure a man selling franchised labels of water and soda who looks like he hasn’t smelt clean water in a year isn’t an official representative of Coca-Cola products.
We went to the main public library and I browsed in the English books section while Leo dozed on a table. After some more walking around, trying to get him to promise me that he’d get going on getting a job abroad we said goodbye, which really just felt like more of a ‘see you later’.
I met Chris in the hostel and picked up our bags, which the hostel tried to charge us ¥10 just to hold them for seven hours. I argued the price down to nothing. After buying four large beers to help knock us out (we were going to be on hard seats on twelve hours), we rushed to the station, grabbing some fried vegetable rolls on the way from some random street stall. It was absolute bedlam at the platform, just chaos. People were pushing into other people cramming into door, guards blowing whistles and gesturing aggressively and a sense of panic was everywhere. I just held onto the knowledge that we actually had seats, unlike many of the others.
The journey was just awful. The train was filthy, nothing like the other trains we had got on before. Dirty people, well, 99% men, were sprawled about everywhere: on the floor, against doors, on the wash basins. People were actually perched on the sinks trying to sleep on them. And everyone looked miserable. People were smoking under the “no smoking” signs, spitting in the aisles and always coughing great hacking coughs that sounded like their intestines would be revealed at any moment, and shouting at each other.
And then I started to feel sick, more and more so. My stomach started swelling to the point that I’d run out of holes to reposition my belt buckle. What was happening?! Was I going to explode like a balloon? I couldn’t stop burping awful pungent burps. I felt like I just needed a crap and then all would be fine but when I tried to go (there were no people sleeping in the toilet which kinda surprised me), I just couldn’t.
I felt worse and worse and I noticed how horrible my environment was more and more. Some fairly respectable looking young Chinese guy had started chatting to Chris, who wasn’t really (understandably) in the mood to listen to yet more enthusiastic broken English. But he turned out to be a big help as he helped us to upgrade our tickets so we could get beds and I desperately needed to lie down. Midnight passed and we had just settled into our new beds and I was starting to feel like I wanted to vomit. I didn’t get any sleep as I kept going to the toilet and dry gagging, unable to vomit-up anything, constantly sipping water to try to control my feverish body. As I watched the first morning light drain into the dank sleeper carriage, I finally vomited a thin-carrier bag full of vomit which was a tremendous relief as the previous dry retching, when I sounded like some kind of deranged animal, coughing up air, was hideous, but I only felt a little better.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Nanjing
The first thing we needed to do was to buy a ticket for the next leg of the journey, Nanjing to Xian. We found a tiny ticket booth with only once section open and after queuing for twenty minutes, a woman behind us (who again spoke good English), told us we needed to go upstairs and offered to help us further. After another then minutes of queuing, we got our ticket for a ‘hard-sleeper’, a night train leaving three days later.
Our residence for the next three nights was to be in Nanjing University dorms so we headed there. I bought some delicious fresh pineapple on a stick (things on a stick seem to do big business in China), which was much needed as it turned out to be an hour-long walk from the station, which, with our heavy backpacks, isn’t funny. The map in Chris’ China Lonely Planet offered very little help but after a lot of guess-work we found the university. Then it struck me that we had no idea where to go so we made sleeping gestures to various security guards and were vaguely pointed in the right direction. Sure enough, these were the halls of residence for the university students, set quaintly in a twenty floor concrete tower.
We rested and dined at a very local super-cheap restaurant, the idea being to pick entirely random items but the woman there made gestures that indicated either slight mental retardation, or the fact that we’d never be capable of eating the things we’d chosen. She produced an old note book with a dozen or so hand-written translations of dishes. The food was great and during the meal, she asked for Chris’ Lonely Planet so she could copy out some more translations of dishes from the “useful phrases” section.
We wondered around and found that this area was much more relaxed and studenty than anywhere in Shanghai, with may bars and restaurants. We bought some fresh yogurts from a tiny street kiosk and sat down on some boxes to drink them (we had to return the bottles). We thought it was milk before we tasted it but instead it was a very sweet rich plain yogurt. I turned to some while guys sitting near us and we got chatting. They were students here, on of them studying (Chinese) medicine, both from America. We joked about how the perception of western medicine must match out idea of eastern medicine: “those strange westerners with their little magic pills”, and they told us a little about living in China. I mentioned how strange it was to have everybody staring at us all the time, and asked if they were talking about us as well. They replied that when you’ve been here a while, you get to learn the kind of things they say about you but you wish you’d never known.
The next day we hired bicycles from a guy who didn’t speak a word of English but we managed to conclude that he wanted a ¥100 deposit for each bike, a charge of ¥15 and they were to be returned by 8pm. It’s really amazing how much you can communicate without a common language. We set off for the Nanjing Memorial Museum, which was all about the Nanjing Massacre of 300,000 Chinese by Japanese soldiers. We got impressively lost deep in the dry open suburbs where there were few cars, few people and surprisingly, a huge exhibition complex, so we asked for help there. We compared our useless Lonely Planet map to their detailed local-area map and discovered that one of the most useful phrases you could need when travelling was not in the guide-book, being “where are we on this map?”
We eventually found the museum and were offered personal assistance by an English-speaking member of the museum who was working there during her PhD in tourism. She guided us across the mass grave of over 100,000 people, showed us piles of the victim’s bones, and added more information that wasn’t popular knowledge in China. For example, the leader of the “safety-zone”, an area set aside to help fleeing Chinese people in Nanjing, was a Nazi, even though he is heralded across China as a national hero. We read accounts of the Japanese burning, raping, beheading, burying alive, machine gunning and bayoneting their victims, all mostly innocent civilians. The museum spoke of the importance of never forgetting everywhere although the general feeling portrayed was one of anger against the Japanese rather than the need to remember such events for the sake of all mankind. The museum offered a purely one-sided view and gave no possible reason as to why this atrocity was committed.
We rode to a huge market area, filled with restaurants, stalls and heart-breakingly low-tech versions of Japanese photo booths, where you could get a cutsie picture with a variety of different backgrounds and graphics. By now it was dark and there were long rows of red Chinese lamps lining the streets, all lit up, and many buildings were lined with small lights, giving a strange synthetic beauty to everything. We chose a fairly random restaurant and dined on fried rice, sweet and sour pork and omelette soup. We had lost track of time a little and realised we only had twenty minutes before 8 o’clock. Nanjing’s main roads are formed in a grid pattern and it’s traffic lights all have large indicators that count-down in seconds when the lights will change.
