In the fading light of Ling Xi

some pics part deux - more pics

2007-02-19T21:59:00.000-08:00

the staircase down from the mausoleum of Sun Yat Sen, chapter 17. A redistribution of wealth.

it was insanely hot and i'd lost my hat and couldn't find a bottle of water to buy, there was a difficult wind i was climbing against and i stopped to help a young family up the
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people vying for the best view of a car accident in the middle of a busy road, 21. A street of tea

16. The Chang Jiang

Meang caught me resting and fighting the urge to strangle a small kitten as we battled the sightseeing crowds in the Giant Buddha's park, near Leshan, 15. Hotel on a mountain ridge

Meang working on 'Blue Steel' at the summit of Emei Shan, 15. Hotel on a mountain ridge

The summer palace, Beijing

The steps of Hau Shan (the stairs a this steep for maybe 200 metres), 9. Staircase to the gold medallion

Looking south over the Forbidden City from the top of Prospect Hill, 4. Ticking boxes.

some pics

2007-02-08T06:10:00.000-08:00

Farmers near the Nth Korean border andthe half bridge that doesn't reach from China to North Korea, Chapter 20. Am I strong?

End of the sky, Chapter 11. Speedos and seafood

Mao statue in the Military Museum, Beijing, Chapter 5. Propoganda and KTV

I have no idea what this is, but it looks pretty
Chapter 16. The Chang Jiang

29. Zaijian (Until we meet again)

2007-02-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

After a few days, I was finally on the bus to Guangzhou International Airport, an hour north of the city, passing a sea of industrial buildings on massive motorways and bridges. Smoke billowed out of chimneys, adding to the brown sky, making the sun look like a giant bronze coin held by the pollution. As the traffic on the motorway thinned out, the bus took an exit ramp with the massive glass-walled departure terminal in view.

I passed through border control and went to the international check-in desk behind a set of partition walls, separating the domestic and international areas in the open-plan hanger. I was covered in sweat from walking to the bus and thought a change of shirt would be considerate for the others on the plane and, having packed all my other clothes, went scouring the few duty free shops. Nothing in the shops was affordable, so I was stuck in the t-shirt I had on. I went to one of the two restaurants for something to eat to pass an hour and then was on my way to Singapore. While there on a quick stopover, I was hoping to visit my childhood home at Nee Soon Camp. I was a young boy when the New Zealand Army sent my father, and subsequently my family to Singapore.

I researched how to get to the camp on the internet and after buying a camera for my mother in the city, headed north via the MRT. The trains venture underground from the central city and emerge to open ground as the rails are elevated above ground level at the outer areas of the island. What I could see of northern Singapore from the train was jungle and water, green pastures and housing complexes.

From the MRT station, I had to find a back road to get to the camp situated off the busy Sembawang Road. The footpath from the station led around the back of a set of apartment buildings and I was soon walking along a narrow road with no footpath, surrounded by wild shrubs and trees. A wire-net fence struggled to hold back the jungle and I thought about the possibility of snakes.

A big black dog appeared from one of the numerous agricultural centres and was instantly interested in me, following at a trotting pace. With no footpath to walk on, I had to walk near the deep grass drains on the side of the road, despite concern for snakes and also had to consider the dog. As I rounded a bend, I saw a junction with a busy road in the distance so sprinted a good hundred metres, still watching for snakes. I slowed to look back at the dog, which rounded the bend sprinting too. I hit top gear again, reached Sembawang Road a moment later, and kept going until I was on the other side of the six-lane highway. The dog stopped on his side of the road, levelling an angry bark at me instead of crossing the lanes.

I took a deep breath and headed north, where I found the gates of another military facility called Dieppe Barracks. My mother had suggested I look around in there too, as there were family facilities, such as a recreation hall, that New Zealand Army families had used there. However, the six-foot high fences and gates were draped in barbed wire and the polite young man carrying the fully automatic MP5 rifle was unable to let me in.

I offered him my passport, my camera and joked that I’d allow him to strip and cavity search me. He laughed and said no.

He said Nee Soon Camp wouldn’t let me in either, as I needed a permit attainable from my embassy, but I’d need to be on official business to attain that. My mother had been allowed into the camp to see our old house during the nineties, but security had probably tightened since she’d been there, maybe due to the war on terrorism. I thanked him for his time and continued north.

Nee Soon is now a large array of apartment complexes, a contrast to twenty years earlier when it was a smattering of tin shacks. I arrived after only a few minutes walk up the road and followed the signs towards the MRT station.

At a shop by the station, the shopkeeper said she was going to New Zealand in a few months to visit her sister and we talked about the changes to Nee Soon since I’d lived down the road. As I told her about living at Nee Soon, she laughed and called me an army brat, indicating she’d met a few Kiwi army families.

I headed west via the MRT to the War Memorial from World War Two. When I lived there, the armed forces would go there for ANZAC day commemorations. The sun was glaring down on me as I walked amongst the headstones of Australians and Indians who served and died in the area. There were a few New Zealand names on the wall of the dead and a large number of Australian and Indian casualties and deceased.

I spent the next day looking around Singapore’s sights and window shopping at the many plaza’s scattered around the city. As I walked through a park in the central city, a group of men sat at benches and produced large snakes from baskets, wrapping them around their bodies. A city in which I would be fined for chewing gum, spitting or jaywalking allowed these guys to carry snakes around.

With my face and neck still sunburnt from the outing to Nee Soon and the Memorial, I was at Changi Airport and about to board the overnight flight to New Zealand when a large group of Kiwi accents got my attention. Like a choir of angels singing, the departure lounge audibly glistened while I enjoyed the subjectively heavenly sounds.

The call was made to board, and once we were in the air, it sunk in that I was on my way home. I had reflected often about the trip, to the many people I’d offered advice to in Shanghai, and with Eric and Steve in Guangzhou, yet I never consistently considered any particular moment as character-building or personally life-affirming. Having half a day to myself on the plane, I tried to sum up what China was like and what I’d learned about the world and gained for myself.

The first glaringly obvious thing I concluded was that the issues I had in life at home were issues I dealt with daily in China. The justifications I made for leaving New Zealand were similar to the reasons I gave myself for doing all sorts of things in China, including leaving that country too. I was running and hiding again, and I couldn’t ignore that ironic twist.

I saw many things in China that I would never see in New Zealand, whether they were at home or not, and I concentrated on my own well being first and foremost. I dealt with the disturbing and troubling images of China, such as police brutality and the inhumane treatment of animals, by putting psychological blinkers on. I didn’t let myself care about situations I felt I had no power over, the same way I lived my life at home. Before travelling to China, I pretended to not care about girlfriends, family, friends, and work, and cut away from people and situations repetitively if I thought something was wrong. China had drawn out my overbearing self-absorbed nature to the point that even I saw it.

Seeing the little girl singing and dancing at the train station in Ling Xi was a life-changing event for me. As I watched her, I snapped out of my anger and hate and saw her humanity. She made it alright for me to care about others, whether I could help them or not, and dished out a lesson that circumstances don’t actually effect whether people enjoy life or not. Her example is something I will always aspire to.

It was a message I’d been sent on numerous occasions. A few days after Ling Xi, I’d been walking through the People’s Square in Guangzhou, where people were socialising, dancing and playing sports daily, a similar site to cities all over the country. The people took the time to get out of their homes and enjoy their lives every day. They literally danced in the streets. Much like that little girl, many people in China celebrate their lives when they get the chance, regardless of what they think they have or don’t have.

That message has finally been received. I took out my diary and wrote my final entry, which said:

“If I ever feel like I’m popping balloons on a raging bull’s horns, I will think of that little girl in Ling Xi singing and dancing, and will charge into the arena smiling.”

The flight arrived the next morning to a cold and crisp Christchurch winter’s day. The doors opened to the arrivals hall and my mother saw me and burst into tears. I smiled like I was five years old again and rushed to hug her.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked.

28. The dancing trees of Goat City

2007-02-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

In search for an authentic dining establishment, hoping to find somewhere that offered very Chinese meals, I found the aptly named Come and Wait Restaurant.

Situated below ground level, I was shown, during the busy lunch period, to a seat sharing a booth with a smoking businessman. He’d finished his noodle soup and had settled in with a cup of green tea and newspaper. I was handed a menu in Chinese. Looking repetitively at both sides of the plastic covered sheet of paper, I couldn’t work out any characters at all. Normally, I could spot the chicken, beef, noodles and rice characters but struggled until the businessman, who’d noticed my consternation, pointed at the menu and then at the corresponding meals situated on tables around the room.

Thanking him, I smiled and tried to get the attention of the staff but was constantly ignored. As each staff member walked directly past my raised hand, some occasionally caught eye contact with me yet continued with other work, refusing to answer my hand waving. This went on for a few minutes and as that chip began to rest on my shoulder again, the businessman stood up and yelled to get the attention of the entire restaurant full of patrons while he berated the staff.

The staff all started calling out back at him beginning an argument about whatever he had said. The staff all stood at the front door projecting their voices to our booth on the complete opposite side of the room and soon four or five other people were yelling from all corners of the restaurant. I was pointed at constantly, other dining patrons looking at me intently and the businessman eventually sat down, hopefully at the arguments end then looked me in the eye and nodded. I nodded and smiled to him, which seemed a cue for him to fire up another smoke in satisfaction and find his place in the newspaper.

The waiter arrived quickly, still mouthing off at the businessman who spoke back harshly. I pointed at the menu indicating what the businessman had suggested was a dumpling soup, and hoped the argument was over.

After I had waited another ten or fifteen minutes, which is a long time to wait in Chinese restaurants, the soup arrived. The businessman left and I was able to settle into the booth myself until a young couple were placed opposite me as an audience to my burgeoning dining etiquette. As delicious as dumpling soup is, I always find it difficult to eat with chopsticks, which was pretty obvious as I splashed the bowls contents over the table.

I mopped up the puddles on the table with extra napkins I’d liberated from tables nearby then put up my hand to ask for the bill. Having been ignored for another five minutes, I walked to the front counter to pay and was ignored again. I raised my arm, waved, made eye contact and brought out my money, hoping someone would take it off me but there wasn’t any sign of interest from the staff. I figured that the moment I headed for the door they’d come screaming, so grabbed the door handle to see what happened.

One of the waiters bounded up the stairs immediately bellowing in an angry hastened tone. I responded by looking him in the eye and waving my money at him. Whether he’d got the picture or I had, the bill was paid and my experience of waiting at the Come and Wait restaurant was over.

A few hours later, Steve, from the USA, Eric and I were getting slightly drunk in a park on Shamian Island. The island is near the central city; maybe four stops via the metro, from the central People’s Square. It’s barely an island but is outset from the northern bank of the river by a fifteen metre wide canal. We were facing the southern bank of the river, as bright neon lights blinked continuously in the night inviting us over to the nightspots only a ferry-ride away.

Earlier that day, a French woman who had stayed at the hostel had problems leaving the country. During her travels, she had her passport stolen and, having had it duly replaced, was struggling to get a replacement Chinese visa. Without that visa she couldn’t get to Hong Kong for her flight home and she was emotional, bordering on distraught. Steve, having a good background in Mandarin after spending a lot of time in China, went with her to the Public Securities Bureau, the organisation that polices, amongst other things, visa activity in China. He spent the better part of a day with her discussing and debating with the bureaucratic officers. Finally, she was granted a visa that allowed her to pass into Hong Kong and get to her flight.

Hurriedly, she thanked Steve, not knowing what to say.

He, also not knowing what to say, said something akin to, “Happy to help”. They swapped email addresses, hugged and she took off quickly. And he was left to bask in the subdued afterglow, not sure how to express himself after doing something so magnanimous for an absolute stranger.

Eric shared about teaching English in Japan and about his girlfriend there, and along with my own recent experiences and insights the three of us dwelled openly on some interesting internal issues, which we shared. Eric shared feelings of disassociation with his homeland. This was something we all shared.

We discussed why a Canadian, a Kiwi and an American would meet in Guangzhou, China. What on earth led us to arrive at this place and why would we begin a conversation with people we didn’t know, which was becoming very deep and introspective. We had known one another for less than a day, and were already delving deeply into each other’s lives.

