12. I love the smell of taxi drivers in the morning

The ferry left Weihai at 9PM and was scheduled to take around seven hours. Karl and I were hoping to get some sleep to make up for a lack of it in the previous day or two. The Y90 tickets had bought us each a bed in steerage, which was great as having spent so little on a ferry ticket I expected to be fighting for a patch of floor to sleep on. The surroundings were such, however that I lay on my bed half expecting a Chinese Jack Dawson to walk in. Eight bunk beds made of thin foam placed on wire supports filled our room. The place looked like it hadn’t ever been cleaned, and the creaking floor felt like it would give way with each footstep.

As I wrote my daily diary entry the boat crew, whose uniforms could be mistaken for Nazi leftovers, walked through policing the way people had placed their luggage. A tap with their solid flashlights meant people had to move luggage or possessions deemed precariously stowed. It seemed a handbag could fall eight inches and seriously damage the hardwood, vinyl-covered floor so the lady next to me had to rearrange herself while the staff member oversaw this important reorganisation. I had to watch out as one of the wardens, sorry, crew spoke some English and tried to read my diary over my shoulder while I was writing about him. Luckily he left without arresting me.

It was a misty night with no chance of starlight and the sea was scarily calm. I had never seen a sea as flat, like a lake.

At 4AM, the boat began docking at the city of Dalian, on the southern tip of the peninsula between Beijing and the Koreas. As I was slowly waking up over the course of the next few hours, we went looking for a hotel room using the map in our guidebook.

We walked through the mist near the docks in early morning light, the roads mostly empty in the early morning city. The hotels and hostels we entered while looking for a room weren’t much more alive. The staff at these places didn’t seem to have any desire to rent rooms, each person disregarding our interest in each place. The taxi drivers could see our pain and preyed on it. As we walked from hotel to hotel, taxi after taxi pulled up beside us and the drivers yelled out.

“No thanks,” we said, repeatedly, which made the drivers all smile and nod as they drove along beside us. “We said ‘no’,” we would say, and they’d smile, nod and stay with us.

“We don’t need your help,” Karl said to one guy. “We’re fine by ourselves, thank you.” This didn’t make him go away at all. They may all have thought we were negotiating, playing hardball and hoping they would give us cheap rates after a while, but we wanted to be left alone.

The hotels suggested in the guidebook proved to be a problem as some were far further out of our price range than we expected, and some had been converted into KTV karaoke outlets. These were all quite easy to spot, with the slight sound of music floating around the streets even at 6AM. The search for a room was summed up at one former hotel site that was now a hole ten metres deep and surrounded by construction machinery.

We asked a man for directions, and as he tried to help, passers by soon formed the obligatory crowd offering advice and suggestions for directions to find a hotel. It would’ve helped if we could understand Chinese or they spoke English, however pointing in general directions worked. It was more time consuming than informative, but they genuinely wanted to help, which made the group hard to walk away from.

Finally, at around 7AM, a cheap room was available at a hostel in the Russian quarter to the north east of the central city. The lady behind the front desk took our passports off us to fill out the forms. I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t let my passport out of my sight as New Zealand passports are worth a lot on the black market. However, having not slept much, and to be frank, the toilet was beckoning too, I let her take them. When she came to our room to drop them off, we were getting ready for a nap that filled the rest of the morning.

Laodong Gongyuan is a park in the central city situated on the side of a hill, with a fun park for kids, an open area for old men to fly kites, and a massive construction that looks similar to a football. We climbed to the top of the hill where Muzak filled the air from the loudspeakers nearby. City skyscrapers took up most of the views to the east, with the sea and port situated beyond, and to the west, hills were covered in plantation. We met a couple of people from Vladivostok who jumped on a cart that people rode down the hill. I couldn’t say no.

Racing down a hill on a small cart inserted in a semi-tube, which even raced above and across a main city road, was lots of fun. It was the sort of ride established safety bureaucracies in New Zealand would have put out of business years ago for its utter disregard for insignificant things like braking systems for the carts and safety nets above the road.