Nanjing is a very busy little city, with about six million people, and so our dash through the city centre wasn’t without fear as we rode by huge dirty bushes, crazy cab drivers and constantly beeping scooters. What made the scene more surreal was the fact that we could always see two or three of these down-counting traffic lights ahead of us, and we were desperately trying to make the next set before zero, and then the next set, and the next, as if we were in some arcade racing game where you have to keep making the checkpoints or your money runs out.
After 25 minutes of this frantic cycling, we arrived at 8.05pm to an unfazed Chinaman who gave us out deposits without fuss and then locked-up for the night. We bought some beers and gate-crashed a party in the courtyard of the halls we were staying in. It turned out to be someone’s birthday and nobody spoke English apart from a Swiss and German girl who were about as warm and welcoming as the Chinese were to the Japanese in 1937. After an hour of so of pained conversation, I gave up and watched TV in our room while Chris located some Japanese guys and had a chat. Feeling drowsy with the weak Chinese beer, I laid down and thought about Aki and Maki. I desperately want to see both of them again. I’m sure I’ll see Maki again, and that’s wonderful, but I don’t know about Aki. Surely her pride or dignity will stop her from visiting me in the UK. Once again I found myself unable to answer any of these questions so I just read my book until I feel asleep.
We hired the same bicycles again the next day and rode to a mountainous area near the city to climb up and get a good view of the city. After five minutes or so into the gentle ascent, two very young looking girls said hello to us. I started talking with them and discovered that they were actually about twenty-two years old, even though they looked about fifteen. Their English was pretty good if a little strange. One of them had a pot of dried sugared plums and when she accidentally tipped them onto the ground the other girl said “oh no, I think surely your heart is melting.” I accounted this to either poor English or a keen sense of poetry beyond that of an ordinary person. The view from the top was almost comical, if not tragic: a sea of mist, dust and pollution only allowed the closest proportion of the city to be seen and everything else was drowned in smog.
“Oh today is much clearer than yesterday” one of the girls said, which bought to me images of people wandering off the mountain because they couldn’t see two steps in front of themselves.
On the way down we talked about how China and Japan compared and found the girls to be interested in studying Japanese. We rode through the city again and to a bridge that crosses a famous river in Nanjing. My only reference to the river was from the museum the previous day when I read that the Japanese had run-out of petrol to burn all the dead Chinese so they just pushed the rest into the river. This river was the barrier that marked the fate of so many Chinese because they simply couldn’t get across in time to escape from the approaching Japanese. Again, the bridge just faded into a haze and you couldn’t see the other end.
We then rode into town to look at a large bookstore and within minutes, a Chinese guy asked us if we needed help. He directed us to the English section which was the size of a small phone-box. Disappointed, we turned to look for somewhere for dinner and this guy clearly wanted to help us so we asked him to show us some places that the girls on the mountains had singled out. We found a dumpling restaurant without an English menu so this crazy guy ordered for us, pausing between items to check with me that we were gonna actually pay for him,
“you invite me yes?”
“Sure”, I replied, all too used to this kind of subtlety what with having lived in Japan for almost two years. So we ate out dumplings, and he gave us his card, practically begging us to email him sometime. With under an hour left before we had to return our bikes, we tried to squeeze in one more sight, the city’s entrance gates. They were nicely lit in the dark and the high solid brick wall had more lights lining the top. It was strange to think that when the Japanese invaded, this wall was the city’s only defence, and now it’s just a tourist sight. Again, we got the bikes back five minutes late, and then Chris passed-out in our room while I went on the internet to email Aki and Maki. Aki was online so we chatted and I cried a little. I had an early night for the sake of having no other plan.
This was to be the day of our first long railway journey, from Nanjing to Xian, on a not-very-comfortable-sounding “hard-sleeper” carriage over fourteen hours, leaving at 5pm. We had an extremely lazy day, just milling around, using the internet (I chatted to Maki for an hour or so, it was great) and chatting to each other. Suddenly it was four o’clock and we met our first major disagreement: I wanted to get the bus and he wanted to take a taxi. We got the taxi, at a cost of eight times more than what the bus would have cost and arrived in plenty of time. Again, the train seemed pretty modern and our “hard” beds were, well, yes, hard, but they were more than bearable. There were six beds to each section which were connected by a small open walkway running across the side of the train. We had middle beds. The highest were the cheapest and the lowest had the most head room and were more expensive; these occupants could use a tine table and while sitting on their beds. The top-bed people could use small fold-down seats in the walk-way, again with a tiny table and the people in the middle-bunks had to make do with just their beds.
For some unknown reason, the Lonely Planet had listed these beds as being the best. I had left my bag of snacks and water in the taxi so as Chris crashed out on his bed, I waited for passing trolleys. I watched as a snack-trolley went by, and then a hot-food trolley passed and I watched what money was being exchanged, an unfortunate necessity in China to make sure I was paying the same as the locals, so I watched the change carefully. But then he was gone and I’d missed it.
I eventually bought a big pot of instant noodles and emptied the various plastic sachets into the small dried noodle-brick. I found one of the many huge boiling water urns and started to eat the spiciest noodles I’d ever had. It turns out that one of the sachets was concentrated chilli paste and I’d used all of it. It took about forty-five minutes to eat. I bought a pot of pineapple pieces that were passing by thinking this might ease my stomach, which it seemed to do.
I then walked up and down the train, entering the restaurant car which seemed to be only for employees, the police and other dodgy-looking characters. I got chatting with the couples on the beds below us, who offered us a place to stay in Xian and gave us a number of a college who would accept us at a cheap rate. The guy did all of the talking, and he seemed a little overly confident in his “knowledge” of different cultures.
“Yes. I know much about Western Culture because I study it, part of my tourism studies. “
“Oh, when did you go to Europe?”
“”No, never. But I’m a tourism teacher. I know about your culture well.”
“That’s great” I replied.
“Yes. For example, I know that Chinese are very noisy when they eat dinner.”
He was starting to really sound as if he could see his own culture from an outsider’s point of view so I agreed, “yes, I guess so.”
“And you English are completely silent when you eat, because you feel the eyes of God watching you.”
Perhaps not. I paused, “um… what do you mean?”
He repeated his last sentence pretty much word for word and in the end I agreed whole-heartedly as it dawned on me that nothing was going to change his mind.
