11. Speedos and seafood

The next afternoon, we arrived in Qingdao and were taken to the central city by a man who approached us on the train offering a hotel room. We were happy with the room, but not the price and walked down the street searching for something cheaper. Staff from several hotels followed, including the guy who’d met us on the train, offering rooms and calling out prices. As I spoke some Mandarin, I was the one who got hounded, grabbed and pushed, and didn’t understand much of what they were saying. They didn’t show any patience for my limited vocabulary, competing with one another for my attention, and got frustrated when I couldn’t answer their questions.

I grew tired of the constant badgering pretty quickly, and asked Karl to take over. He obliged, and was happy to tell some of the men to shut up while he bargained us a room. A few minutes later, the man from the train offered us the room we’d seen previously for half the original price, and we accepted this.

Once showered, we went for a wander along the waterfront in the mist of the early evening, several hundred men swimming off the rocks. All of them were wearing Speedos. This was the first time I’d seen so many men wearing Speedos in one place. They didn’t have any shame at all even if their budgie smugglers were skin coloured or fluorescent pink.

After dinner, we bought a bottle of the locally brewed beer, Tsingtao, which is pronounced the same as Qingdao, and strolled through the esplanade with thousands of locals doing the same. Having a drink by the seaside and accompanying the many hundreds of others getting out for the night, the heat we’d become used to was cooled off by a refreshingly cool wind blowing in from the sea.

The next day, we went for a walk around the coast spotting numerous western- style houses by the seaside hiding in the still pervasive mist. Speedos were on sale at every shop along the way, and men lounged around on the beaches flaunting what they had.

Following the peninsula around to the north, a friendly waitress invited us into a seafood restaurant and, lacking any English menu, we ordered lunch using the point-and-hope technique Karl highly recommended.

A few minutes later, we had five plates on the table with shellfish and rice surrounding us on all sides. We both kicked up a stink as we had only ordered three things, but the staff played dumb and insisted we’d ordered it. They played the language barrier even though, when we’d walked towards the door, one of the waitresses said she spoke some English. Now of course, she didn’t have a clue.

We had to pay for the expensive meal and figured we’d stuff as much of the food into our mouths as possible. We couldn’t finish it all, and were both suffering as we walked back to our hotel room. My stomach was groaning as it tried to process the piles of food it’d just received, and Karl had to stop at a public toilet.

Having suffered the consequences of our over-indulgent lunch later that evening, we woke the next morning to, finally, blue skies and sunshine lighting our way to the bus station near the sea.

When we walked through the station’s gates, the bus drivers gathered around as normal and I simply told them where Karl and I were going, Weihai. They all pointed to the same bus. The driver stepped forward and directed me to the ticket booth while Karl got on board. All the bus drivers gathered around watching intently as I purchased our tickets. They asked where I was from and how I had learned some Mandarin. I struggled to explain that I’d learned in a New Zealand university, and they talked about universities in Beijing and Shanghai. The driver ended the confusion by dragging my pack off my back, throwing it in the luggage compartment, and pushing me onboard. He closed the doors and we were off.

Our bus not only transported people but also freight as packages were picked up from to the side of the road and placed in the aisle. After a few stops, people had to rest their feet on the boxes.

After several hours of farmland, we crossed a range of hills and entered a massive city, which we concluded was Weihai. Karl and I were looking out the window at the tall buildings when the driver pulled over and told us to get out. All the other passengers were still onboard, as they left us on the side of the road with no clues as to where we were or how to find a hotel. We had no map, nor any clue of the layout of the city. We weren’t even completely sure of whether we were in Weihai or not. We glanced at each other, then at the bus driver who waved and drove off.

I was at a complete loss as to what to do, looking to Karl for leadership as he scratched his head. We each muttered a few swear words about the disservice the driver had done us. I felt myself panicking, unsure what to do, but before a large meltdown set in, Karl took the reigns and walked into a shop and asked for hotel rooms. He didn’t get any joy but his efforts kicked me into action.

