8. End of the cobblestone roads

Karl and I planned a two-week encirclement of Beijing, travelling through northern, central and coastal provinces, and Jan and her brother Sam chose to join us for the first few days. I had foregone any personal interest in studying Mandarin and teaching English for my interest in seeing more of the country, and I soon felt like my initial travel fears and nervousness were reborn.

While waiting to meet the others at Beijing’s west train station I bought the world’s oldest, dustiest bottle of water and took a seat outside amongst the masses of travelling people resting with their bags. Those who didn’t squat, as Chinese people tend to do while resting, employed pieces of cardboard to protect their clothes from the tiled square’s dust and grime. I was afforded quite a bit of their attention, being the only foreigner in view, and felt pretty friendless until the others arrived.

Having worked our way through the metal detector scramble at the station’s entrance we made it to the departure lounge, joining the thousands of people filling the plastic seating and aisles, perching themselves on their baggage if no seat was available. The gates were soon opened and the train carriage beckoned.

Our bunks were all part of the same door-less six-bed cubby hole, the compartments separated by divider walls which helped fill the carriage with upwards of fifty sleeping souls. Soon enough, as we chatted and sorted sleeping arrangements out, the station was left behind and we headed southwest. As the train sparked up its speed, so did the travellers’ cigarettes gain light and the carriage was quickly filled with smoke. We couldn’t escape so it was grin and bare it for the four of us, all non-smokers.

Then the train sound system began hurling out Kenny G hitting the notes of Queen and U2. Conversation and reading helped to block out the Muzak, and the loop-play option was finally switched off, along with the lights encouraging all travellers to sleep.

I was woken in the morning by Kenny G covering Meatloaf. I would’ve preferred a buzzer. It was 6AM, and our carriage rolled slowly through a little city called Weinan, consisting of a downtrodden train station and brick housing. Karl and Sam were already wide awake and obviously disturbed by the droning sounds, but Jan hummed away as she lay on her bunk enjoying the music.

Weinan was nothing more than brick building collections and simple shacks, as were many of the other smaller cities of only a million or so which the train had been through the previous evening. Most constructions were uniform, fitting the picture perfectly from one town to the next, but every now and then a neon light shone through the low-light, mist or cloudy polluted skies. Throughout the night, passengers had disembarked at these towns and despite being steadily replaced by others, there were noticeably fewer passengers on board.

The train rolled into Xi’an Station at around 7AM. We disembarked with the masses and were faced at the exit gates by a sea of people. Pushing through the infestation of humanity, screams were directed at us from all sides.

“You want bus? You want bed? You want food? You want girl?” were shouted at us in both Chinese and English. I was being grabbed by the arm and bag, and had to physically force my way past people, driving like a rugby player in a scrum while hundreds of people scrambled for my attention. I lost the others until I managed to break free of the crowd. An elderly lady stole my used train ticket. I thought this would be pointless but Jan explained she would sell them to people who didn’t know the holes punched by the ticket-checkers signified it has been used.

A lady had approached us on the train offering a room at the plush Xi’an Station Hotel so we followed her there for a look at the room quality. In tow, several of the touts from outside the train station followed. They would not give up on selling whatever they thought we would buy until we made it indoors.

Safely in the hotel, where the touts wouldn’t follow us, we were shown a room with four uncomfortable beds, city noise, pollution, and an air conditioning unit that sounded like a diesel engine truck reversing up a hill. The establishment offered open-plan communal showers, disgusting communal squat toilets that hadn’t been cleaned and a curfew. Then they told us the price and without a moment for discussion the four of us nodded in acceptance. It was too cheap to refuse.

After an hour’s rest, Jan led Karl, Sam and I to a conglomeration of buses which operated from outside the Xi’an Train Station. When they saw us enter the bus area, the operators came rushing over to find out where we were going. They surrounded Jan, the only Mandarin speaker among us, yelling, screaming, pushing and pulling at her while she found us a bus to get to the Terracotta Warriors. We piled on with other passengers and the bus hit the road leaving the disappointed many other operators behind. Jan’s face glowed with relief.

Xi’an still has sections of the ancient city walls standing, which means there are few entry points to get in and out. The train station is right outside the northern city wall but the roads dictated that the bus had to go south through the inner city and then head east and then north. The roads and buildings were not very different in design to those of Beijing except there seemed to be more distinctly Chinese restaurants and shops and few recognisable franchises. It was noticeably dustier than I found Beijing.

Outside the city limits, small town roads were worn and the bus often drove over roads in the process of being resurfaced. To the side of these roads, old and middle-aged men were piling up ancient-looking cobblestones that were being removed from the carriageway. The cobblestone roads were being replaced by concrete, probably due to the ever-increasing volume of traffic passing over the out-dated and now unusable paving. It wouldn’t be surprising if many of the old men who were piling the stones that day were part of the group who laid them however many years ago. Maybe these men were undoing their life’s work.