After exchanging brief conversation with the two other men in our section I settled down to a very unsettled sleep, but felt surprisingly happy and optimistic to once again be truly travelling.
Our residence for the next three nights was to be in Nanjing University dorms so we headed there. I bought some delicious fresh pineapple on a stick (things on a stick seem to do big business in China), which was much needed as it turned out to be an hour-long walk from the station, which, with our heavy backpacks, isn’t funny. The map in Chris’ China Lonely Planet offered very little help but after a lot of guess-work we found the university. Then it struck me that we had no idea where to go so we made sleeping gestures to various security guards and were vaguely pointed in the right direction. Sure enough, these were the halls of residence for the university students, set quaintly in a twenty floor concrete tower.
We rested and dined at a very local super-cheap restaurant, the idea being to pick entirely random items but the woman there made gestures that indicated either slight mental retardation, or the fact that we’d never be capable of eating the things we’d chosen. She produced an old note book with a dozen or so hand-written translations of dishes. The food was great and during the meal, she asked for Chris’ Lonely Planet so she could copy out some more translations of dishes from the “useful phrases” section.
We wondered around and found that this area was much more relaxed and studenty than anywhere in Shanghai, with may bars and restaurants. We bought some fresh yogurts from a tiny street kiosk and sat down on some boxes to drink them (we had to return the bottles). We thought it was milk before we tasted it but instead it was a very sweet rich plain yogurt. I turned to some while guys sitting near us and we got chatting. They were students here, on of them studying (Chinese) medicine, both from America. We joked about how the perception of western medicine must match out idea of eastern medicine: “those strange westerners with their little magic pills”, and they told us a little about living in China. I mentioned how strange it was to have everybody staring at us all the time, and asked if they were talking about us as well. They replied that when you’ve been here a while, you get to learn the kind of things they say about you but you wish you’d never known.
The next day we hired bicycles from a guy who didn’t speak a word of English but we managed to conclude that he wanted a ¥100 deposit for each bike, a charge of ¥15 and they were to be returned by 8pm. It’s really amazing how much you can communicate without a common language. We set off for the Nanjing Memorial Museum, which was all about the Nanjing Massacre of 300,000 Chinese by Japanese soldiers. We got impressively lost deep in the dry open suburbs where there were few cars, few people and surprisingly, a huge exhibition complex, so we asked for help there. We compared our useless Lonely Planet map to their detailed local-area map and discovered that one of the most useful phrases you could need when travelling was not in the guide-book, being “where are we on this map?”
We eventually found the museum and were offered personal assistance by an English-speaking member of the museum who was working there during her PhD in tourism. She guided us across the mass grave of over 100,000 people, showed us piles of the victim’s bones, and added more information that wasn’t popular knowledge in China. For example, the leader of the “safety-zone”, an area set aside to help fleeing Chinese people in Nanjing, was a Nazi, even though he is heralded across China as a national hero. We read accounts of the Japanese burning, raping, beheading, burying alive, machine gunning and bayoneting their victims, all mostly innocent civilians. The museum spoke of the importance of never forgetting everywhere although the general feeling portrayed was one of anger against the Japanese rather than the need to remember such events for the sake of all mankind. The museum offered a purely one-sided view and gave no possible reason as to why this atrocity was committed.
We rode to a huge market area, filled with restaurants, stalls and heart-breakingly low-tech versions of Japanese photo booths, where you could get a cutsie picture with a variety of different backgrounds and graphics. By now it was dark and there were long rows of red Chinese lamps lining the streets, all lit up, and many buildings were lined with small lights, giving a strange synthetic beauty to everything. We chose a fairly random restaurant and dined on fried rice, sweet and sour pork and omelette soup. We had lost track of time a little and realised we only had twenty minutes before 8 o’clock. Nanjing’s main roads are formed in a grid pattern and it’s traffic lights all have large indicators that count-down in seconds when the lights will change.
Nanjing is a very busy little city, with about six million people, and so our dash through the city centre wasn’t without fear as we rode by huge dirty bushes, crazy cab drivers and constantly beeping scooters. What made the scene more surreal was the fact that we could always see two or three of these down-counting traffic lights ahead of us, and we were desperately trying to make the next set before zero, and then the next set, and the next, as if we were in some arcade racing game where you have to keep making the checkpoints or your money runs out.
After 25 minutes of this frantic cycling, we arrived at 8.05pm to an unfazed Chinaman who gave us out deposits without fuss and then locked-up for the night. We bought some beers and gate-crashed a party in the courtyard of the halls we were staying in. It turned out to be someone’s birthday and nobody spoke English apart from a Swiss and German girl who were about as warm and welcoming as the Chinese were to the Japanese in 1937. After an hour of so of pained conversation, I gave up and watched TV in our room while Chris located some Japanese guys and had a chat. Feeling drowsy with the weak Chinese beer, I laid down and thought about Aki and Maki. I desperately want to see both of them again. I’m sure I’ll see Maki again, and that’s wonderful, but I don’t know about Aki. Surely her pride or dignity will stop her from visiting me in the UK. Once again I found myself unable to answer any of these questions so I just read my book until I feel asleep.
We hired the same bicycles again the next day and rode to a mountainous area near the city to climb up and get a good view of the city. After five minutes or so into the gentle ascent, two very young looking girls said hello to us. I started talking with them and discovered that they were actually about twenty-two years old, even though they looked about fifteen. Their English was pretty good if a little strange. One of them had a pot of dried sugared plums and when she accidentally tipped them onto the ground the other girl said “oh no, I think surely your heart is melting.” I accounted this to either poor English or a keen sense of poetry beyond that of an ordinary person. The view from the top was almost comical, if not tragic: a sea of mist, dust and pollution only allowed the closest proportion of the city to be seen and everything else was drowned in smog.
“Oh today is much clearer than yesterday” one of the girls said, which bought to me images of people wandering off the mountain because they couldn’t see two steps in front of themselves.
On the way down we talked about how China and Japan compared and found the girls to be interested in studying Japanese. We rode through the city again and to a bridge that crosses a famous river in Nanjing. My only reference to the river was from the museum the previous day when I read that the Japanese had run-out of petrol to burn all the dead Chinese so they just pushed the rest into the river. This river was the barrier that marked the fate of so many Chinese because they simply couldn’t get across in time to escape from the approaching Japanese. Again, the bridge just faded into a haze and you couldn’t see the other end.