Karl found us dinner at a small restaurant near our hotel. Being a Muslim food restaurant there was no English menu but they had photos of their dishes. We each bought a spicy dish with fresh noodles based solely on how good the photo looked and were pleasantly surprised to find it delicious. We had no idea what we were eating, other than the noodles, and considered the possibility it was dog. If so, it was great dog.

As we were walking along the road the next day, a five-year-old beggar ran in front of us with his hand out. Both Karl and I ignored him, and tried to get past, but he saw my wallet protruding from my pocket and snatched at it. In the instant that I was wondering what I should do, Karl snapped into action and pushed him out of the way empty-handed. He stared up at us with a shocked, violated look on his face. He looked like an innocent who had been completely mistreated and couldn’t fathom what had happened to him. This was from a child who only seconds earlier tried to steal all my money.

“That was pretty rough,” I said to Karl.

“He would’ve grabbed your money, mate,” he said.

It was a difficult situation to walk away from. He would happily have run away with my money, and not thought twice about me yet I wondered if I should I disregard him too. His was a plight I knew nothing about. He was unwashed, and probably sat with his mother all day, in ripped, old rags for clothes, and being trained to be a beggar. I couldn’t decide whether to support that by giving them some money or let them starve. Karl didn’t admit to any guilt or shame for shoving the boy, but I wondered what that sort of violence would teach him. Of course, had he succeeded in grabbing my wallet, I would have tried to run him down and tackle him without a second thought.

The ferry to Tianjin that evening was similar to the one from Weihai with the room and bunks similarly set out. More passengers were onboard, and seemed busier, probably due to Tianjin having a much more vibrant business culture than Weihai. For most of the evening I chatted to a businessman who had the bunk across from me. Karl and I went for a walk, stopping at the toilets.

With the same design as the toilets in the Zhengzhou Train Station from a week before, that is, a single channel running through the partitions with water flushing all excrement down one end, the toilets proved to have a major design flaw. Masses of piled up excrement were blocking the channel when I went in to use them. The smell was horrible and the mess was beyond description. The channel was filled with excrement from one end of the room to the other.

“That was beyond gross,” I told Karl, as though he didn’t already know. Outside, we gasped for fresh sea air and I failed to hide my half-horrified, half-disgusted features from the other ferry passengers.

“There’s a few places in there that you wouldn’t want to slip,” Karl said, winning the understatement of the year award.

Karl watched as the ferry entered Tianjin’s port, Tonggu, in morning mist while hundreds of massive barges departed in the opposite direction. I got up in time to join him with our bags while the ferry parallel parked at the port. We disembarked with maybe a thousand passengers filing slowly off onto the docks and were greeted by a few bus and taxi drivers all lining up for our business.

After a four-kilometre drive to the train station, we were going to catch a thirty-minute ride to Tianjin proper. The taxi drivers however, were charging the equivalent of a ten to twenty kilometre journey.

“Where are you going?” they all asked in Chinese.

“How much to the train station?” I said.

“Y40,” one guy said.

“Fuck off,” I replied. I said it the same way I would say, “Fuck off” to a mate that told me he wrestled a bear. I said it expecting him to begin bargaining with me. He took it literally and walked away, which was a first for the taxi drivers I had encountered.

“Y35,” said another, which was still far too much.

“I’ll pay you Y10,” I said, figuring I would go as high as Y15 if I had to.

“No, you pay Y35,” he said, not budging with his price. I figured bargaining wasn’t going to work so started to walk away. “Train station is Y35,” he repeated.

“No, I won’t pay that,” I said, following Karl who was already checking out the prices offered on the buses.

It seemed that this time “No” meant “Please grab my arm, stop me from walking to the bus I want to get on and speak to me angrily in a language I don't fully understand.”

I tried walking through the group brushing off their hands, but this one man was adamant I was going to pay him Y35 for a ride. He grabbed my arm tightly and pulled me back, speaking too quickly for me to understand.

In response, I looked at his hand, then into his eyes and physically removed the hand by the forearm and placed it on his chest forcefully. He got the picture finally, stepped aside along with the others, and left me to get on the bus with Karl, which cost us Y5 each.