His quick search for a room proving fruitless, I saw a convenience store and entered.

“Women yao yige Weihai ditu,” I said, wanting a map of Weihai, going on to ask if they had one. “Ni youmeiyou.”

“You,” the lady said, meaning she had one, and she pulled it out from deep under the counter. She swept dust off it as she said “Y3.”

I paid, opened the map on her counter and said “Women zai nar?” That is, where are we?

She looked at the map, turned it around, then turned it again and began pointing at the numerous places, mumbling to herself. Standing outside the door, Karl and I had raised the interest of several people and we soon had a group looking at the map, trying to figure out where we were. Each person had a completely different idea, pointing at different grids and coming to no consensus. Once there was upwards of a dozen people pointing and arguing, not a clue among them, Karl and I figured they couldn’t help us.

Another man walking by stopped and asked, in English, where we were going.

“Not sure,” said Karl, “we’re looking for a hotel.”

“I own a hotel,” the man said. So we followed him around the corner from where the bus had left us. The man explained that the driver had done us a favour by not taking us to the bus station ten minutes and a surely expensive taxi fare away.

The room on offer wasn’t great but we took it anyway, and after dumping our bags, walked back to the receptionist, pulled out the map and started the whole thing over again. As the group with noses buried in the map swelled to five people and were all arguing, it was apparent that no one in this city could help us. We had to do a little exploring and figure it out for ourselves, which took two minutes. Looking at the Chinese characters on a few street signs, we figured out which way was north on the page and a quick walk to the landmarks by the waterfront helped us learn exactly where we were.

Those people gathered around the map didn’t help much but they wanted to. I doubt many people in New Zealand would automatically give others that much of their time.

Karl saw a simple buffet restaurant and I bought a plate of spicy vegetables and rice, sitting with Karl and his pork and noodle experiment by the window. People walked by looking in at the white guys. By now my skin was much more sun-damaged, coloured a mixture of maroon and tan, while Karl was still pretty white having hidden himself from the sun via the floppy bucket hat.

I was a little put off eating with the multitude of people walking past for a gander at us, the new attractions, to which Karl offered a comforting thought.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “they’re all just saying, ‘Look at those handsome devils’.”

The next morning, we set off for Chengshan Tou, the End of the Sky, supposedly the eastern most point of the Chinese coastline. The hotel owner took us to the bus stop, bought our tickets to the station and wished us luck in finding the bus to the landmark.

“That sounded ominous,” Karl said.

At the station, we realised why he’d wished us luck. Neither of us could find an English sign nor anyone to approach to ask. The ticket operators offered me blank stares when I enquired about tickets. I wondered if they were as lost as we were.

A young man tapped Karl on his shoulder.

“Can I help you?” he asked in English.

“Yes please,” Karl said as he stopped himself from falling to his knees to beg.

“Where are you from?” he asked us.

“New Zealand,” we said, not expecting him to know much about the place.

“Really?” he said as his face turning to astonishment. “I studied at AUT in Auckland. I just got back this week.”

He helped us on to the bus we wanted and helped sort out a decent price too, making sure we wouldn’t get ripped off. He had to go before we could ask him much about the city.

Our bus travelled east along a mixture of poor roads and patches of dirt barely describable as roads, passing through small towns and villages and monotonous stretches of farmland. We passed large billboards asking citizens to pay taxes and endeavour to get involved in the projects that those taxes fund. An hour after leaving Weihai, we arrived at the gates of Chengshan Tou.

Not many tourists were around, and we had the place practically to ourselves apart from a couple of Aussies and Brits. They told us they were volunteer English teachers from Qingdao.

The shop attendants called out over the sound of the crashing waves trying to sell us disposable cameras, drinks, ice creams, hats, t-shirts, and anything else not tied down. We waved back, smiling and I said no thanks in Mandarin. They responded with laughter, maybe at my attempts at the language.