We then rode into town to look at a large bookstore and within minutes, a Chinese guy asked us if we needed help. He directed us to the English section which was the size of a small phone-box. Disappointed, we turned to look for somewhere for dinner and this guy clearly wanted to help us so we asked him to show us some places that the girls on the mountains had singled out. We found a dumpling restaurant without an English menu so this crazy guy ordered for us, pausing between items to check with me that we were gonna actually pay for him,
“you invite me yes?”
“Sure”, I replied, all too used to this kind of subtlety what with having lived in Japan for almost two years. So we ate out dumplings, and he gave us his card, practically begging us to email him sometime. With under an hour left before we had to return our bikes, we tried to squeeze in one more sight, the city’s entrance gates. They were nicely lit in the dark and the high solid brick wall had more lights lining the top. It was strange to think that when the Japanese invaded, this wall was the city’s only defence, and now it’s just a tourist sight. Again, we got the bikes back five minutes late, and then Chris passed-out in our room while I went on the internet to email Aki and Maki. Aki was online so we chatted and I cried a little. I had an early night for the sake of having no other plan.
This was to be the day of our first long railway journey, from Nanjing to Xian, on a not-very-comfortable-sounding “hard-sleeper” carriage over fourteen hours, leaving at 5pm. We had an extremely lazy day, just milling around, using the internet (I chatted to Maki for an hour or so, it was great) and chatting to each other. Suddenly it was four o’clock and we met our first major disagreement: I wanted to get the bus and he wanted to take a taxi. We got the taxi, at a cost of eight times more than what the bus would have cost and arrived in plenty of time. Again, the train seemed pretty modern and our “hard” beds were, well, yes, hard, but they were more than bearable. There were six beds to each section which were connected by a small open walkway running across the side of the train. We had middle beds. The highest were the cheapest and the lowest had the most head room and were more expensive; these occupants could use a tine table and while sitting on their beds. The top-bed people could use small fold-down seats in the walk-way, again with a tiny table and the people in the middle-bunks had to make do with just their beds.
For some unknown reason, the Lonely Planet had listed these beds as being the best. I had left my bag of snacks and water in the taxi so as Chris crashed out on his bed, I waited for passing trolleys. I watched as a snack-trolley went by, and then a hot-food trolley passed and I watched what money was being exchanged, an unfortunate necessity in China to make sure I was paying the same as the locals, so I watched the change carefully. But then he was gone and I’d missed it.
I eventually bought a big pot of instant noodles and emptied the various plastic sachets into the small dried noodle-brick. I found one of the many huge boiling water urns and started to eat the spiciest noodles I’d ever had. It turns out that one of the sachets was concentrated chilli paste and I’d used all of it. It took about forty-five minutes to eat. I bought a pot of pineapple pieces that were passing by thinking this might ease my stomach, which it seemed to do.
I then walked up and down the train, entering the restaurant car which seemed to be only for employees, the police and other dodgy-looking characters. I got chatting with the couples on the beds below us, who offered us a place to stay in Xian and gave us a number of a college who would accept us at a cheap rate. The guy did all of the talking, and he seemed a little overly confident in his “knowledge” of different cultures.
“Yes. I know much about Western Culture because I study it, part of my tourism studies. “
“Oh, when did you go to Europe?”
“”No, never. But I’m a tourism teacher. I know about your culture well.”
“That’s great” I replied.
“Yes. For example, I know that Chinese are very noisy when they eat dinner.”
He was starting to really sound as if he could see his own culture from an outsider’s point of view so I agreed, “yes, I guess so.”
“And you English are completely silent when you eat, because you feel the eyes of God watching you.”
Perhaps not. I paused, “um… what do you mean?”
He repeated his last sentence pretty much word for word and in the end I agreed whole-heartedly as it dawned on me that nothing was going to change his mind.
After exchanging brief conversation with the two other men in our section I settled down to a very unsettled sleep, but felt surprisingly happy and optimistic to once again be truly travelling.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Shanghai
When I opened the curtains in the morning, I peered across a sea of small old tiled buildings and looking down at a somewhat generic ‘Asian’ scene. Bicycles loaded high-up with boxes and food, animals and cages, beggars, rich people, and many street vendors. We needed a cheaper place to stay so we set out across Nanching Road, the main strip in Shanghai.
“You want watch, DVD… very cheap for you… hello, where do you come from?” were blurted to us by men and woman, and more obscurely: “you wanna come to art exhibition?” which we later discovered was a genuine invitation just with a not-so-genuine entry-fee. Everybody had someway of squeezing money from us so every ‘hello’ from a Chinese person was met with well-founded suspicion.
We found a tourist information centre and on entry, discovered three young people, about our age, all eating lunch. Nobody attempted to acknowledge our presence (even though we were clearly the only customers) so we approached the guy who was concentrating hard on his noodles and asked what places we could stay in tonight. He replied after a second’s pause:
“No. No places.”
I persisted,
“you mean there’s nowhere in Shanghai we can stay?”
“Yes, nowhere, sorry.”
He seemed eager to return to his noodles. They did point-out an internet café so we went there and after five minutes of checking out passports and visa, settled to check our mail and to find details of places to stay in Shanghai. An email from Aki sent me spinning again… that chin… that cute cute chin which I’ll probably never see again… just unbearable horrible heart-ache. Those tears, those hard sad sobs. I cried in the dark computer room, wondering when this pain would stop. Thank-god we’re always on the move, I thought. It would be too much to stay in one place and just think… think…hope… of Aki… and Maki.
Lunch was a KFC meal, with a cup of hot orange juice, a first for me. We moved to the next place we’d be staying in, a large YHA hostel known as “Captain’s Hostel”. We had a dorm room with about eight other beds and Chris was a bit annoyed as he’d been placed right by the door, which didn’t have one of those heavy-duty-slow-down things on the top. We set out for a walk across “The Bund”, a famous walk-way by the river, decorated with street vendors every ten metres or so, selling watermelon and pineapple on sticks, river tours, drinks and various types of meat, cooked over small charcoal fires. Across the river was the somewhat hazy sky-scraper district with many oddly-shaped buildings, in particular a huge globe in the middle of four vertical columns which reduced to a large TV aerial at the very top. It was kind of red and dirty gold coloured but the constant Shanghai mist made it hard for any vividness.