“Do you like China?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” Eric answered half-heartedly, “but usually, no.” And Steve and I nodded our understanding. “I like my home town a lot more than here, but sometimes it’s just not fulfilling.”

“Home doesn’t place us in the same emotional state as travel,” Steve added. “If I could be the same person at home that I am when I travel, I would feel much closer to a free spirit.”

“But are we free spirits here, really?” Eric asked. “Are we trying to represent some place, or some thing? Is it more profound, or less, than that?”

And we pondered and couldn’t come to any great conclusion.

We sat, drank cheap beer and enjoyed one another’s thoughts well into the night. It seemed a difficult thing to grasp, why we were there and of all the answers forthcoming, none were right, and none were wrong.

We chatted with no reservations. I wondered what made my approach to these two guys different from how I perceived Jiandong and Chong Ke, the two basketball players I had befriended in Jilin. It could’ve been that they were travellers too, or that they were also foreign to China. Maybe my defences had dropped after Ling Xi.

Heather had just arrived in the country, having flown to Hong Kong earlier in the day and jumped on the train up to Guangzhou soon after. A blond haired, blue-eyed American, she walked into the hostel with a pack on her back, back straight and energised, and looked bright eyed. She would notice people staring at her basically any time she would be in public in China, her appearance was that foreign, but she said she had travelled throughout Asia before so the attention would not be so new as it was for me. She asked a few of us for instructions on how to get train tickets and options were offered regarding the train station, the travel shops nearby and the expense of it all. She then went get tickets to Kunming.

The next day, I was walking out the door as she was walking in having been to an art gallery in the morning.

“Where are you off to?” she asked.

“I found a cheap Internet café yesterday,” I said, “and I’m going back to check in with some people.”

“I’d love to check emails,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Could I please tag along?”

“Sure thing. It’s on the other side of town, maybe thirty minutes away.”

“Cool,” she said. Five minutes later, she had herself organised and we were off.

“What are you doing in Guangzhou,” she asked, as we walked towards the metro station.

“I’m going home,” I said, “and since I’m running out of money, I figured I’d wait for my flight here. How about you?”

“I’m going to Chengdu to study Chinese,” she said.

“Cool, it seemed like a nice city when I was there. Watch out for the cops.”

“Yeah, it’s cheaper to study there than Beijing and Shanghai,” she told me, “and I’m hoping I’ll be speaking Mandarin to people more often.”

The metro station was quiet, which was surprising considering it was situated in the middle of such a large city. The train arrived and there were no seats available. Maybe Shamian Island was in a quiet part of town.

“Don’t people seem to look depressed when they’re on these things,” I said, pointing around the carriage.

“Yeah,” Heather agreed, “maybe because they’re off to work, and we’re on holiday.”

After we had paid for our time at the Internet café, we both realised we’d forgotten to eat, so tried to buy some food at the café. Confusing the issue, however, was the fact that Heather is a vegetarian and there was no English menu available. My notes helped me get fish, beef and chicken based meals but did not include vegetable dishes this may suggest a certain degree of healthiness, or lack thereof, regarding my diet, and also proved useless when ordering a meal for her. The staff looked lost as we tried to get the vegetarian message across to them. My Mandarin skills were useless in the Cantonese-speaking city, not that they were particularly effective in other places either.

We considered waiting until after finishing with our emails but as we were both starving, we persevered. Heather took a gamble and ordered some rice with something described as green while I ordered a curried beef dish. Our respective meals arrived at our computer desks, and Heather’s asparagus spears looked very appetising while my meal was inedible. Apart from the rice, I barely touched it.

Just up the road, the Memorial garden to the Martyrs was a great place for a walk and a chat. The paths and bridges circled around and across a lake, small ponds, several monuments and lily pads galore. We walked past two trees that were intertwined and curving around one another, both having grown to maybe thirty feet tall.

“They look like they’re dancing,” Heather said, looking into the branches above. We continued walking, as I thought about how she had described those trees.

“You see the world in an interesting way,” I said, pointing back as she looked up at me quizzing my comment. “I would have described those trees as having grown with and amongst one another. You skipped that and saw something beyond the straight forward yet, still understandable.”

“Maybe it’s the way I view nature,” she said. “I grew up in the outdoors, seeing plant life as producing something more than just growth. My father’s approach to nature was to understand and appreciate not how it acts, but that it wants to act.” And I felt humbled.

“I wonder why I didn’t attain that,” I said. “Maybe because of my upbringing or maybe it’s just the way I am. How do you think you became like that?”

And she pondered this. She pondered a lot of things. We had a few things in common.

“I’m pretty sure my upbringing led to me being somewhat the person that I am,” she began, “but still, I may have been born a little different too.”

The next day, we went for a walk down one of the main streets of Guangzhou, before she decided to go back to the hostel for a rest and I went to another park, Yuexiu Gongyuan.

The large park was situated on the side of a hill, and included the tall monument to the five celestial goats of which Guangzhou, meaning Goat City, is named after. It stood in a courtyard surrounded by six-foot blue metal barriers, hiding construction beyond. Nearby, a lawn bowls club was situated at the summit of the hill. It wasn’t busy but with gates open and the greens immaculate, it was obviously not redundant.

A museum at the top of the hill was filled with the usual historical artefacts I had come to expect from a Chinese museum and on the decks outside, views to the north and east took in the high-rise buildings encircling the hill. The skies were grey and engulfing air pollution wrapped itself around the buildings like cotton protecting them from any untoward attacks, disturbing the view in the process. It was disappointing but not surprising.

While the walk around the park was slightly strenuous in an enjoyable way, and the views of central Guangzhou held my interest for at least a few minutes, I was really missing someone to talk to. Maybe I would’ve talked anyone, but it felt like I wanted to talk to Heather. And it felt good. She was a special person to meet and I enjoyed being around her. She made me feel more in touch with myself. Then again, maybe I just felt like talking to someone and she didn’t tend to interrupt.

I stopped at the People’s Square on the way back to the hostel, finding green trees, a central pavilion, small square courts and uncut but plentiful lawns. As I walked through the aptly named Square at maybe 3PM, it was absolutely crowded. People of all ages were out socialising in different yet similar ways.

On one particular tree lined path, many different activities took place. A group of women were taking part in traditional fan dances. With crowds moving around them, they continued the cross between line dancing and tai chi. The sound of the fans opening was one singular “Frap”, as maybe twelve in total, opened as one. The music the fan dancers played from a stereo competed with the music from every other stereo that was nearby.

A group of slightly younger women practiced their cheerleading, as if the Dallas Cowboys were about to run onto the Square. With stylised star jumps, kicks and half-turns the cheerleaders called out in Chinese, smiling and puffing out their breasts at the end of each movement.

A ballroom dancing group of maybe fifty, with their own stereo playing and step routines being enforced took up an area beside a pavilion housing onlookers who rested in the shade. People seemed to line up to get involved and others pushed their way onto the makeshift dance floor, and there were many people, including myself, just watching. I wished my own dancing didn’t look like a bull-seal guarding his natural habitat.

Spread around the square, amongst the many other groups doing their own dance routines, older people exercised, quite a few doing tai chi, without the fans. Others played a version of hackey-sack, kicking to one another what looked like a small beanbag crossed with a shuttlecock. Their skills were sublime as they showed off by doing such things as kicking the bag up from behind their backs using the bottom of their feet. Others played badminton and table tennis and many were content to just sit and chat or have a wander, like me.

In the area to the north of Shamian Island, dark and narrow streets offer food markets, restaurants and Japanese porn DVDs for all and a misguided stroll at night led Heather and I to become lost quite quickly.

We were hunting some dinner and with an abundance of choice, settled on a small restaurant’s noodle specialties, buying cheap beer from the stall next door. Ordering was a mission again, involving the staff and passers by in our explanations, rising to our feet from the plastic stools and lino-covered tables to deliver farm animal noises straight from kindergarten. I was happily sussed with my chicken noodles and Heather had done some practice, managing to find something green for herself too.

We chatted the night away talking about USA and New Zealand history, about Asia and China and, once finding our way back to the island, got an ice cream and sat down by the river as I had done with Eric and Steve.

She left for Kunming the next day before going to Chengdu for the start of her classes. I didn’t know how to say goodbye or even if I needed to. We had spent only a few hours together over the period of a few days, yet it seemed enough to know her quite well. I wondered what our time would have been like had we met in New Zealand while I was at work, slightly closed off from the way I felt in Guangzhou. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent much time with her at all had we met while I was in Shanghai only a few days earlier, I was so wrapped up in my depression.

We hugged goodbye outside our hostel room and she walked out the door. I sat down and began chatting to an Englishman who had arrived an hour earlier.

As I chatted to people there, I thought about the way I’d treated women in the past. I didn’t express to Heather that I was attracted to her, and she looked confused when she left, as though she expected something more than a hug. If Heather wanted to kiss me, I would have obliged without protest. I didn’t give her my email address, and maybe she’d expected it. I felt like I’d slipped back into hiding and pretending to not care.

Swarming from the White Swan Hotel, across the road from the hostel, American families made up of Caucasian parents and their adopted Chinese babies were like a plague all over Shamian Island while out for daily strolls.

Restaurants, cafés and tourist shops had ramps for the thousands of prams rolling by each day and were never lacking for customers despite the overblown prices of goods and food. Stalls surrounding the shops by the hostel offered Chinese name cards and portrait services along with toys and baby products, from prams to nappies to baby harnesses.

Part of the fee paid to the adoption agency goes toward their stay in the White Swan Hotel, as they have to stay in the city for the first month of their adoption. The amount of money exchanging hands for an adoption to go through was, I was told, US$25,000. Numerous discussions from a few of the backpackers had mixed opinions, although disdain directed at the Chinese company running the enterprise was common.

I assumed most of the children adopted are girls, judging by the clothes they wore and toys their parents bought. This wasn’t surprising as boys have been the in-thing in Chinese parenting fashion these past few millennia. I assumed many of these girls have been dumped by their birthparents, whether figuratively or literally, and this enterprise was selling kids to foreigners merely to make money from it.

It struck a pretty raw nerve in me but it wasn’t surprising. I’d heard the phrase “sell your own kids to make a buck”, and here I saw it first hand. The foreigners paying these prices, I considered, were encouraging the practice.

I don’t have the answers though. If the girls weren’t adopted anything could happen to them. Sex slavery is a very real thing in the world and that’s where a lot of these girls could end up. Not so extreme, but also slave-like, many daughters are sent to the cities to work in manufacturing plants, while sons are sent to school. The realities of this world were tough for me to consider. I’d never really thought about this stuff until Shamian Island.

27. Ling Xi

2007-02-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

I bid farewell to Devrim, caught a taxi to the train station, and watching out the window as the train rolled out of Shanghai, thoughts of home raised my spirits. Within an hour, though, the train ride was driving me nuts. Three kids under the age of ten had bunks in my cubby hole and another four kids of a similar age were riddled throughout the carriage. They all came to play and sing together at my cubby hole.

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read and couldn’t rest. Sitting for long periods looking out the window with high-pitched squeals and screams reverberating from the walls around me, I employed some earplugs from my pockets, which had been used in the over-crowded hostel room a few days earlier. The plugs were a little dirty admittedly, and I had to pluck off the lint, but I stuck them in my ears anyway. The child-noise was toned down and I could read a little bit, but those kids were so loud, I held back from crying at them to shut up constantly.

In the late afternoon, the train came to a grinding halt. What I could see out the window was a small train station building and houses and roads nearby with rubbish overflowing from large concrete bins pouring down streets and into unkempt hedges and plantations. The sign at the station said we were in Ling Xi. No doors were opened for anyone to exit or enter the train. We were stagnant for whatever reason.

The very small town consisted of a few people, a train station, and a mess of discarded plastic bottles and food wrappings. Lying maybe seven hours train-ride due southwest of Shanghai, the town seemed to exist for piling up of waste. Like a bulldozer had swept the road clean and filled each nook and cranny, the gaps between buildings and on street corners were filled with rubbish. With this man-made garbage creep, the streets were becoming narrower and narrower.

A quaint wooden building situated at the rear edge of the ten-metre long train station platform was the colour of faded whites and greys. I felt my heart sink, as I compared this place with home, and saw how much nicer yet how alike New Zealand is to this small microcosm of Chinese consumer waste management.