We got to the eastern most point, finding ten-foot tall statues of the Emperor who visited the cape twice and made it famous by suggesting fairies lived there and the place offered the secret to eternal life. There wasn’t a horizon view on offer, as a wall of mist or smog cut through the sky into the water. The large Emperor statue pointed into the distance held deep within the grey wall.

We walked around checking out the other odds and ends in the park, including statues of the Chinese horoscopes and an impressive large Buddha garden. There were also rubbish bins in the ironic form of dolphins with open mouths, maybe teaching Chinese kids a valuable lesson on what dolphins eat and justifying certain waste management schemes.

We heard great booming explosions in the distance, maybe from the naval base somewhere in the area. There could have been a training exercise on at the time.

On the bus back to Weihai, I saw a woman walking along the street of one of the small towns completely naked. She strolled down the road with no real qualms about people seeing her, so either she was the town nutcase, or people weren’t concerned about nudity there.

When we got back to Weihai that evening, we went to the ferry terminal to get tickets for the morning sailing to Dalian but were turned away and I was told to return in the morning.

Walking around the city, we found a Japanese restaurant with an English menu, which more than anything else sold us on the establishment. Knowing what I was ordering was a nice change. We enjoyed a fantastic meal after the “Mushi-mushi” greetings offered as we walked through the door. Unfortunately, while we were out walking after dinner, my bowel made movements that must’ve registered on the nearest Richter scale and I had to run to the communal squat toilets at our cheap hotel.

While I was in mid-squat, Karl knocked on the locked door and begged me to let him in. The following few minutes were spent laughing and laughing as we cursed the Japanese food together and bonded in a way I had never imagined.

Early the next morning, we woke up both with sore stomachs, got packed quickly and returned to the terminal to purchase our ferry tickets. It was a hot day already and my feet were squelching in my jandals.

We lined up to buy tickets for the 830AM ferry, but the lady at the counter told us only tickets for the 9PM ferry that night were available. We asked why we couldn’t get 830AM tickets and she replied that there was no ferry.

The night before, they had told us to buy our tickets in the morning for the 830AM ferry, and now were saying something completely different. There was literally no ferry other than the 9PM option. Why had they misled us? Had we misunderstood? Was this lay-by for a day going to hurt our travel options in the coming days? We were planning to meet up with Jan and her boyfriend, Justin, but now our timeframe was screwed up. I was pretty pissed off at the situation.

Regardless of whose fault it was, and it very probably was mine, we purposely got up and left our hotel room in the early morning after having little sleep. Now we had half a day to kill in a city I had seen enough of and there were no decent toilets we could use that I knew of. I wanted to move on and make the most of the time we had, but we were now stuck. The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got.

The discussion with the ticket operators drew a curious crowd who huddled around the counter with us. When we walked away disappointed, 9PM ferry tickets in our hands instead of the intended morning ferry, the group of people laughed. They looked into my eyes as I turned from the ticket counter and laughed directly at me. Whether they thought I’d laugh with them I didn’t know but I was incensed. I wanted to lay a verbal insult at them all and could’ve hit one of them out of shear irritation. My hands had clenched into fists as I walked out the door. I held back while I fumed, Karl a step or two behind me.

I muttered about the shit-hole city of Weihai, Karl staying quiet as we walked down the street. I turned towards the waterfront bitching away for a good minute or two before I noticed Karl had stopped under a tree fifty metres back and was already reading. I thought it was probably a good idea to have some alone time too so sat down by the seaside.

Boats ran to an island shrouded in cloud, mist, pollution, or a combination of all three. As each boat passed, a wave produced from the wake of the boat crashed against the seashore disturbing the otherwise calm water. The breaking waves, made of water a sickly yellow-green colour, foamed up like soap leaving a green residue on the sand and stones. Floating in the water were plastic bottles and wrappers, empty cigarette packets and butts, small netting and other assorted rubbish. A bug crawled up on my leg, sending me flying. Shaped similar to a cockroach but with a heap of legs, it seriously grossed me out. They had infested the area around the End of the Sky and obviously had a home in the city here too. I shook my new friend off and, after evicting my backpacks new small residents, joined Karl in the shade of the tree.