We wandered into the more authentic backstreets, past a group of men who were flying extremely high fish-shaped kites across one of Shanghai’s main roads, and into an entirely different world. Everything was to do with food: people were either carrying it, cooking it, maintaining it (there were many washing up bowls filled with fish with hoses running water in a constant flow) or eating it. It seemed to be rush hour now as people dodged between endless ancient bicycles and mopeds and electric bikes. We passed hundreds of vague shops, at the back of houses, repair shops, fish, fruit, vegetables, books, many textile shops and more strangely, places with young women in them who would open the door and call “hello” as we walked past.
It was a chaotic free-for-all when it came to roads, although there did seem to be some vague adherence to the many traffic lights. In complete contrast to Japan, nobody waited for the little green man apart from when there were traffic wardens, armed with whistles, who blew and pointed at cars that didn’t follow the lights with such an intensity, you’d have though the drivers had just personally insulted the warden’s mother.
That night, we met a friend of Chris’ from long ago, a guy called Kiren who now lived in Shanghai as an English teacher. Chris hadn’t seen him for about four years and didn’t know what to expect but he turned out to be the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet. He clearly loved living in China, and having been here only six months, was able to confidently converse with the locals. He even seemed to enjoy chatting to the beggars and dodgy salesmen. Over dinner in a pretty nice place, he told us that he always had opportunities to practise, what with people always approaching you. After dinner and wan coconut juice, he walked us around the city centre and pointed out some sights, at one point referencing a huge concert hall that was the first building in history to be literally picked-up and moved to a new location, apparently because it had been built too close to a busy road and the noise from the traffic could be heard during performances. We passed many beggars with abnormalities such as a missing arms or burnt withered hands, and these people all had themselves in clear display. Although not warm, one guy with no hand or arm was kneeling in the subway with no top. These types of beggars were everywhere and it really made me think how sad a total lack of a welfare-system can be. Shanghai’s metro closes quite early so Kiren had to get back after pointing out a shorter way for us to get back to out hostel with a weak nautical theme.
The next day we had to decide when we’d move on to Nanjing, so we took a metro to the north railway station and discussed in a Starbucks what we should do. I disliked being in a Starbucks for the usual reasons but also because I was paying international prices once again for a local product, some black tea. We settled on leaving the next day and started queuing in the one counter out of twenty that said “English speaking”. The amount of people pushing-in was no=where near what I’d expected and we managed to get out “hard-seat” tickets (hard being second-class, soft being first) after dealing with a rather blunt severe ticket woman.
We decided to walk back to the hostel via the main market area which sold a huge amount of crap touristy crap but also a lot of intriguing food. I kept seeing people eating what looked like a deep-fried bat on a stick and after some serious consideration, bought one myself for a closer look. It was some type of bird. It’s head was sagging downwards, as if ashamed. I couldn’t quite deal with this little beaked face, so I plucked it off and enjoyed the rest of the remarkably meaty and tasty bird. Then we practised haggling, which is expected almost everywhere in China. Chris wanted a wind-up Chairman Mao watch with a flicking arm that waved every second. He got the initial price of ¥120 down to ¥20 within a minute. All you need to do it seems, is to offer a low price and then slowly walk away until they rapidly reduce the price to your original offer.
“¥120? No no no… ¥80… last price ¥70… wait… last price ¥60… last price ¥20” was about how it went.
We took a quieter road by the river to get back to the hostel and found one of Shanghai’s many out-door gym areas for public use. We attempted to use the various pieces of equipment but a few totally perplexed us, until an old man wandered over to us and demonstrated how to use them and what parts of the body they were supposed to help, while speaking Chinese. Somewhat more confused than when we arrived, we continued onwards and once we arrived, I got chatting with two Japanese guys in our dorm, who were traveling as a celebration of their university graduation. Having quickly used up my entire Japanese vocabulary within minutes, I was happy when a Chinese guy came back to the dorm, who called himself Davy, and spoke English and Japanese. He told us that he lived in Japan and had a very good friend there (surely his boyfriend) and was back in China because of a new job opportunity that wasn’t turning out to be much fun, so he was in a hostel as he didn’t want to commit to being in an apartment. I asked him to take us to a good cheap restaurant, so the five of us found ourselves in a busy basic place just around the corner. The prices on display were very low but when we were handed an English menu, everything looked more expensive. Davy confirmed this and asked the waitress why. She responded it was because the food is cooked a little differently for foreigners, total nonsense of course. It was just another chance to con us. So after some seemingly high-tension dialogue between Davy and the waitress, she agreed to charge us the same. On the way back, we bought a few bottles of “Tsingtao”, which comes in large green bottles but is 3% alcohol, and drunk them back in the hostel, not wanting to go to the hostel’s bar to pay ¥35 per Tsingtao, as opposed to the ¥3 they cost from a convenience store. We got Davy a sweet fruity drink for a sweet fruity guy, to thank him for showing us the restaurant.
As I closed my eyes that night, and the French singing Spanish guitar player had finally sand the last of his many encores just outside our room, I thought of the two people who had been floating around my head with equal intensity: Aki and Maki. Funny how similar those names are but what such opposites they are as people. I was too tired to cry once again when I thought of Aki’s heart-breaking sobbing, but still alert enough to get yet another pang of heart-ache, guilt and love for her. I believe I’ve seen the saddest sight in the world, but I’m the only one who’ll believe that.
We woke at about 8.30 which seemed to be the norm on this trip and after collecting our things together and saying goodbye to the Japanese guys, got the metro to the railway station. The Shanghai metro has people selling all sorts of rubbish in the subways and a unique feature is the to-the-second count-down that the information screen gives until the next train. It would have been more impressive if it didn’t keep jumping back up a few seconds,
“20-19-18-17-16-35-34-33-32-37-36-35…” until the train arrived, which seemed to somewhat undermine the whole automated point of it.
Once we arrived, we needed to find the right platform but in actuality, we needed to find the right waiting-room, a huge room filled with people of all kinds, many watching the huge TV screen at the front which was playing an English premier league game. British football and snooker are very popular in China. After some announcement was made, everybody reacted in a way which suggested a delay. This was confirmed to us a few seconds later by a sweet young Chinese girl who spoke good English and explained the train will be fifteen minutes late.
“Wow, you speak great English! Did you live abroad?”
“No, I just like to study English.”
“Did you learn English at school then?”
“Not really. We just studied grammar and reading. I learn with movies and English TV.”