For some time it was a pretty quiet drive, for Chinese roads, until a man got off the bus at one of the stops, and the driver accelerated before he was fully out the door. The man apparently fell out into a mud and brick puddle. The bus stopped at the lights down the road so he ran to catch up and began banging on the door hard enough to be let back on. An argument then ensued as Jan translated for us.

“I’ll go to the cops to report you,” the guy said, looking over the mixture of mud and blood covering him and trying to not rest on a supposedly injured hip on which he had just run 100 metres in less than twenty seconds.

“Don’t bother doing that,” the driver said, “here’s some money, just sod off.”

“How much?”

They began squabbling over the amount, Y20 being offered which is about NZ$4, but the guy wouldn’t go for anything less than Y100. It was getting tense as the bus driver and his helper were getting pissed off. They tried to bargain with him but got nowhere.

The bus stopped on the side of the road and the driver’s helper pulled the guy off the bus, across the other side of the road and flagged down a bus going in the opposite direction. Trying to push this guy onto the other bus proved hopeless and they both ended up back with us.

Jan said the driver was telling this guy to tell the cops and see where it got him.

We disembarked at the Warriors complex with the issue still unresolved. Considering stories I had heard regarding bus drivers in third world countries I wonder if the guy didn’t get finished off and dumped on the side of the road.

The driveway up to the Terracotta Warrior Army complex was lined with touts armed with fruit, toys, general Chinese fare, such as Buddhas and jade carvings, and as per usual they took great notice of Karl and I. I was beginning to feel that being white was a plague of misery. I wanted to enjoy this outing, but our presence served as invitation to be harassed by anyone selling anything.

We pushed our way through once again, and finally inside the complex we got to see the Terracotta Warriors. In massive enclosure halls protecting the Warriors from the elements, they were lined up in rows in expansive dugout, soil tombs. The excavation area being so large demonstrated how many soldiers were cast in terracotta and signified the massive effort made thousands of years ago.

The history lesson behind why the Warriors were built was what caught my attention the most. A film was shown detailing the first Qin Emperor, the warlord who also began the construction of the Great Wall, ordering the Warriors made as a large memorial to his power. The Army is near his mausoleum, seeming to guard his own terracotta statue. Of course, the film was all in Chinese with no subtitles, so the flickering of the bright lights and moving pictures was what entertained me most.

With the many Chinese and American tour groups taking over the place with their flags and megaphones, we tired of the place. A few touts rushed up to us as we left selling, you guessed it, mini-terracotta warriors. I was ignoring them and having a look around the stalls when some cops drove up the road. The touts all turned and hoofed it down the street, the cops giving chase. That drew a smile from us all.

The bus ride back to Xi’an was uneventful so for some excitement, the group of us went for a walk through the city in the evening. People watched Karl and I intently as we perused what the city had to offer.

“They’re saying, ‘Look at those handsome devils’,” Karl said, which I replied to with a smile.

Standing at ten metres thick and very tall, the Xi’an City walls were more impressive close up. The inner city was much like any other city with McDonalds, KFC, shopping malls, neon lights, plus hotels more luxurious than the Xi’an Train Station Hotel we’d chosen to patron. My first assessment of a city with less branding than Beijing was soon quashed. Multi-national corporations were thriving.

After dinner, and in search of a toilet for Jan, we followed a sign down a dark alley finding a group of men playing Chinese chess under a street lamp, kids playing long jump and throwing stones, and a couple of women chatting in a darker corner. With the streets under repair there were a few ditches to avoid, a few pieces of parked heavy machinery to dream of driving, and a scary looking public toilet formed with four small walls of corrugated iron with some planks of wood. Jan bravely ventured in while the rest of us joined the people out for their social gatherings. We all invested in a cheap ice cream from a convenience store and sat outside watching the locals watching us.

There was a quiet relaxed community there as the people accepted our presence, and while being curious, they continued with what they were filling the evening with. Sam, Karl, Jan and I sat there for maybe thirty minutes, not really interacting but feeling like part of the community, albeit a small, unproductive part. Even though I wasn’t sure exactly where I was, this place, for at least a moment, felt like home did on a good day.

I didn’t have any box to tick for that. A simple sit down, a chat, and ice cream was all it took. Maybe I had already done this so much that the box couldn’t be seen for the ticks.

Feeling like this helped me understand I didn’t need any list or schedule. Then again, maybe the efforts of the day, including the bus trip, the annoying touts, the hotel conditions, the tour groups, and not understanding anything of a twenty minute documentary on the making of the Warriors all added up to needing this respite.