The sun began setting behind the hills, and the train had been parked for over thirty minutes in this town seemingly forgotten by those rooted deeply in the throws of modernising China. It’d probably stopped to let a more expensive, more expedient train pass by, and the kids grew even louder sharing in the general frustration of standing still. I began to reminisce about Muzak.

The memories of the feeling of movement drained any other life force from me for some time and I became more and more lethargic with each passing minute. Pins and needles flowed through my body, and I felt dizzy. From behind the station building, a little girl, maybe three or four years old, skipped out onto the otherwise unpopulated platform.

She was wearing a dirty, worn and tattered pink dress and danced merrily around the platform singing to herself. Her shaven head displayed scars and pockmarks from either abuse or an already hard life, and dirt and grime covered her face. Her smile, as she skipped around, was like a rainbow on a cloudy day.

She danced over to one of the large concrete-slab rubbish bins, which were built beside the wall of the wooden station building. Happily, she rummaged away in there until she found a red plastic supermarket bag. She placed it over her head suffocation-style and continued dancing around. She was enjoying herself and I felt like crying. The reason she was alone was probably due to her parents working. As she danced and sang, I wondered what her future options would be like.

I stared out the window hoping and dreaming for her to become a lawyer or doctor, despite my best knowledge telling me it was a foolish thought. As my eyes were locked on a little girl with a future riddled with who knows what, I thought about the waste I’d made in the name of comfort. The sunlight was fading as the little girl sat down and kept playing with her plastic bag, her face darkened by the shadow of the hills. It was well and truly dusk when the train finally lurched into action, the faded pink of the girls dress seemed to have changed to a grey colour as we left her behind. I tried to forget her, because I felt my future happiness could be tarnished forever as the memory of the little girl in Ling Xi I left behind became ingrained in my head.

As I watched her disappearing into the train passengers’ collective past, my travel experiences came flooding back to me. I felt like I was desensitising every feeling I had apart from irritation and hate. Considering what had happened to me lately, and how trivial it all was, I knew I couldn’t continue validating my disdain for China.

That girl at the train station was enjoying life, and I saw that I was not. I was finding excuses to hate China and avoid caring.

I remembered the car accidents I’d seen, my first thoughts were always of people being injured, but I stopped thinking about it and chose to note the crowds looking on. And then there was the corpse floating down the Yangtze River that I chose to not think about as anything more than fish food rather than as a father, mother, husband, wife, daughter or son. I chose to not care when I walked past beggars and I chose to not care when I bought a hot chocolate for Y20, money that could’ve fed a family for a week. I chose to not care when I saw cops kicking two teenagers in Chengdu. I chose to not care when, everyday, I handed empty plastic bottles to elderly men and women who would starve if they didn’t get paid for recycling. And I remember telling myself repetitively to stop caring as I walked through the Maids Picnic in Hong Kong with Pauly.

Seeing the little girl dancing in Ling Xi made it clear that why I chose to not care was because I felt helpless. I was scared I couldn’t help, and the only thing I was left with was caring. If I cared, I couldn’t hide or run, which came to me as the best way to not deal with any situation. And it stretched back to my life in New Zealand.

The way my life was going, with no job and no girlfriend, felt helpless, so to deal with it, I chose to not care and took refuge by escaping to China. I wasn’t enjoying life all the time, despite being an incredibly lucky person, having been born in a wonderful country and surrounded by fantastic people. I had nothing to complain about, yet I complained more than this little girl in Ling Xi, who had nothing.

The dinner cart came down the corridor, so I bought some rice and, after the kids had finished eating, I was offered a seat in our cubby-hole. Their parents ensured I had some space by pushing a couple of the kids out the door. I was pretty subdued, having had a self-defining epiphany not long before. I thanked them and ate, then climbed up to my bunk and tried to read while the kids kept playing. At 9pm, everything seemed to stop, the kids collapsed onto their bunks and there was blissful silence.

At 5AM in the morning, when the kids began playing games as noisily as possible while their parents didn’t seem concerned at all, I got upset again. The screaming and singing was nearly 90dB and the earplugs were irritatingly useless. I told myself that the kids were full of life, like the girl in Ling Xi, which is a wonderful thing. I was unable to share their joy so enthusiastically though. I ended up spending the rest of the morning considering both how dangerous it could be to jump from a moving train and how to go about getting over myself.

The train finally arrived in Guangzhou at 1PM and I couldn’t hide my relief as I made my way out the door. Trying to clear my head proved futile while in a constant neurobiological merry-go-round for hour upon hour thanks to those kids. I wanted to find somewhere quiet. The modern, sparkling metro from the station was the easiest way to the hostel on Shamian Island to the west of the city centre, and the ticket machines were easier to find than operate.

The person I lined up behind didn’t purchase anything and left the screen as she was using it. Without the intro screen I was stuck without means to the English option and was lost. I stood there for a moment, aware of the people waiting impatiently, and admitted defeat. I was lost without English instruction. A woman said something over my shoulder in Chinese so I turned to her in absolute desperation and said, “Help.”

Without hesitation, she and two men explained what to do, pressing buttons and getting the English option up on screen. It was child’s play and they probably thought I was a right munter but they didn’t show any judgement. Instead, she asked my anticipated destination and pressed the buttons for me, which I thanked her for. It was pretty obvious how getting that chip off my shoulder had helped. Asking for and accepting guidance appreciatively was answered positively much more often than negatively. I knew this but that didn’t mean I accepted it all the time.

I exited the Changsha station and, while looking for Shamian Island, got lost. I stopped a young woman passing by, who led me to the island where her church group was meeting. Down the road from the church, I found the hostel and lined up behind Eric, of Canada, who got the last bunk. He consoled me with a pat on the shoulder while I booked a bunk for the following night and got a room for myself in the meantime. An hour later, I was at a bar down the street drinking beer, eating sweet ‘n’ sour pork and watching English football as Everton played someone wearing red.

And life was good for me. It was another of those meals that I savoured, alike that first meat and rice dish in Beijing.

It was no wonder people here were constantly after money from me. They are starving or dying of the heat in the summer, cold in the winter and disease and starvation year round. I was constantly seeking to be appreciated by people who are striving daily for their families to survive.

“Wow,” I said to myself, “I’m really narcissistic.”

Surrounded by squalor and disease, I was wrapped up in my fears. The same issues I didn’t deal with in New Zealand were the ones I couldn’t avoid in China.

26. Meltdown in the big city

2007-02-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

I woke up early and headed to the airline offices via the underground. I was told I’d have to pay a large fee if I was to fly from Shanghai, but if I left from Guangzhou, in the south, the fee would be waved. I figured I’d head south and see that city before I left, and was told it’d be at least a day before my flights would be confirmed.

The next stop was at the hostel from the night before. They had a discounted bunk vacant that had no locker and shared a room with twenty other bunks. I paid for a night and went back to the hotel to check out.

As I waited for my bond, a clerk offered me the room at half price for that night. I shook my head. If they had offered that deal last night, I may have stayed all week. I accepted my money back and returned to the hostel, finding my bunk was actually a stretcher in a meeting room.

Brett, an American, and Brits Angus and Sam were all sharing their travel plans, and I lay on my stretcher and joined in their discussion.

I went for lunch with Angus and Sam who went exploring afterwards, and I returned to do some laundry, finally, and met Paul, an English teacher from New Zealand.

“We’re the spill-over, are we?” he asked with a grin as he dropped his bag by a stretcher. I recognised his accent straight away and we fell into a conversation about all things political, sporting and otherwise regarding home. It seemed like hours later when Paul excused himself to go for a walk. I pulled out a book and read the rest of the day away before having a beer with him at the bar, overlooking Shanghai’s majestic buildings.

The next day, I met a friend of Tee’s, Devrim, who offered me a bed at his apartment. He had been working in Shanghai for a month and said he was happy for the company. We had dinner near his work and then walked to his apartment complex nearby.

I told Devrim that while China was a land of extremely weird and strange events, it had lost its surprising nature for me. Just then, a burning cigarette butt was thrown from a deck a few stories above us and landed on my head. I wasn’t surprised. I was pissed off but not surprised.

Having gained my bearings, I returned to the hostel to collect my bag. Not long after 8PM, I was saying goodbye to the people I’d met at the hostel, wishing them well, when a Korean man who had been on the stretcher opposite me burst through the doors, breathing heavily.

His English wasn’t great, but he managed to say he’d just been mugged only five minutes walk away. Two Chinese men had cornered him, threatening him with a knife. This after he’d reported the night before that he’d been physically assaulted at the People’s Square only ten minutes walk from the hostel.

He was visibly shaken, and began warning everyone about this city. I wanted to get on my way before I thought about it too much. I waved goodbye to Paul and the others and stepped out the front door, walking west towards the People’s Square, and considered taking a taxi. Instead, I headed for the underground, more because it was economical than me being brave.

Forty-five minutes later, I arrived at my new accommodation unharmed with no other incidents happening. I collapsed on the couch breathing a massive sigh of relief.

“You look freaked out,” Devrim said.

“I am freaked out,” I thought out loud.

With my flights out of Guangzhou confirmed, all I had to do was get there and enjoy the final few days in the country. I went to the train station for tickets, and upon entering the main ticketing hall, saw the massive queues lining out the door. People were everywhere, pushing their way to the front of the lines, arguing and shouting. I decided to skip that mess and walked to the English-speaking ticket counters in a hotel nearby. It would cost a surcharge, but at least I wouldn’t have to fight for service.

No tickets were available to get to the southern city for at least three more days. The lady at the counter told me a national holiday was coming, and travel around the country would be difficult, so I took the first available bunk.

“What time of day does it arrive in Guangzhou?” I asked her.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to arrive at night.”

“Why not?”

“Getting a hotel room late at night is very difficult,” I told her, straining to not talk to her like a child.

“I understand,” she said, nodding as her eyes lit up like someone had flicked a switch. The other ticket clerks in the office listening to our conversation also nodded, as if I’d told her the secret to hydrogen energy stability.

“What time does the train arrive in Guangzhou?” I asked again.

“1PM,” she said, with a smile. “Early afternoon.”

I thanked them all and walked outside, instantly bombarded by touts trying to sell me hotel rooms and girls. I ignored what they had to say and crossed a driveway where I almost got run over.

A tourist bus steamed out of a gate nearby, and as I had my psychological blinkers on to avoid the touts, I completely missed the bus heading straight for me. The driver screeched to a halt and I had to jump into a full bicycle rack to get out of the way. The driver leaned out the window screaming at me and the touts all started laughing. I smiled, waved an insincere apology, climbed out of the bikes and walked towards the underground station.

In one of the subway underpasses on the Pudong side of the river, I saw a young man playing an instrument so beautifully it was unfathomable that he was a busker. So many people to be heard busking in China and the only dollar they would receive from me would be in pity, yet this man was amazing. What led to him being stuck for work with the talent he had I didn’t know. The idea this man would play this spot for the next twenty years was disheartening. I dropped Y5 in his hat, enough to buy an ice cream and a drink and I took a seat on a nearby staircase, listening to the concert he was playing for the millions of people in his head.

I was wandering the shops, unsure what I wanted to buy. As I looked at cameras and MP3 players, I was approached constantly and offered the goods at inflated prices. The shopkeepers thought I was stupid. I didn’t bother bargaining with them, as that would suggest I wanted to make a purchase and they wouldn’t let me out the door empty-handed.

When I saw other foreigners spending up large I realised why they thought I was stupid too. Foreigners paid Y50 for a cigarette lighter with Mao’s inscription on it, whereas it was quite easy to get ten identical lighters for that price. I’d managed to get five for Y25 without bargaining that hard and I was still a bargaining novice.

Of course, idiot tax was still hitting me as hard as anyone else new to the country. As I walked around waiting to go home, I was able to reflect on what everything was worth with more discretion, as I was able to see how much Chinese people would pay for things. When I first arrived I forgave myself for being ripped off but after I felt the initiation was over I was a lot harder on myself.

On Nanjing Lu, the main pedestrian shopping precinct in central Shanghai, a man with a massive friendly smile approached me, and I smiled back. He tried to tell me something, and brought a pamphlet out of his pocket to show me some photos of high-tech gadgetry. I didn’t understand him nor the Chinese written on the pamphlet, and didn’t know what the gadgets were for either. He was trying to sell them to me, so I lost my smile and waved him away.