I’d managed to lose Chris in the crowd and she guided me to the right platform. I was a little surprised by the newness and softness of the ‘hard’ seats and was relieved to find Chris next to me, although someone was already sitting in my seat. I showed my ticket and he loved although the guy next to me was clearly unaware of my existence and leaned over me and stretched his legs apart as if I wasn’t there. There was a woman coming through the carriages with hot water for people’s flasks of tea, and occasionally a tray of snacks or drinks was on sale. Half-way through the journey, the Chinese girl from the waiting room appeared and told us what a beautiful place her home-town was , and much better than Nanjing, our destination. She seemed a little disappointed when I said we couldn’t go, much as we’d love to see her town. The watery landscape passed and I asked someone when our stop was. We arrived in Nanjing without incident.
“You want watch, DVD… very cheap for you… hello, where do you come from?” were blurted to us by men and woman, and more obscurely: “you wanna come to art exhibition?” which we later discovered was a genuine invitation just with a not-so-genuine entry-fee. Everybody had someway of squeezing money from us so every ‘hello’ from a Chinese person was met with well-founded suspicion.
We found a tourist information centre and on entry, discovered three young people, about our age, all eating lunch. Nobody attempted to acknowledge our presence (even though we were clearly the only customers) so we approached the guy who was concentrating hard on his noodles and asked what places we could stay in tonight. He replied after a second’s pause:
“No. No places.”
I persisted,
“you mean there’s nowhere in Shanghai we can stay?”
“Yes, nowhere, sorry.”
He seemed eager to return to his noodles. They did point-out an internet café so we went there and after five minutes of checking out passports and visa, settled to check our mail and to find details of places to stay in Shanghai. An email from Aki sent me spinning again… that chin… that cute cute chin which I’ll probably never see again… just unbearable horrible heart-ache. Those tears, those hard sad sobs. I cried in the dark computer room, wondering when this pain would stop. Thank-god we’re always on the move, I thought. It would be too much to stay in one place and just think… think…hope… of Aki… and Maki.
Lunch was a KFC meal, with a cup of hot orange juice, a first for me. We moved to the next place we’d be staying in, a large YHA hostel known as “Captain’s Hostel”. We had a dorm room with about eight other beds and Chris was a bit annoyed as he’d been placed right by the door, which didn’t have one of those heavy-duty-slow-down things on the top. We set out for a walk across “The Bund”, a famous walk-way by the river, decorated with street vendors every ten metres or so, selling watermelon and pineapple on sticks, river tours, drinks and various types of meat, cooked over small charcoal fires. Across the river was the somewhat hazy sky-scraper district with many oddly-shaped buildings, in particular a huge globe in the middle of four vertical columns which reduced to a large TV aerial at the very top. It was kind of red and dirty gold coloured but the constant Shanghai mist made it hard for any vividness.
We wandered into the more authentic backstreets, past a group of men who were flying extremely high fish-shaped kites across one of Shanghai’s main roads, and into an entirely different world. Everything was to do with food: people were either carrying it, cooking it, maintaining it (there were many washing up bowls filled with fish with hoses running water in a constant flow) or eating it. It seemed to be rush hour now as people dodged between endless ancient bicycles and mopeds and electric bikes. We passed hundreds of vague shops, at the back of houses, repair shops, fish, fruit, vegetables, books, many textile shops and more strangely, places with young women in them who would open the door and call “hello” as we walked past.
It was a chaotic free-for-all when it came to roads, although there did seem to be some vague adherence to the many traffic lights. In complete contrast to Japan, nobody waited for the little green man apart from when there were traffic wardens, armed with whistles, who blew and pointed at cars that didn’t follow the lights with such an intensity, you’d have though the drivers had just personally insulted the warden’s mother.
That night, we met a friend of Chris’ from long ago, a guy called Kiren who now lived in Shanghai as an English teacher. Chris hadn’t seen him for about four years and didn’t know what to expect but he turned out to be the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet. He clearly loved living in China, and having been here only six months, was able to confidently converse with the locals. He even seemed to enjoy chatting to the beggars and dodgy salesmen. Over dinner in a pretty nice place, he told us that he always had opportunities to practise, what with people always approaching you. After dinner and wan coconut juice, he walked us around the city centre and pointed out some sights, at one point referencing a huge concert hall that was the first building in history to be literally picked-up and moved to a new location, apparently because it had been built too close to a busy road and the noise from the traffic could be heard during performances. We passed many beggars with abnormalities such as a missing arms or burnt withered hands, and these people all had themselves in clear display. Although not warm, one guy with no hand or arm was kneeling in the subway with no top. These types of beggars were everywhere and it really made me think how sad a total lack of a welfare-system can be. Shanghai’s metro closes quite early so Kiren had to get back after pointing out a shorter way for us to get back to out hostel with a weak nautical theme.
The next day we had to decide when we’d move on to Nanjing, so we took a metro to the north railway station and discussed in a Starbucks what we should do. I disliked being in a Starbucks for the usual reasons but also because I was paying international prices once again for a local product, some black tea. We settled on leaving the next day and started queuing in the one counter out of twenty that said “English speaking”. The amount of people pushing-in was no=where near what I’d expected and we managed to get out “hard-seat” tickets (hard being second-class, soft being first) after dealing with a rather blunt severe ticket woman.
We decided to walk back to the hostel via the main market area which sold a huge amount of crap touristy crap but also a lot of intriguing food. I kept seeing people eating what looked like a deep-fried bat on a stick and after some serious consideration, bought one myself for a closer look. It was some type of bird. It’s head was sagging downwards, as if ashamed. I couldn’t quite deal with this little beaked face, so I plucked it off and enjoyed the rest of the remarkably meaty and tasty bird. Then we practised haggling, which is expected almost everywhere in China. Chris wanted a wind-up Chairman Mao watch with a flicking arm that waved every second. He got the initial price of ¥120 down to ¥20 within a minute. All you need to do it seems, is to offer a low price and then slowly walk away until they rapidly reduce the price to your original offer.
“¥120? No no no… ¥80… last price ¥70… wait… last price ¥60… last price ¥20” was about how it went.