A few hours later, we walked up the road to another park at the centre of the city, and took a seat reading and sleeping while beggars took the opportunity to come up and wear down our already frayed nerves.

One particular man was accompanied by a monkey on a leash and approached with the hope it would humour us into feeding him. The man, that is, not the monkey.

He pointed at the monkey and then held his hand out for us to fill, as if to say “Look at my monkey, surely I deserve some of your money for this.” Karl told him to get lost and his demeanour changed from a pleasant, happy monkey tamer to a grumpy beggar with no one but a monkey for company. He stomped off looking over his shoulder at us in disgust, dragging the monkey by the chain behind him.

We both made separate searches around the city for a wangba, that is, an Internet café, and Karl proved successful. We went there to catch up on emails and to pass some time. The room was filled with a layer of cigarette smoke on the air and there was a mess from the left over food packets and bottles. Once we’d tired of the idea of attaining black lung, we went to get some lunch.

Since we had lost faith in the food in Weihai, we went to KFC and utilised the cleanest toilets I had seen since leaving Beijing. I thanked Karl profusely for finding the blessed franchise outlet, offering to name my first-born son or daughter after him.

There were many travel shops, restaurants of dubious food quality, and numerous back streets filled with merchants selling things from computer hardware and DVDs to gardening tools and fresh produce. We lazed some of the afternoon away on the lawn of another park surrounded by green trees. At the northern end of the main drag, what looked like another government building sat atop a small hill with stairs leading to the front door from street level and lawn and gardens filled the real estate between. Without being exciting, the city was a nice place to relax.

Dinner was a novel experience again, as we walked down the market streets looking in windows for anything that looked appetising. There was a night market bustling with food stalls offering the chance to practice my bargaining skills. Having seen Jan bargain some bananas, I had a good idea of a fair price and managed, after a few tries and a few vendors, to get some for close to what she paid.

At a mall nearby, we were looking for something cooked, cheap and tasty. There were no English menus to be found so I could only have trust in what I saw. In a quiet restaurant near a busy section of the mall, the staff were shocked to see two white men walk in and sent word out to “come and see the Americans”. While I found a bowl of rice and a plate of beans at the buffet, Karl’s attempt of pointing at the menu and hoping like hell worked as he received a pork and bean spicy dish. I didn't quite have that level of confidence, after the poor seafood experience in Qingdao a few days earlier. We then ate with a small audience coming and going.

At the top of a small hill as night closed in, our final view of central Weihai was that of lights on buildings, streets, and a large boat by the terminal. Sensing our impending departure time, we walked to the ferry terminal waiting room.

Karl went to the toilet and a gentleman sat beside me, saying “Hallelujah” and “Amen” repeatedly. I smiled at him, bemused. I couldn’t figure out if he was being nice or hoping I would give him something.

My confusion ended when he pointed at the greenstone crucifix I wore around my neck. It had fallen out over my t-shirt and he and his family had seen it from across the room. The penny dropped and I felt instant relief and understanding.

“God bless you,” he finished with as he returned back to his family, obviously embarrassed but hailed as a hero for speaking with me.

The call was made to board and a mad sprawl for the gates ensued. Surprisingly though, the staff actually forced everyone to line up. Usually a mass of people bottleneck around the counter, gate or door but getting on board this boat actually had a sense of order to it.

Karl and I sat waiting for the lines to dissipate and I felt relieved that I was moving again. I didn’t feel constrained anymore. I felt ready for another adventure but, somehow, I felt like I was running away from another one. After the morning’s frustration, I was much calmer now, thanks to sitting around reading and eating all day.