He continued talking to me, his smile not diminishing, and waved the photos in my face. I walked away, but he followed, smiling and telling me, in Mandarin, to look and something about being friends. When he finally got the message, he turned to another foreigner, smiling even wider.

I walked to the hostel to meet Paul for a beer, and wondered what all of this tourist dollar was in aid of. From what I had experienced, China doesn’t want or need more people in the country, but to invite money from around the world, foreigners are greeted with open arms. It seemed that my apparent wealth was the only reason I was welcome.

The longer I spent thinking about it, China was just some place to buy something inordinately overpriced that stated, “I have been to China.” As far as I could tell, they wanted money and I was just the vessel carrying some. Whatever they had to do to get it, they’d do, and didn’t respect me at all.

The crazy lady at the internet café in Haerbin, and a myriad of bus drivers, taxi drivers, hotel staff, touts and the tour guide Postman Pat had treated me like crap. People were constantly rude and gave the message that they didn’t want me around. The cop who pointed his rifle at me in Changchun may have secretly wanted to pull the trigger and spit had landed at my feet more times than I bothered to count.

Walking the streets, people stopped and stared, my presence making them uncomfortable. They didn’t want me around and the feeling was growing more and more mutual. As I approached the hostel, I had the urge to run back to Nanjing Lu screaming that I don’t care that Chinese people don’t want me. And I wanted to scream that I don’t want China.

“I don’t want you, China,” I wanted to tell everyone.

“Hey China, get fucked!” I wanted to scream.

“You’re already fucked, China, but really, GET FUCKED!”

So Shanghai wasn’t my cup of tea. I visited a different restaurant for every meal as the food choices were fantastic, but that was about all that got me going. I read for the rest of the week, starting and finishing three books within five days while I waited for my southbound train.

Although I smiled, was courteous, and spent time chatting to Devrim and people at the hostel, I was sulking. I had come to Shanghai to sulk. Before I left though, I was able to at least be woken out of my depression.

I was walking along Nanjing Lu again and saw the aftermath of a van versus motorbike altercation in the middle of a busy intersection. The obligatory crowd of ten to fifteen people had already gathered around in the middle of the road, the intersection buzzed with vehicles continuing on with their own private journey.

The lights changed and as I crossed the road, there was a short, sharp crunch. A scooter had parked itself on top of a bicycle right beside the first accident, probably due to both riders rubber-necking the other accident.

The two riders stood and began cleaning up the respective loads they had both spilled and the crowd in the middle of the road watching the first accident’s aftermath barely moved. They merely turned around to watch the aftermath of the second. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

25. World like a picture reel

2007-02-07T09:25:00.000-08:00

It was early morning, maybe 8AM, and the sun was shining in the window of our moving train carriage. A group of people chatting on the bunks below noticed I was awake and offered their morning greetings. I kept dozing for a while, ignoring the Muzak and the loud people on the train and hoped we were getting close to Shanghai.

I asked the people sitting on the bunks below where we were and they said that we were halfway there. I sat up, checked my watch, checked the map, checked my watch again and did some maths.

“Oh shit,” I said quietly. “This is not good.”

After lying on my bunk doing the maths repetitively for a while, checking the time every five minutes, I rolled onto my side and waved to beckon the attention of the people sharing the carriage.

“The train arrives at Shanghai at what time?” I asked in Chinese, looking at no one in particular.

There were looks amongst the group sitting together, and discussion which I didn’t understand, then a young woman turned to me and spoke in broken English.

“Five o’clock we get to Nanjing,” she said. “Maybe nine o’clock train gets to Shanghai.”

“Nine o’clock,” I parroted, “9PM?”

“Yes,” she said, turning to the rest of the group for confirmation and getting it in the form of nodding heads.

“Thank you,” I said smiling and rolled onto my back, my fears confirmed. “Fuck!”

My mind instantly shot back to Shanhaiguan and began replaying the night Karl, Jan and I arrived in the dead of the night and had been pretty lucky to find a place. It had already been a long train ride, stopping time after time to let other trains go by, but with the advent of this new information, my mind was preoccupied with thoughts about what I was going to do when the train finally got to Shanghai.

I was planning to go to the hostel Five-foot and I had stayed at before, which was very central and very affordable. I considered it might be worth going to the hotels near the train station instead. I would need to get to the hostel as soon as possible in case they ran out of beds. The problem was that if they were already full, I would be looking again. Walking around all night was something I wanted to avoid but I was resigned to the idea that finding anything affordable at that time of night would be a struggle. I found the hotels near the train station always terrible, but maybe it was worth getting a bed for a few hours then head to the hostel in the morning.

The train continued on and the people I sat with explained that we had stopped for six hours overnight, which may have explained why I stuffed up my times. I started dreaming of arriving in the city at 3PM but that made me feel like jumping from the train.

We passed crop fields and small towns, large cities and a few livestock farms. From the window of a moving train and with so much planning and organising running through my head, the outside world looked like a picture reel being projected against a wall. No smells, no tastes and no real sense of what was happening out there was getting through. All that was happening in the world seemed to be in that carriage.

The rest of the day, I spent sitting and dwelling on the situation I had put myself in. I cursed myself for buying tickets for this particular train. I hadn’t asked about the arrival times, in my haste to leave the north. “Idiot” was a label that was beginning to stick.

Finding a cheap bed in Shanghai would be much more difficult and much more energy sapping than Shanhaiguan had proven to be. Being a lone traveller in a major city, I wasn’t prepared to trust a taxi driver late at night as Karl, Jan and I had.

At Nanjing, the others in the compartment disembarked, waving goodbye and wishing me luck. The final run towards Shanghai became the most trying. Outside, the sun began to lower and the fields and towns became cities squashed between hills to the south and the Yangtze River to the north. The train followed the mighty river towards the coast passing by major bridges and ports. Vegetation covered the hills in the south and crops began to grow darker and darker. The concrete, brick and steel of city daytime, became flashing neon lights and vehicle headlamps. Housing complexes signified another uniform civilisation as the train rolled on.

A gentleman came by and interrupted the negative internal dialogue I was still issuing in abundant detail.

“I am a businessman,” he said. “You go to Shanghai too?”

“Yes,” I said, not really giving him much thought.

“Have you been to Shanghai before?’

“Yes,” I said, “have you?”

“No, this is my first time. Where are you from?”

And I was soon in the middle of a conversation that I had been in time and time before. I am a New Zealander. I have a brother. I am on holiday. I have been in China for however many weeks. I have been to all these places. I like Chinese people. I hope you have a good day. I hope you believe me.

Many of these conversations were good distraction, but this one was not and not because of the very friendly, amiable man I was chatting with. It was all me. I was struggling to snap out of my pissed off depression. Part of the problem, I figured, was being stuck in the train. It felt like a prison cell.

The man continued, asking if I could speak any Mandarin. When I couldn’t tell him what day it was, he took it upon himself to teach me the days of the week. Monday to Saturday are numbered from one to six, Lingxiyi to Lingxiliu, and Sunday is called Lingxiri, which the businessman couldn’t explain. For thirty minutes, I practiced the days of the week like a pre-schooler, and he clapped me along, his smile growing brighter each time I got it correct.

The skyscrapers of the city loomed near and I decided, not exactly on a whim, to go straight to the hostel. I figured however things worked out, things would work out.

The train pulled into the station at 925PM. I threw my pack on my back and escaped the Muzak box and followed the herd towards the exit gate with fake confidence etched on my face. I waved farewell to the businessman from the train and walked through the masses in the square outside the station heading for the underground station nearby.

The underground carriages were packed, but I only had to squeeze in with my pack until I got to the People’s Square a few minutes away. Exiting the station, I was surrounded by crowds either shopping, partying or out walking and I headed due east towards the Bund. The crowds thinned out on the less lit streets, until I was one of the few people around. A young man with a clipboard approached offering I wasn’t sure what but I made it clear I wasn’t interested.

“Bu yao,” I said and crossed the street. I had learned the correct way to say “bu yao” which made people leave me alone. Being forceful, being straightforward, and forthright only served to fuel their inclination to sell. The way to get rid of these guys was to say “bu yao” as though I was answering the fifth phone call from a telemarketer in one hour. A dejected, resigned, and put upon voice was what worked more often than not.

At 10PM, the counter attendant at the hostel said there were no beds available.

“Am I able to book a bed for tomorrow night?” I asked.

“Not yet,” the young lady said. “Tomorrow morning you may be able to.”

“Okay,” I said, “are you able to help me find a bed for tonight?”

“No,” she said firmly.

I felt like going upstairs, and sleeping in one of the hallways, but there were security guards on patrol so I may have been found out quite quickly. Stepping outside, I wondered what my next best option was. The train station had been extremely busy and was thirty minutes away yet looking for a hotel room there could be a waste of time too.

All the other hostels in my guidebook were quite a hike in opposite directions and any amount of travel there didn’t guarantee a bed. I decided to walk towards one and check out the hotels along the way. I set off southwest passing the young man with the clipboard again, needing to tell him to leave me alone again.

I stopped at a few hotels having no luck then followed a narrow street to a major intersection until I saw another hotel’s foyer lights inviting me inside.

“Hello,” I began. “I need a room.”

“Now?” said the lady at reception, flabbergasted that anyone would be so stupid as to still need a hotel room at 1045PM.

“Yes,” I said with a smile on my face. “Tonight.”

She and another staff member fluffed about for a few minutes, drawing out the process of me looking at a room and finally grabbed a key.

“No singles are left, only doubles,” she said. “Doubles are Y240.”

“As there is only one of me,” I began, “is there any chance of a discount?”

“No discount.”

“Right,” I said, dropping my head slightly and puffing out my cheeks. I had been travelling under budget for quite a while so this wouldn’t break the bank. I went upstairs and was shown a very nice room. If I were there with a friend it could’ve been worth the price but it didn’t matter to me at the time.

If I weren’t as tired I may have tried to find something cheaper. I had even considered roughing it and wandering the streets all night. I skipped both options, as I hadn’t had enough sleep in the previous few nights and felt that this was what my body was craving. As I perused the room, I felt my shoulders drooping, my knees wobbling and head bobbing. Having not eaten all day then walked around with my pack on my back in the summer heat of late evening Shanghai for over an hour, I was pretty tired.

I dropped my pack on the floor of the room, revealing my sweat laden and stinking shirt. My first stop downstairs was at reception to pay and then I went to the shop next-door. I bought an ice cream, a bag of chips and a bottle of coke for a combined breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I had a quick shower and finally crawled into bed at midnight, eating and chilling out for the first time all day. I watched Chelsea play Arsenal live, complete with Chinese commentators. Sitting there with a mouth full of half-chewed chips, I began laughing.

“I’m NEVER doing that again,” I said quietly to myself through the mashed potato pieces, “and this time, I mean it.”

24. Popping balloons on a bull’s horns

2007-02-07T09:23:00.000-08:00

The Karaoke bus arrived in Changchun a few hours later and once out the door, I had to ask the driver where we were. The street was full of vegetable and fruit markets, hardware stores, livestock in cages and cyclists thundering past. Buildings in all directions were a mixture of the tall and modern and those in near ruin. There were no street signs to be seen. The bus hadn’t stopped at the station, rather on a street nearby so my map would be useless until I knew where I was.

“Huoche zhan zai nar?” I asked the driver, enquiring where the train station was. With his nose buried in the freight compartment, he replied that he was from Haerbin and didn’t know.

“Qiche zhan zai nar?” I asked this time, enquiring where the bus station was. Still digging bags out of the compartment, he replied by saying something like “Around the corner” without pointing or suggesting which corner he meant. He was avoiding the hassle of trying to explain directions to a foreigner for five minutes so I gathered up my backpack and walked down the street hoping I was heading west.

I kept an eye out for any street signs and landmarks such as the bus and train stations. The early afternoon sun was blocked by the zillion tonnes of pollution in the sky and with no shadows cast to suggest compass directions, I was lost. I got to a major road before changing direction having missed any signs or clues to follow so I turned what I guessed would be north.

After walking for five minutes, the feeling of burning flesh on my neck suggested the sun was at my back, which I concluded meant I was going east, away from the train station. According to the map, three main streets led to the station, one from the west, one from the south, and one from the southeast. I reckoned I was facing southeast so spun around and walked for ten minutes to the major intersection in front of the train station. Around the corner, there was a hotel.