We took a quieter road by the river to get back to the hostel and found one of Shanghai’s many out-door gym areas for public use. We attempted to use the various pieces of equipment but a few totally perplexed us, until an old man wandered over to us and demonstrated how to use them and what parts of the body they were supposed to help, while speaking Chinese. Somewhat more confused than when we arrived, we continued onwards and once we arrived, I got chatting with two Japanese guys in our dorm, who were traveling as a celebration of their university graduation. Having quickly used up my entire Japanese vocabulary within minutes, I was happy when a Chinese guy came back to the dorm, who called himself Davy, and spoke English and Japanese. He told us that he lived in Japan and had a very good friend there (surely his boyfriend) and was back in China because of a new job opportunity that wasn’t turning out to be much fun, so he was in a hostel as he didn’t want to commit to being in an apartment. I asked him to take us to a good cheap restaurant, so the five of us found ourselves in a busy basic place just around the corner. The prices on display were very low but when we were handed an English menu, everything looked more expensive. Davy confirmed this and asked the waitress why. She responded it was because the food is cooked a little differently for foreigners, total nonsense of course. It was just another chance to con us. So after some seemingly high-tension dialogue between Davy and the waitress, she agreed to charge us the same. On the way back, we bought a few bottles of “Tsingtao”, which comes in large green bottles but is 3% alcohol, and drunk them back in the hostel, not wanting to go to the hostel’s bar to pay ¥35 per Tsingtao, as opposed to the ¥3 they cost from a convenience store. We got Davy a sweet fruity drink for a sweet fruity guy, to thank him for showing us the restaurant.
As I closed my eyes that night, and the French singing Spanish guitar player had finally sand the last of his many encores just outside our room, I thought of the two people who had been floating around my head with equal intensity: Aki and Maki. Funny how similar those names are but what such opposites they are as people. I was too tired to cry once again when I thought of Aki’s heart-breaking sobbing, but still alert enough to get yet another pang of heart-ache, guilt and love for her. I believe I’ve seen the saddest sight in the world, but I’m the only one who’ll believe that.
We woke at about 8.30 which seemed to be the norm on this trip and after collecting our things together and saying goodbye to the Japanese guys, got the metro to the railway station. The Shanghai metro has people selling all sorts of rubbish in the subways and a unique feature is the to-the-second count-down that the information screen gives until the next train. It would have been more impressive if it didn’t keep jumping back up a few seconds,
“20-19-18-17-16-35-34-33-32-37-36-35…” until the train arrived, which seemed to somewhat undermine the whole automated point of it.
Once we arrived, we needed to find the right platform but in actuality, we needed to find the right waiting-room, a huge room filled with people of all kinds, many watching the huge TV screen at the front which was playing an English premier league game. British football and snooker are very popular in China. After some announcement was made, everybody reacted in a way which suggested a delay. This was confirmed to us a few seconds later by a sweet young Chinese girl who spoke good English and explained the train will be fifteen minutes late.
“Wow, you speak great English! Did you live abroad?”
“No, I just like to study English.”
“Did you learn English at school then?”
“Not really. We just studied grammar and reading. I learn with movies and English TV.”
I’d managed to lose Chris in the crowd and she guided me to the right platform. I was a little surprised by the newness and softness of the ‘hard’ seats and was relieved to find Chris next to me, although someone was already sitting in my seat. I showed my ticket and he loved although the guy next to me was clearly unaware of my existence and leaned over me and stretched his legs apart as if I wasn’t there. There was a woman coming through the carriages with hot water for people’s flasks of tea, and occasionally a tray of snacks or drinks was on sale. Half-way through the journey, the Chinese girl from the waiting room appeared and told us what a beautiful place her home-town was , and much better than Nanjing, our destination. She seemed a little disappointed when I said we couldn’t go, much as we’d love to see her town. The watery landscape passed and I asked someone when our stop was. We arrived in Nanjing without incident.
FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Japan
Here is my diary for the 6 week journey I took going home from Tokyo. I'm typing it up as I go so please be paitent. It starts in a pretty sombre mood but if you can get over that, it gets better I think. It was written as I travelled. I hope you can enjoy it. Each blog entry will represent a part of the journey, starting with :
Japan: The Saddest Day
I never thought I’d be looking at the passing urban suburbs of Tokyo and thinking how I’ll miss it all. As I drove with Aki to the airport, we burst into tears for the majority of the journey. I’ve rarely known such sadness. This was it. This was the final journey to the airport, having been in Japan for twenty months, having fallen in and out and in love, having had my world turned upside-down, spun-around and shaken-up. The way her chin pointed up sharply and quivered as she sobbed hard broke my heart again and again. Her desperate croaky voice, broken by crying:
“I don’t wanna go to the airport… no… no… don’t go Trevor… don’t go… let’s go somewhere… let’s go to Disney Land” and my heart broke again, shattered and scattered across this country that was once so foreign and unwelcoming to me. Now I clung to it desperately, unable to comprehend the enormity of leaving my life here, my friends, my routines, Aki, and Maki. Maki is another story.
We were late for check-in and I had to rush from one counter to another, as my travelling buddy Chris, and his Japanese girlfriend of six months happily waited for me and joked with each other. Aki stood a few metres away, in her own desperate world, sobbing and sobbing as she leaned against a huge pillar, unable to support herself. I finally her and told her I loved her, and I’d see her soon, unable to know if either was true. She held her handkerchief against her beautiful smooth face, against the mask she was wearing, in an attempt to convince the strangers around her that it was all just a strong bout of hayfever. But her inconsolable sobs gave her away. I cried and cried as the incredibly strong bond between us was starting to be roughly torn apart. I had to leave. Chris was waiting. The plane was waiting. This was the plan. But I couldn’t help asking myself again and again “why am I leaving Japan now?”
As I was boarding onto the plane, I noticed the most stark and beautiful sunset I’d ever seen in the land of the rising sun.
So, our plan was to travel by land from Shanghai to London over about six weeks, passing through China, Mongolia, Russia, Beralus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France. I’m not expecting all to go according to plan but I’ve realised that that’s why people like travelling. Instead of turning around and landing back in Tokyo, as my heart and soul ached for, our plane landed uneventfully in Shanghai in fog that was so thick, we still thought we were in the sky as we looked out the window and the plane suddenly jolted onto the runway.
Once we were through customs, we collected our backpacks and searched for ways of getting to central Shanghai.
“You want taxi? You want taxi?” was the mantra of the shady tourist-fishermen as we walked around looking for a phone to contact one of the places listed in Chris’ “Lonely Planet” guide to China. A semi-hysterical group of young Chinese ladies were frantically trying to get our attention:
“You want hotel? You want hotel?”
We went over to them and was asjed about our budget for a bed. Chris said “three hundred and fifty” and her reaction failed to hide her happy shock to which she replied “oh, we have many options for three-fifty”.