After paying the inflated room charge, I fell into the wonderful, slightly hotter than lukewarm shower. It was bliss. I didn’t bother asking at the front desk if there was a laundry service. If the room rate was any indication, it would near bankrupt me.

Dwelling on the future options I had penned in my notebook, I went across the road to get a train ticket. I wanted to continue travelling but also preferred to be in a good frame of mind while I did so. I was aware that I had been pissed off, non-stop, for days now. I think I had slept pissed off.

I couldn’t find any available rides to Beijing for three days but there was a bunk available the following day for Shanghai. From there, I could sort out my flights home. I stood at the ticket counter with my notebook of different itineraries open and considered bussing south. A lady standing in line offered me her suggestions, not that I understood them, and I decided to go home.

With tickets to Shanghai in my wallet, I walked to a restaurant across the road. I shared a table with a family as there was no other seat available and we all looked up as four heavily armed soldiers or policemen walked in and ordered meals. Dressed in dark blue uniforms similar to USA police’s SWAT teams, these guys looked like the real deal, highly trained and waiting for their next mission. They carried helmets and black ammunition belts while wearing what looked like Kevlar bullet-proof jackets.

Their rifles were much more modern than the standard issue for the usual guards found at embassies, military compounds and museums throughout the country. Three men slung their firearms over shoulders while the fourth leaned his against the counter when he had to reach into his wallet for some money.

They all looked around the room trying to look staunch, which wasn’t difficult, and eyed up everyone eating, now quietly, in the restaurant. When their eyes settled on me everyone else in the restaurant glued their gaze on me too. One of the soldiers pointed his rifle at me without placing his finger on the trigger, and spoke to his mates as I stared down the barrel. They all responded with laughter while a cold shiver went through my body. I stayed quiet, munching away on my chicken noodle thing and sipping my drink until only ice was left.

Their meals arrived at the counter in brown bags and they walked past slowly on the way to the door, still interested in my dining techniques, chatting and smirking to themselves. I looked up at them smiling with a gob full of chicken and noodle, the friendliest guy in the world. The guy who pointed his gun at me smiled back warmly. As the door closed, there was a collective sigh of relief from everyone sitting nearby and I felt myself join in.

I was never in danger, but having the serious end of a serious piece of hardware pointed at me was indescribably harrowing. While I didn’t really feel paralysed with fear, I did come close to shitting bricks.

That evening, I slumped on the hotel bed, tired and alone. I wanted to get home, or more importantly, away from where I was. Hiding was allowed tonight. I wouldn’t beat myself up for it this time.

I switched on the television to waste the evening, as reading wasn’t on the cards. I hadn’t been that interested in Chinese television before, since it was usually crappy music and theatre shows that failed to entertain me. If I understood anything it may have been more entertaining. Alas, I would normally channel surf the night away, but this night there was a game show on that completely captured my attention.

Teams from countries including France, Romania, and China squared off in random tests of general sporting ability. Two of these tests were beyond what I would describe good taste, yet I couldn’t look away.

The first contest had participants running from side to side in an arena carrying objects to score points, the test being avoiding the raging bull being roused into action by constant horns and trumpets being blown. The bull was young with its horns dulled, but it was still dangerous. As men got flattened, jumped up and climbed onto the cage and sometimes dodged the beast, the commentators shrieked with cries of joy when the bull’s big hits landed.

Another test had the bull running around to the sound of horns and trumpets again, but this time, instead of dodging it, the contestants had to pop balloons on its horns. They ran in unwaveringly, trying to pop as many balloons as possible before time ran out. The contestants copped it a few times, but for the most part the bull ran around in complete bewilderment, huffing and puffing and looking extremely stressed out. I was drawing parallels between this and my current life situation, although I couldn’t figure out if I had more in common with the people popping balloons in maybe the stupidest way ever conceived, or with the bull suffering a very public nervous breakdown.

After the game show, I channel surfed until I saw the infomercial for the ages. The new product, designed to help women’s breasts grow, had maybe the cheesiest and best advertisement ever made. The models rubbed gel made from a root-plant on their breasts twice a day for a month then put on a padded bra, and voila, they had a well-earned C-cup.

On the ad, women compared breast size frequently, and those with larger breasts who had used the gel were happy, while the women with small breasts looked away dejectedly. A boyfriend was caught looking at another woman’s breasts and got in trouble with his small-breasted girlfriend. To apologise, he bought her the root-plant gel and was instantly her hero again, earning him a kiss. Pure genius. I wish this could be the way the female psyche worked.

Before I went to sleep, the phone rang.

“Ni yao xiaojie?” the receptionist enquired, offering me a girl.

“Bu yao,” I responded more out of habit than actually considering the offer.

The next morning was spent reading and shopping for food for the train before going to the station across the road. Once the train was on the move the next afternoon, I lay on my bunk watching the crop fields go by until the daylight turned dark. I spoke to no one. I was an island. I was unreachable. I was making the first step of my journey home.

23. Idiot taxes

2007-02-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

Jiandong and Chong Ke had suggested I take the train when leaving Jilin, but the bus seemed like the easier option. During my travels in the northeast I had enjoyed the new luxury cruiser buses and I hoped the next journey to Haerbin would be similar. The price for each mode of transport was comparable but getting a bus ticket was easier than a train ticket, even if it did increase the dangers. Chinese roads are infamous for death and carnage.

I evaded the touts outside the bus station by putting the psychological blinkers on to ignore what they were trying to sell, and once inside, lined up for a ticket. I only had to wait fifteen minutes for the bus to depart. No seats were available by the departure gate, so I sat on my bag waiting amongst the throng of people coming and going. I was less nervous in the departure lounges now, with the noise levels and people constantly moving becoming less intimidating over time.

Children ran around me playing and getting into mischief while parents chatted away unworried about what the kids were doing. Touts offered cheap cigarettes and food, and I was constantly waving people away. The place smelt of stale cigarette smoke, much like any indoor hall, wangba and restaurant, which was becoming quite pleasant now I’d been in the country a few months.

A man approached asking in Mandarin if I was going to Haerbin. I nodded, and he led me by the shoulder to the front of the departure gate queue. My ticket was checked and accepted and I was seated on a crappy, old, stinking, uncomfortable bus with a spring poking into the small of my back. This was not what I wanted to pay for.

We left the station with all the seats full and the first stop was two minutes down the road where the bus driver turned into an alleyway, broke out some stools and put more people in the centre aisle. The bus was literally packed shoulder-to-shoulder, front to back and then departed Jilin.

I wondered if I had got on the correct bus. There are cowboys in China who drive old buses, which they don’t keep in good working order, run the same route as the organised bus and collect payments and tickets for which they are reimbursed. They look to fill every seat and once they’ve done so they fill the aisle, which is illegal, and once they’ve done so the bus is on its way.

I was sitting shoulder to shoulder between two very smelly people, which was okay since there was no air conditioning and I was sweating and stinking myself. I was getting paranoid again, thinking I’d got on the wrong bus. I had failed to check the bus number printed on the ticket against the number painted on the bus. My mind wandered back to all the times I had been ripped off, and I started beating myself up for being stupid.

I found more evidence I was not on a regulated ride when the bus passed a bus stop, complete with mini-restaurant and toilet facilities, and stopped fifteen minutes up the road. Available at our stop, a broken down old shop offered a limited food selection and drinks hidden in a fridge out the back. One solitary toilet for all on the bus to line up for was by the road and if the outside was anything to go by, the inside was not a desired restroom option.

Once on the road again, we passed car crash after car crash on the side of the road. Cars had ploughed into trucks had ploughed into buses had ploughed into trees. There were too many incidents to count, and our driver seemed to desire being another statistic himself and taking the rest of us with him. The bus flew around corners and overtook large lines of trucks, forcing traffic coming from the opposite direction onto the grass on the side of the road. I rolled my eyes to block all the mortal thoughts out and watched as we passed another truck parked on top of a car.

After a couple of hours, narrow back-roads becoming large inter-provincial highways, then industrial farm equipment centres grew into tall towers and a corporate zone. Cars and trucks shared the roads and paths with pedestrians and cyclists, along with a few horses towing carriages. We were in Haerbin, another capital of the north.

Within minutes of stopping on a side street around the corner from the bus station, I knew I had been duped. I looked for a bus number on the front windscreen but there was none, even though there was one on my ticket. While hunting down a hotel room, I walked past the bus station and saw a modern bus marked Jilin to Haerbin with a shiny new paint job and clean windows. People in uniforms passed out luggage from the freight compartment and the number on the back window corresponded with my ticket. I had subsidised all the other tickets to Haerbin for the passengers on my bus. I felt stupid. Again.

“Live and learn,” I said through gritted teeth. “At least I got here though.”

I looked at a room in the train station hotel, fleas bounced off the bed and the smell from the communal toilets blew throughout the corridor and rooms due to the draught from the gaping holes in the walls. A door to another room opened and, stretched out on maybe six beds, were twenty grown men and women either sleeping or watching television. Condensation was dripping from the ceiling in the non-air conditioned sweltering room.

Having opted to pursue other accommodation, I took a big breath of comparatively fresh air outside and walked into the central city area, two kilometres northwest of the bus and train stations, and found a hotel in the middle of the obligatory shopping precinct. The staff spoke some English, which I thought would help.

After arguing about the room price for fifteen minutes, I realised I had no cash so had to go looking for a bank. Upon my return we argued over the price of room insurance, or bond for another ten minutes and I finally paid and went upstairs to partake in a hot shower as I had gone without for a few days. Unfortunately, I would go without for a while longer.

“What time is hot water available?” I asked at the front desk a few minutes later.

“Seven o’clock tonight,” the lady at the desk said. Cool, I thought, that’s only a few hours away and I don’t have to smell myself in the meantime. This reminded me of something else.

“How much to wash clothes? Laundry service?” I asked.

“Y70,” was the total suggested after we had added up all my garments that stank like week-old margarine and rotting orange peel.

“Ya what?”

“Y70,” was the response. I had heard her correctly the first time.

This was probably the most I had been quoted to do laundry since I’d arrived in the country, and probably reflected how desperate these hotels thought I was to get some washing done. Their hands had just rifled through my dirty, stinking shirts after all.

“Not paying Y70,” I told them. “Do you know somewhere I can wash them that is cheaper?” They laughed and said no. I didn’t expect them to help me with this but there was no harm in asking.

“Wash in your bath,” one of the ladies at the counter said. I figured I could do that again.

At 7PM that evening, I tried the hot water without luck.

“What time is hot water available?” I asked again, having returned to the front desk.

“Seven o’clock in morning,” said the lady. My hand hit my forehead with a thud.

I walked out and found an Internet café down the road. It operated differently to other cafés, in that customers paid the total hours before logging on and the computer automatically logged off at the end. That worked, as it stopped me from playing on the net for too long. I paid for an hour and wrote emails to a few friends and family, letting them know I was still alive and kicking. When the little dialogue box told me I had one minute to go, I logged off.

I was walking behind a group of very attractive young women on the way back to the hotel. They all held hands, which added to how collectively attractive I found them. When one woman turned, reached back in her throat for a hunk of phlegm and spat it into the gutter, my attraction diminished somewhat, for them all.

The next morning, I woke up to my alarm at 7AM and started up the shower. I left it to run for a minute and when I returned it was cold. For fifteen minutes, I played with the tap, played with the nozzle, let it run for ages, and tried what I thought was everything before giving up.

“Hi,” I said to the guy behind the desk, “I’m in room 620, and I haven’t got any hot water.”

“Seven o’clock tonight,” he said.

I went for a walk before I strangled someone.

At the northern end of the central city, Songhua River dissects the urban area from the parks and reserves reachable by taxi-boat and cable car. Stalin Park, on the city side of the river, was alive with stereos, people, shops, game stalls and carnival booths. I had planned to go to a reserve across the river but assumed it would be just as reserved as any other area designed to attract tourists, that is, not reserving anything conceivably sellable. So I skipped it.

I kept walking, and no matter where I went clothes and electronics stores were everywhere. I wasn’t interested in shopping but couldn’t avoid it. I would turn a corner, and there would be another row of shops, stereo’s blaring out loud music and staff clapping at the doorstep.

Walking through any shopping area in Chinese cities, it was easy to spot people standing outside shops trying to attract attention, usually screaming advertisements such as specials of the day. Often there was someone who, lacking prices or specials to advertise, simply clapped continuously. They wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t move and wouldn’t respond to eye contact. They just stood there clapping.

Five-foot had said the advent of the clapping work was due to laws regarding employment numbers per square metre.

Chinese laws of the past mandated requirements that businessmen must employ so many people to work a certain sized area, probably as means to keep farmers in work and spread wealth accumulation. This law is still in effect even in shoe stores and restaurants, so I saw a lot of service people standing around, not seeming to do much. Clapping is just a way to make someone look needed, or required at least.

While I thought of this during my wander through central Haerbin, I made not one purchase nor did I take much notice of what was for sale. I ignored most of it, looking for something else to do. I scoured back streets, found another couple of parks and a large church, but couldn’t find anything interesting to fill my day. I went back to the Internet café from the night before to relax and waste the early evening.

My time on the net was nearly up and a dialogue box popped up on the screen to tell me I had ten minutes left, which was ample time to finish my emails.

As I did so, a lady from behind the counter walked up and spoke to me. Her comments included the words “wu kuai,” Mandarin for Y5. I understood this, but nothing else that she said.

“Budong,” I told her. I don’t understand.

She repeated herself, including the “wu kuai” part, and pointed at the computer screen.

“Budong,” I also repeated. I figured she was telling me to give her Y5 to pay for more time, but I wouldn’t be staying so tried to tell her I was leaving. “Shi fen, wo qu.” I said this hoping it meant that I would go in ten minutes. I do admit that this could mean, “I don’t know the capital of Nigeria”, but I was pretty sure I was correct.

She responded by yelling at me, tapping the screen, saying the “wu kuai” thing again and stopped me from writing and sending emails.

“Budong,” I said again.

“Budong,” she snarled, her eyes bulging out of her head as her nose wrinkled up and her top lip curled off to one side. “Budong, budong, budong.” By now, my time left on the net was around six minutes. We had gained the attention of everyone frequenting the place and I felt like hiding under the desk.

“I’m going in six minutes,” I reiterated in both English and Mandarin, hopefully. I was starting to get irritated which complemented the confusion I was suffering.

She responded by pulling my chair away from the computer desk, getting in my way and yelling the “wu kuai” thing again. She started going right off, yelling at the top of her lungs, and I couldn’t understand a word.

“Budong,” I stammered incredulously. She threw her hands up in despair, showing her anger and irritation, but thought twice before giving up completely.

“Wu kuai,” she said again and said words I didn’t know. She spoke slowly and loudly, great lot of help that it was. With only four minutes to go on my prepaid log-on, I was could feel blood rushing to my head. She continued pointing at the screen and saying something I didn’t understand, demanding Y5 from me after I had already paid for my hour. I’d even bought an overpriced bottle of lemonade from them.

I sat there chewing teeth for a moment while she kept yelling. When the dialogue box popped up to say I only had two minutes left before being automatically logged off, I hit boiling point.

“Get out of my face, you fuckin’ bitch,” I yelled in English. If I could say it in Mandarin I think I would have. “I’m leaving! I’m leaving!” I pointed at the door saying in Mandarin that I would go. I logged off everything, stood up and pulled a Y5 note from my pocket, walked over to the rubbish bin and shaped to lob it in. I stood there for a moment, looking at the people around the room and then into the eyes of the stunned lady who had been yelling at me moments before. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll get a nice ice cream for Y5.

Walking back to the hotel, I was irate. I hadn’t showered in days and all my clothes stank. I was in a city in which all I could find was a massive shopping hell and I’d paid for a luxury bus to get here and got on a shit-can box with wheels instead.

Nobody understood me and I didn’t understand anyone, and I was getting sick of it. After the situation I had just been in, on top of the things that had happened in the previous few days, I felt useless again. I felt stupid, unprepared, and out of my depth. I felt like I had wasted my time coming to this city that was clearly not my scene. And I tried to draw differences in this place from any other that I had been to in China. The more I thought about it, the more the cities and places merged into one big shopping spree. It must’ve been me.

Why I was testing myself, and what I had to prove, I didn’t know. If I was trying to be brave, I must’ve been failing. It dawned on me that it was completely stupid to traipse around China trying to prove myself when I didn’t know what I was trying to prove. As I ate my ice cream, I admitted to myself that I was sick of the place.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I had decided I didn’t want to be in China anymore. This was only cemented further in my heart when I tried the shower again.

The next morning, there was still no hot water. I packed and went to the front desk to demand hot water or they would lose my business. It was pretty obvious they were either incompetent or stringing me along, but most likely it was both.

They told me 7PM that night, which I laughed at and demanded my bond back. They found this rude, but I was beyond caring about breaking social taboos. Saving face could go to hell. Once the money was in my wallet, I walked back to the bus station.

“Get me the fuck out of this shit-hole of a city,” I said to the ticket counter lady, who looked perplexed, so I corrected myself. “One ticket to Changchun?” She understood that.

On the road headed south, my mind was stuck on all the annoying things Chinese people did. They pushed in line for train tickets and endlessly tried to sell things even though I made it clear I wasn’t interested. One day, a man tried to hijack a taxi from Five-foot and I as we put our bags in the boot after lining up for twenty minutes. After we both yelled at him, he smiled and apologised as if he didn’t realise what he was doing.

I would walk along a narrow footpath between a bicycle parking area and a building. A cyclist would pass by then stop on the footpath directly in front of me, blocking the path while he or she found a park for the bicycle. I would be stopped in my tracks with no way to get past. Why he or she chose to pass me if they would block my way a second or two later wasn’t an issue to them as any thought of me never entered their heads. This wasn’t just a one off example but a regular occurrence.

If I voiced my irritation, they would smile and apologise, nodding as if they understood the error in their ways but I could tell they were only doing so to avoid any great conflict. Saving face. After a while, my instant reaction became to swear at them and push past, making sure they knew I wasn’t expecting nor accepting an apology.

The thing I was most irritated by was the smile and apology. I could tell these people didn’t give a rat’s ass about what they did. They only did so to avoid being seen as completely bad. I don’t recall any sincere apologies in one of those instances. That insincerity was what irritated me.

As the bus continued to Changchun, I was stewing big-time.

22. Defence: clap, clap

2007-02-07T09:14:00.000-08:00

The major motorways north bisected hills covered near-continuously in wheat crops moving in waves up and down the slopes as the stalks blew in the breeze. Under the big blue sky, with not a hint of white cloud or pollution, the flowing green ocean of plant life made the lack of rapid travel more bearable, although as the bus crawled along, other passengers complained at the speed, or lack thereof.

The driver was continuously on his mobile phone talking about an American on board, which I figured was in reference to me and I was wondering what was going on. The modern bus, similar to the one I had travelled to Shenyang on, was struggling for no apparent reason. The driver slowed down and began calling people on his mobile about a “Meiguo ren”, that is American person. I considered the possibility someone may be waiting for me at the bus station in Jilin.

We finally got to Jilin and when the bus stopped out the back of the station, I was weary of any arrival party organised by the driver so asked him where to go. He pointed into the station building so I walked out the driveway in the opposite direction, ignoring his protests.

A procession of cheap hotels near the train and bus stations were easy pickings for a cheap bed and, having taken care of somewhere to sleep, I ventured to the main shopping precinct for some lunch and dinner.

The hotel owner told me how to get to the main shopping area, a good place to find restaurants and out-door dining establishments, such as, charcoal barbeque stalls. The walk there was a mixture of mad-cap crossing of busy streets, watching for random cyclists and motorbikes out of control and long waits for the pedestrian lights at major intersections, which still did not guarantee anyone’s safety.

I passed a monkey “trainer” putting on a street show, which consisted of a guy with several chained monkeys hitting them until they did what he said. The crowds didn’t clap or boo, they just watched. A couple of cops stood nearby, unfazed despite this form of animal cruelty being illegal. Obviously they had bigger issues to police, like the traffic. Well, there must be something they police.

Jilin smelt odd, like a mixture of dirt from the dusty roads and streets, foods of all different kinds, such as barbequed meat and boiled fish, and freshly cut steel from all the construction work happening everywhere. Amongst the shopping and restaurant areas, steel beams were being cut and carried with little regard to shopper safety.

I got a simple rice and meat meal and went for a walk past the outdoor restaurants, surrounded by charcoal barbeques, woks and frying pans, boiling pots and chillers filled with drinks. On the way back to the hotel, I walked through a street that doubled as a livestock market as the day turned to night, chickens in abundant supply housed in tiny cages.

The next day, I was sitting in McDonalds watching advertisements for McDonalds on the televisions situated around the walls. A man sitting at the table beside me turned, reached back in his throat for a fresh hunk of saliva and spat at my feet. I was unsure whether I should feel insulted but he simply turned around to his disinterested girlfriend and acted completely oblivious. I’d had spit land at my feet often enough to make me think people meant something by it, but whether it was meant as an insult or not I didn’t bother finding out. On this occasion, I laughed and left before contracting something contagious.

I went for a wander south through the shopping areas and arrived at the Songhua River, where I crossed to the southern side to get to Century Square. Many young people roller-skated and roller-bladed around the large fountain and museum structure in the centre. There weren’t enough people falling over for me to fit in, so I declined the skate-hire touts. I couldn’t think of a Mandarin translation for “uncoordinated”.

Back on the northern side of the river, I walked east through a park full of old men flying kites and older men exercising. Another bridge connecting to the southern side of the river doubled as a roof for basketball and tennis courts and an outdoor public gym. There were maybe upwards of fifty young men playing a number of basketball games while others exercised on the pseudo-weight machines. While watching the mixture of sporting talent and concentrated aggression, I took out my map to find the best way back to the hotel.

A young man from the basketball courts approached and tried to speak to me in very poor English, to which I responded in very poor Mandarin. Maybe because we couldn’t really communicate with one another I was invited over to the courts to play basketball with his friends. I tried to tell them that I suck, but couldn’t refuse the ass kicking they offered.

He introduced me as a New Zealand person and that I think Jilin is very good. This was all I had managed to say in Mandarin, which led to laughs from most of the men on the court. I felt embarrassed straight away. Soon enough, I was called onto the court for a game and told “Defence” repetitively.

I ran around the court like a headless chicken pretending I knew what I was doing but was comprehensively outplayed by everyone. The young men sunk basket after basket over my head and all I could do was watch. I gave up heaps of fouls and when given opportunities to shoot, and I mean given, I missed every time.

Language, I came to understand, is such a limited medium. The physical world needed no explanation though as, yes, even though I couldn’t tell them, they now knew that I suck.

“Defence,” clap, clap. “Defence,” clap, clap. They all joined in, pointing at me and clapping, trying to urge me into a greater performance. I laughed at the thought of launching my shoulder into someone’s gut and spear-tackling him into the concrete floor.

After embarrassing myself and my country (I’m unsure how clear it is that I suck at basketball quite badly), my team walked off the court and sat nearby where a conversation ensued, employing my dictionary and guidebook phrases. We spent maybe fifteen minutes trying to decipher one another’s comments, a crowd of ten or more people gathering around. We all struggled until Jiandong turned up.

He introduced himself in well-spoken English and introduced his brother Chong Ke, who had invited me to play basketball, and the others in the team. We discussed football and basketball and I tried to introduce them to rugby, but they had seen a game and felt it wasn’t for them. Too violent, Jiandong said. Chong Ke was formerly in the army and had become a guitarist and DJ hoping to make it big in Beijing or Suzhou. Jiandong, a few years younger, studied English at middle school and was readying himself to study English and economics at university.

“Do you all play basketball here often?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “In summer, we’re here every day.” It was no wonder I was humbled only a few minutes earlier.

“What do you do at night time?” I asked.

“We watch television and play computer games.”

“Do you go for walks by the river?” Everywhere I’d been, people walked by a lake or river after sunset, and I figured the Songhua River would attract people each night just the same.

“No,” he said. “Old people do that. Young people watch television.”

It was late afternoon and Jiandong asked me if I would like to join them for dinner, so I accepted.