But I’d landed without any Chinese cash so I found an international ATm and withdrew an almost random figure of ¥1000. I had no idea what the Yuan was worth. Most of the hotel’s phone numbers in Chris’ new-edition guide didn’t work but we found one place, the Nanching Hotel. The guy told us to get the no.2 metro and get off at… somewhere. It just sounded like noise. We went to a taxi desk and were told a bus would take 2 hours but a taxi would take forty-five minutes or one hour, depending on which liar you listened to.
“Can we get the metro?” we asked.
“No. Metro stops at 9pm.” It was 10pm. I wandered out the exit and found some buses. Instead of the ¥350 cab ride that was being strongly advised to us, we took the bus for ¥16, which tool fifty minutes, over-taking hundreds of slow driving taxis as it sped down the highways. We got talking to a Chinese guy who was coming home from his job as an aircraft maintenance engineer. Having formed the impression from the Japanese that the Chinese hate them, I was surprised to hear he could speak a little Japanese and liked Japan very much. He told us that his English name was “Pannis”. When I asked how does a Chinese person work-out their English name, he said “we don’t. Just choose a cool word. I like ‘Pannis’”
Once we were dropped off somewhere apparently vaguely near our hotel, we eventually arrived to a surprisingly nice place, having passed through downtown Shanghai late in the evening with offers of “beautiful girl” and “ma-sar-gee”. It occurred to me what a strange impression of backpackers these guys must have, as if the first thing on our minds is to get lard, having just stepped onto the country.
Once we settled into the room, I flicked through the TV channels, and was surprised to discover a few English speaking channels. I tried to put thoughts of Aki and Maki out of my mind and went to bed.
Japan: The Saddest Day
I never thought I’d be looking at the passing urban suburbs of Tokyo and thinking how I’ll miss it all. As I drove with Aki to the airport, we burst into tears for the majority of the journey. I’ve rarely known such sadness. This was it. This was the final journey to the airport, having been in Japan for twenty months, having fallen in and out and in love, having had my world turned upside-down, spun-around and shaken-up. The way her chin pointed up sharply and quivered as she sobbed hard broke my heart again and again. Her desperate croaky voice, broken by crying:
“I don’t wanna go to the airport… no… no… don’t go Trevor… don’t go… let’s go somewhere… let’s go to Disney Land” and my heart broke again, shattered and scattered across this country that was once so foreign and unwelcoming to me. Now I clung to it desperately, unable to comprehend the enormity of leaving my life here, my friends, my routines, Aki, and Maki. Maki is another story.
We were late for check-in and I had to rush from one counter to another, as my travelling buddy Chris, and his Japanese girlfriend of six months happily waited for me and joked with each other. Aki stood a few metres away, in her own desperate world, sobbing and sobbing as she leaned against a huge pillar, unable to support herself. I finally her and told her I loved her, and I’d see her soon, unable to know if either was true. She held her handkerchief against her beautiful smooth face, against the mask she was wearing, in an attempt to convince the strangers around her that it was all just a strong bout of hayfever. But her inconsolable sobs gave her away. I cried and cried as the incredibly strong bond between us was starting to be roughly torn apart. I had to leave. Chris was waiting. The plane was waiting. This was the plan. But I couldn’t help asking myself again and again “why am I leaving Japan now?”
As I was boarding onto the plane, I noticed the most stark and beautiful sunset I’d ever seen in the land of the rising sun.
So, our plan was to travel by land from Shanghai to London over about six weeks, passing through China, Mongolia, Russia, Beralus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France. I’m not expecting all to go according to plan but I’ve realised that that’s why people like travelling. Instead of turning around and landing back in Tokyo, as my heart and soul ached for, our plane landed uneventfully in Shanghai in fog that was so thick, we still thought we were in the sky as we looked out the window and the plane suddenly jolted onto the runway.
Once we were through customs, we collected our backpacks and searched for ways of getting to central Shanghai.
“You want taxi? You want taxi?” was the mantra of the shady tourist-fishermen as we walked around looking for a phone to contact one of the places listed in Chris’ “Lonely Planet” guide to China. A semi-hysterical group of young Chinese ladies were frantically trying to get our attention:
“You want hotel? You want hotel?”
We went over to them and was asjed about our budget for a bed. Chris said “three hundred and fifty” and her reaction failed to hide her happy shock to which she replied “oh, we have many options for three-fifty”.
But I’d landed without any Chinese cash so I found an international ATm and withdrew an almost random figure of ¥1000. I had no idea what the Yuan was worth. Most of the hotel’s phone numbers in Chris’ new-edition guide didn’t work but we found one place, the Nanching Hotel. The guy told us to get the no.2 metro and get off at… somewhere. It just sounded like noise. We went to a taxi desk and were told a bus would take 2 hours but a taxi would take forty-five minutes or one hour, depending on which liar you listened to.
“Can we get the metro?” we asked.
“No. Metro stops at 9pm.” It was 10pm. I wandered out the exit and found some buses. Instead of the ¥350 cab ride that was being strongly advised to us, we took the bus for ¥16, which tool fifty minutes, over-taking hundreds of slow driving taxis as it sped down the highways. We got talking to a Chinese guy who was coming home from his job as an aircraft maintenance engineer. Having formed the impression from the Japanese that the Chinese hate them, I was surprised to hear he could speak a little Japanese and liked Japan very much. He told us that his English name was “Pannis”. When I asked how does a Chinese person work-out their English name, he said “we don’t. Just choose a cool word. I like ‘Pannis’”
Once we were dropped off somewhere apparently vaguely near our hotel, we eventually arrived to a surprisingly nice place, having passed through downtown Shanghai late in the evening with offers of “beautiful girl” and “ma-sar-gee”. It occurred to me what a strange impression of backpackers these guys must have, as if the first thing on our minds is to get lard, having just stepped onto the country.
Once we settled into the room, I flicked through the TV channels, and was surprised to discover a few English speaking channels. I tried to put thoughts of Aki and Maki out of my mind and went to bed.
Sunday 3 December 2006
Looking ahead...
I just got off the phone to a friend and realised that I gotta stop looking in the past. I must look ahead in to the future. I think I only want to go back to Tokyo to recreate the same situation, exactly as it was, same friends, same girlfriend, same situation, I may be wrong there, but either way, Tokyo was a whole little life in itself, and I loved it because I knew it had to end.
So I must look ahead now. What can I do after this year teaching music at the high school?
So I must look ahead now. What can I do after this year teaching music at the high school?
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