I was feeling a little suspicious of the two of them as it felt odd to be approached by a complete stranger like this, but I wouldn’t have picked them as having sinister plans in mind. They were playing basketball with their friends and I walked past them, whereas, those who target tourists tend to hang out at bus and train stations and hotels. I chose to trust them. As we left the courts, a friend of theirs gave me a bottle of Pepsi saying, with translation from Jiandong, that he had met two foreigners today. One had thrown a ball into his face and the other had talked to him. I couldn’t recall if my ball passes had inadvertently hit his nose, but I knew I’d talked to him. I accepted the bottle graciously, I hope, remembering to nod and save it for later, which is how one should accept gifts from Chinese people. Opening the bottle immediately would make me look greedy. We crossed the road and Jiandong and Chong Ke stopped a taxi for us.

The taxi took us to the opposite side of town, maybe twenty minutes walk from my hotel, and Chong Ke led us off the main road across some train tracks and down an unkempt street lined with small workshops and piles of hardware outside. Rubbish filled potholes and black puddles along the ripped up asphalt. His father’s welding business, it turned out, was located in one of the workshops and we had come to visit him. I wondered if Chong Ke was asking for money from his father so he could feed us all. I hoped not as the money in my wallet began to burn a hole in my pocket.

“This street,” Jiandong told me, “was very new ten years ago.”

“Really?” I replied. “Why does it not look good now?”

“Because of the rubber factory that moved in,” he said, pointing at the out-of-place monstrous building amongst the ramshackle buildings directly behind us. “Since the factory began operating, the trucks rip up the road and when they spill and drop rubbish, nobody cleans it up.” According to Jiandong, the government stopped bothering with the roads upkeep.

Jiandong also said that he and Chong Ke aren’t brothers in the western sense of the word, but cousins. In one child China, they were raised as, and literally refer to one another as brothers. Chong Ke’s sister lived in New Zealand but not Jiandong’s.

We began walking back into town and were now talking about politics, or more specifically, China, Taiwan, and the USA.

“Taiwan is really part of China,” Jiandong told me matter-of-factly. “And the USA has stopped China from being able to rule over our country. The USA also attacked Iraq and Vietnam with no real reason. They are a very bad country.”

I could have argued the point but confronting Chinese people with views from foreign lands often provoked angry or absolutely bewildered responses. Often, when challenged, Chinese people wouldn’t be able to comprehend the idea that what the government has said could be incorrect. I found myself in a situation where, in the past, I would just say whatever was on my mind but this time I didn’t want to press too hard. These guys were taking me out for dinner and being very welcoming to me.

“You’re correct that a lot of people in the world think the USA were wrong to attack Iraq,” I began, “but to say that the USA is a bad country because of that would forget all the good they have done in the world too. The USA has done many good and many bad things and the New Zealand government has done many good and many bad things. Also, the Chinese government has done many good and many bad things. I don’t think you can call any of these countries good or bad as they are capable of both.”

And Jiandong was taken-aback. I don’t think he knew how to respond. Maybe I had pressed him too far and maybe I had bored him to tears. I couldn’t tell.

Chong Ke led us to a barbeque restaurant and once seated, I was asked what I would like to eat so invited Chong Ke and Jiandong to order for us. Our meat skewers and spicy vegetables arrived after a short wait. The meat was nothing more than gristle and fat but I didn’t want to be rude by not eating it. Once I had plastered it in the spicy powders placed in front of me, it was more appetising.

Something white and skewered was thrust in my direction and upon trying it, I didn’t recognise the taste.

“What is this?” I asked Jiandong.

“I think you call it Squirrel,” I thought he said.

Upon noting the look of consternation on my face, he elaborated.

“They have eight arms and live in the sea.”

“Ah, squid,” I replied, breathing a sigh of relief. Then again, squirrel kebabs may not be so bad.

Once we’d finished eating, they asked me if the meal was, in their words, “good enough”.

“Yes, thank you very much,” I said. “I really appreciate you both bringing me here. I don’t know how to order this kind of food and you both helping me has been great.”

The bill arrived and I wanted to pay it but Chong Ke wouldn’t let me. I was a rich man compared to these guys and they were not interested in me paying for our meal. I had mixed feelings about accepting their welcome and hospitality as I felt I may never be in a position to offer anything in return.

They decided to walk me back to my hotel, Chong Ke growing angry when he heard how much I was paying for my room.

“If you are going to stay for another day,” Jiandong said, “we will argue to get you a fairer price.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’m happy with my room.”

“Well, we’re scared that you will be tricked out of your money. Many people in China target foreign travellers who don’t know better. ” I couldn’t agree more, but I didn’t want them to help me.

“I understand and you’re correct. I have been targeted and I have been tricked. But that’s something I can only avoid by learning things for myself.”

They nodded and laughed. I think they expected me to be ripped off at every turn, a realistic expectation.

We stood outside my hotel and Jiandong and Chong Ke said their farewells. They spoke to the hotel manager who couldn’t believe I didn’t understand much Mandarin.

“She doesn’t know why you would travel around China if you don’t know the language,” Jiandong said.

“Neither do I,” I laughed. “I suppose I want to see more of the world and meet people from as many places as possible. I don’t want language difficulties to stop me.”

And then Jiandong and Chong Ke walked away. I struggled to say any more than “thank you” to both of them. I couldn’t think of the words to explain how I was feeling. I wished them luck in the future and walked back into my room. I switched on television and, as no hot water was available in the communal showers up the corridor, I washed myself with cold water from the hand basin.

I was pissed off with myself at the end of the night. I finally felt safe not when we were sitting at dinner nor during any discussion, but when I had got to my room. I’d been paranoid about these guys’ intentions the whole time, just like I was with the bus driver the day before. Once alone, I really did feel by myself. I was hiding again. Maybe I was hiding during our dinner conversation.

21. A street of tea

2007-02-07T09:08:00.001-08:00

The next day, rain was pouring down while I caught a lavish bus, with recliner seats and heaps of legroom, making the three-hour journey from Dandong to Shenyang. The roads took me back in the direction the train had travelled the morning before, passing Fengcheng via a two lane wide motorway that ran through rolling hills and mountainous terrain. The road was elevated above gorges and rivers, villages and crops. Karaoke was again an option, again lacking a microphone, which was starting to even get on my nerves. I could’ve asked, I suppose.

The downpour became heavier throughout the journey and ten to twenty metres below the roads, rivers swelled and burst their banks, running into the crop land and flowed ever closer to inhabited towns and solitary homes. The brown of the water and homes offset the green of the trees, plants and crops, and stretching above for mile upon mile, the road that the bus was travelling on. As the bus continued rolling on, breathtaking scenery and forces of nature combined to present a beautiful yet harrowingly fragile human existence below.

We left the mountains, the rain petered out, and the lush rolling hillside became flat plains of industrial factories that grew into bustling city streets littered with traffic congestion, people, shopping arcades and litter. The bus arrived at the station and as the doors opened welcoming me to Shenyang, I filed out with my fellow passengers, the station surrounded by modern skyscrapers and burgeoning shopping malls.

I collected my backpack and headed for the exit gate. Puddles that had formed on the uneven paving were quickly evaporating under the heat of the now powerful sun. Obligatory sales people offered drinks, fruit, hotels and girls.

A woman outside the station invited me to view some rooms so I followed her into the back alleys nearby.

The first room she showed me to looked fine and wasn’t too expensive, but when I sat on the bed it was little more than a bed-dressed wooden slab. She glowed at the wonder and joy that was the room until I said I didn’t want it and asked for something else, knocking on the bed to say that it was too hard.

Glowing even more, she showed me to a plush, beautiful room upstairs. The price was Y200, which was too much for me, and when I tried the bed, it again was like a desk with a duvet over the top. I laughed, knocked on the bed again, and said no. She tried bargaining but I didn’t bother.

She followed me all the way to another hotel situated to the south of the train station and began abusing either me, the hotel I was walking in to, or both. I ignored her and left her at the door.

After the guided tour of the busy hotels disgusting communal toilet and bathroom facilities, I decided to not stay there and tried to leave.

On the sixth floor, I tried to take the elevator but every time one arrived from the floors above, it was full of people and with my pack on my back I wasn’t able to squash in. For five minutes, each and every elevator that stopped on its way down was full so I gave up and asked for directions to the stairs. The staff looked shocked. Obviously no one had ever used them before. They pointed down the corridor and I was on my way, leaving laughter and chatter about the American behind me.

I found out why they were laughing when I got to the bottom of the stairwell. A chain and padlock held the door fast, keeping me from the outside.

“I’m glad I’m not staying here,” I said to myself. The only exit from the higher floors seemed to be the elevator.

I began to climb back up and on the second floor I found an open door, so walked in.

The door led to a photocopying centre full of completely surprised, shocked, unbelieving faces trying to grasp the concept of a white man standing behind their service counter despite the fact I never walked in the front door.

“Where the hell did you come from?” was the question I could read on their faces.

“Ni hao,” I said to one of the shocked staff members, smiling at her as if there were nothing amiss. “Huoche zhan zai nar?” Where is the train station?

She responded by standing still, not moving a facial muscle while she caught flies. She stayed frozen until the manager intervened.

“You want train station?” he asked in English.

“Yes,” I replied, still smiling like a gimp as I turned to face him.

“Follow me.” He walked into the foyer, down a set of stairs and into the square outside right in front of the station.

“Xiexie ni,” I said, thanking him. “Zaijian.”

“Zaijian,” he replied, smiling and waving as though he was saying farewell to a guest from his home. After walking for a few minutes across the square, I turned back and there he was, still standing by his door waving like a mad man. I smiled and waved back, laughing to myself. I had just made his day.

With a western toilet and bathroom and a bed that wasn’t made of sheer timber, I couldn’t refuse the next room I saw. The young lady showing me the room spoke no English, so I conversed with her in Mandarin. Whenever I said anything, she blushed and averted her eyes, replying while she looked at the floor.

As we stood at the reception desk organising my payment, she was joined by another young lady who did the same thing. Neither of them could look at me. I never realised I was that intimidating. To be fair, I probably blushed just as much, although my sunburnt cheeks probably hid that fact.

I planned to stay one night and after paying, returned to my room for a shower. Before I had a wash, I turned on television, peeled off my clothes and instantly saw an advertisement for a New Zealand rugby match that was live the following evening. Instantly I threw on my sweat-soaked clothes, returned to reception, paid for the following night and began planning my day around seeing the game in thirty hours time.

I left the hotel the following morning, headed towards Zhongshan Square to the southwest and the roads were busy with people zooming from place to place on bikes and in cars. Parks were full of people chilling out and the square, with a huge monument in the centre, acted as a roundabout for traffic. People crowded around to take photos of the massive sculpture, and I was no different.

As I continued my saunter through the city, I saw a van versus scooter accident. It must’ve been a bad one as the ambulance blocked much of the road and traffic even slowed down a little.

People gathered around to look, circling the accident as close as they could get. Thirty people crowded the scene in the middle of the road, with more crowding around by the moment as traffic continued to wiz by. They had to get as close as possible. If there was glass casing surrounding the accident, I’m sure their noses would be pressed hard against it. I took a photo of the group of people.

As I walked away, I wondered why an accident on New Zealand streets would’ve had me much more concerned than this accident. The crowd was still growing when I ventured into a park nearby.

A large congregation of mostly old men sat around a small amphitheatre listening to a young man who offered a vocal recital. When he finished, the crowd fell into appreciative applause and I joined in.

On the way out of the park, I bought a bottle of frozen water from a street vendor and instantly kicked myself for having done so. The cap was partially melted onto the bottle suggesting the guy had filled an empty bottle with tap water and fused the cap back on with a lighter. As evidence, the water tasted disgusting.

Outside the park, where I left the nearly full bottle of water in a rubbish bin, tealeaf vendors had taken over a street. Stretching up and down the alleyway, table after table was packed with buckets of varieties of tea. I walked along looking throughout the containers, each marked differently. Not being a tea lover, I could think of a dozen people who would be in heaven on that street. The tea market stretched for one hundred metres with each vendor packing six or seven containers full of leaves onto their bowing trestle tables while only a few customers perused their wares.

I wasted some time reading while I waited for the evening’s entertainment, then picked up some junk food from the large shopping centre near the hotel and settled in to watch the rugby. And New Zealand lost.

20. Am I strong?

2007-02-07T09:00:00.000-08:00

After a days rest, I organised my travel north, waiting a few days in Beijing with Five-foot.

In Wangfujing, central Beijing, a busy shopping precinct stretches for maybe a kilometre. Shops and bars, malls and restaurants are seen and heard by the thousands of people congregating there at any time of the day. I was sitting on the edge of a small garden drinking a bottle of iced tea while Five-foot did some suit shopping. With the many people walking by, and with the amount of noise and sell, sell, sell, it wasn’t really a place to relax.

Most people in the central city tried to pretend to not be interested in me but gave away signs to the contrary by staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. Two girls aged between ten and fourteen approached me.

“Where are you from?” the older one asked in well-spoken English.

“I’m from New Zealand.”

“Do you like China?”

“Yes, very much,” I lied.

“Why?”

“Um,” I said, thinking hard, “people here are very polite and helpful.”

“Have you been to Hangzhou?”

“Yes, I was there last week,” I said, smiling.

“We are from Hangzhou. Did you like Hangzhou?”

“Yes, it is a beautiful place.”

“Do you speak any Chinese?”

“Yidiar,” I said, which was meant to mean “a little,” but they looked at me with absolute confusion.

“You can speak English,” one of the girls said, meaning that I can’t speak Chinese.

“We will teach you some Chinese,” they said. Soon, they were increasing my Mandarin vocabulary with words such as flower, turtle, butterfly and shop.

“Now I’m going to test you,” one of the girls said. After a test result of 60%, I was pretty content, but neither of the girls seemed impressed. They said goodbye, and ran back to their parents, leaving me to try to take in the conversation that I had just been a part of.

Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t really a willing participant but a bystander, with things happening at me, not with me. My mind didn’t seem filled with any thought at all, and I felt blank. Here I was, having a cultural experience with strangers that, when I set out travelling, I had hoped would happen, yet I was so distant, it could’ve been an out of body experience.

Five-foot interrupted my introspection and we returned to his place in Wudaokou.

The view out Five-foot’s window took in the communal square of the housing estate he lived on. At 5PM each afternoon, kids and mothers would gather around the circular fountain that switched on for thirty minutes, like clockwork every day. The children would hover above the water-shoots awaiting the water flow and mothers would sit and chat in the shade. Once the water-shoots switched on, the kids were soon running around screaming and playing and the parents, too, laughed and enjoyed the fountain antics. Thirty minutes later, the water switched off abruptly, the kids disappeared and the mothers stuck around to continue their gossip.

After a few days of eating and watching DVDs, I grunted a farewell to Five-foot. He was headed home to New Zealand, his Mandarin studies complete, while I was going north. I was unsure how I would get on without him considering he’d done most of the talking for the weeks we’d travelled together, but it felt right to be doing my own thing. I was unsure if it was a test I was choosing, but it felt like one. I felt as though I was trying to prove to myself how much I didn’t need to hide. I wasn’t running anymore, I was merely looking around. That’s what I kept telling myself, at any rate.

I was on an overnight train to Dandong, a city on the border of China and North Korea, and hadn’t spoken to anyone at all. The train left Beijing in the late afternoon so I was soon on my bunk reading and looking out the window from time to time. Midnight arrived before sleep did, and a young woman of maybe twenty years of age lying on the bunk opposite noticed I was still awake.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. The train lines serviced the east coast towns north of Beijing, but I wasn’t sure which towns we were nearest to.

“Where are you from,” she asked.

“New Zealand.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Are you strong?”

“Sorry?” I said, not sure if I had heard her correctly.

“Are you strong?” she repeated.

“No, I’m not very strong at all,” I said, not sure if that was what she had actually meant to ask.

“Why do you not sleep?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you not sleep?”

And she couldn’t answer. It seemed her vocabulary was spent. She stammered a little, smiled and seemed to want to continue the conversation but didn’t know how.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No,” I said, smiling.

She climbed down, stepped into the dark corridor taking a bag full of dried fruit. She was soon passing me dried apricots and asking me if I liked them.

“Yes, they’re very nice,” I said, eating out of duty. She smiled and continued eating while sitting by the window.

She told me her name is Xiao Pang, which I thought translated into Little Fatty, but I couldn’t see why she’d be called fat. I suppose she had a more shapely figure than the average Chinese girl, but to call her fat was just wrong. In fact, she was notably attractive to me.

She stood up from the small table and rubbed my face full of stubble with her hand. “I like,” she said, looking into my eyes. I smiled. And then she started rubbing her hands on my arms.

“I like,” she said more intensely than before, looking deeply into my eyes. So Xiao Pang liked my hairy arms and face. My reaction was a mixture of appreciation, although my skin kind of crawled. I knew she meant well, maybe extremely well, but it was a little creepy.

Imagine lying on a bunk bed on a packed train and in the dead of the night an attractive young stranger who doesn’t speak much English starts coming on to you? Okay, it doesn’t sound that creepy at all but I think the lack of ability to express our thoughts to one another through language made her advances extremely simple. I didn’t really know how to react.

I had no intentions outside of sex and didn’t want to give her the wrong idea about wanting a girlfriend so instantly shied away from her. Many women in China see marriage to foreign men as a means of escape to another life, so getting a date is relatively easy for a European looking male. It also made the women look pretty desperate and put up with some shocking treatment from the men. That was something I preferred to leave to others.

She climbed back on to her bunk and soon, the night was filled with the sounds of the train rattling along the tracks while I wondered what might’ve been.

My mind went back to a few women I’d treated poorly in New Zealand. I could’ve been ignoring women because I didn’t want the specific hassles that each one seemed to offer. My inability to communicate very well with Xiao Pang gave me an excuse to avoid her interest, and I’d often found excuses to avoid the issues in relationships I’d been in.

I resisted the urge to get involved with Xiao Pang due mostly, to be honest, to her desperation being a little too off-putting. I’d like to think this proves me to be gentlemanly, but I wasn’t thinking gentlemanly thoughts at the time. The next morning, I was kicking myself for passing up what I thought was a fantastic offer. The only other similar invitations I received while in China tended to be in the form of trade and commerce.

Xiao Pang disembarked at the last stop before Dandong, a city called Fengcheng, surrounded by hills and mountains of deep green trees and field after field of crops. The city looked like it either needed a revamp or to be levelled. The buildings were decaying and falling apart, broken windows needed replacing and roads went uncared for. Central Shanghai and Beijing would never suffer such ignominy again.

As the train began to pick up speed, we passed the mother of all four-wheel-drive vehicle-parking areas. For maybe ten to fifteen seconds, all to be seen through the window was white, blue, red, silver and black four-wheel-drives parked outside what I guessed was an assembly plant: a large metallic, shiny, new building. The thousands upon thousands of brand new vehicles awaiting shipment from this formerly remote part of the world filled an entirely concreted plateau on the hillside maybe fifty metres from where the train passed. And that made me laugh.

Just outside a town only a few years from absolute ruin, a factory produces vehicles for the roads of rich New Zealand suburbs like Fendalton, Khandallah, and Ponsnobby. I didn’t bother guessing where the people that built them live.

The weather was refreshingly cool in early morning Dandong when the train arrived at 8AM. The temperature was in the low-twenties, hardly cold but not stifling at all. Puddles filled the uneven platform of the city’s station, leaving narrow strips of dry concrete for the hundreds of disembarking passengers to safely tow their trolley-suitcases towards the exit. Jostling for the exit with the usual rugby scrum was thereby exacerbated and with my pack being pushed constantly, I quickly tired of nearly being thrown, inadvertently or not, into the puddles. Screw it, I figured, and stepped out into the middle of the two-inch deep warm, stagnant water, splashing my way to the exit while onlookers didn’t try to hide their amusement.

Mao greeted travellers to the square outside as his likeness hail-waved towards the exit gates. Holy Night played on the large sound-system and a giant screen displayed advertisements on the wall of the station. I checked my internal calendar, and it was only August. Christmas was starting earlier every year. I headed east towards the hotels and river, passing through the built up city and soon reached the waterside looking at North Korea only one hundred metres away.

All I could see was plant life, a few small buildings and, in the distance, smoke billowing from an industrial sized chimney. Looking north and south, there was little else to note, apart from the building shells of a small village, box-like grey concrete building skeletons the only sign of human existence, with no inhabitants discernable. I hadn’t looked for a room and the time was nearing 9AM so I walked along the riverside looking for a cheap hotel.

Struggling to find anything, even after asking numerous people, shop owners, and even braving confronting the police, I stopped a taxi.

“Do you know a cheap hotel?” I asked in my best Chinese, surprising myself.

“Yeah, get in,” he replied in Chinese, and before I could ask him where it was, he stopped near the train station and walked me into a hotel I had walked past twice.

I paid and thanked him and was shown to a flea infested closet with a shared bathroom and toilet, no air conditioning, and continuous street noise as cars zoomed by honking their horns.

“I’ll take it,” I said, the world’s biggest grin plastered on my face.

An hour later, I was on the bus to Hushan headed towards Tiger Mountain and the Great Wall. Before the bus left the city the driver stopped at the side of the road to pick up freight packages, which were duly dumped in the aisle. People on bikes and scooters delivered the packages to bus stops and street corners. At one stop, a lady was selling fried corncobs so windows were opened and bargaining began between the fryer and passengers. Corn was passed throughout the bus while money flowed out.

My own bargaining with the corn lady was great entertainment for everyone nearby. She wanted Y5 from me but everyone else had paid Y1. I told her I wouldn’t pay more than Y1. She refused, citing a reason I didn’t understand, and turned her head away from the bus window I hung out of, which delighted the crowd. As soon as I offered Y2, she agreed and the rest of the bus laughed, as did the crowd that had now gathered around us outside. I was slightly embarrassed, both for the argument and for paying twice as much as everyone else, but at least breakfast tasted good.

The bus left the city heading north and travelled through the countryside. With the river border to the east, hills to the west were covered in crops and untamed natural forest. Forty-five minutes after leaving Dandong, the Wall was in view and when the bus stopped, a finger was pointed at me and I was told to get off. I thanked the lady that pointed at me and she said something about Americans to the other passengers. As the bus departed I heard laughter throughout.

I strolled down a small path to a gate surrounded by free roaming chickens. I had to take a photograph while visiting the Great Wall with free-range chickens running around.

From the top of the Great Wall on Tiger Mountain, which is more of a hillock than a mountain, there are views far and wide into North Korea. I couldn’t see much other than farmland, mountains to the south-east, and a few people tending to their crops. A town with grey concrete buildings could be seen in the distance, no movement visible. No great insights into life in the Axis of Evil could be made from the Wall’s vantage point.

Looking from north to south, I could see small buildings hidden in the vegetation, each the size of a small garden shed. Apparently this is where the gun-toting North Korean border guards live and roam from day and night. Try crossing the river border and they’ll pop up from behind a shrub with rifle in hand to say “Hi”.

I ticked that box on the perilous climb down and was happy with my day out, and it was still early afternoon.

I had a semi-conversation with a couple tending to their garden by the bus stop, telling them I was from New Zealand and asking if they were too busy for a photograph. As they posed, smiling and laughing while I counted down to the photo, a taxi pulled up to offer me a ride.

“How much to Dandong?” I asked in Chinese.

“Y10,” he said, which was more expensive than the bus but I figured I could afford it. With encouragement from the people tending their garden I got in and we were off. He drove like a madman, as I expected.

After a minute, he leant down and turned his meter on, which instantly read Y6, which I thought was odd. As the meter wound up to Y10, and we were nowhere near Dandong, he turned off the main road away from the river.

“Ni qu nar?” I asked him. “Where are you going?”

“Hen kuai,” was all I understood of his reply, which means “very fast.” I took this to mean he was saying this was a short cut.

“Dandong, Y10 ma?” I asked trying to figure out if I was still going to be charged Y10 as the meter now read Y15.

“Shi, shi, shi,” he said, in a reassuring tone, either meaning, “It is, it is, it is,” or “Ten, ten, ten.” It could’ve meant anything, but the word “shi” spoken with a certain tone means “is”, and with another tone means the number ten. I took from his tone, that I was fine so I relaxed a little, although I was still wondering where we were going.

We came to a small town where he stopped for no apparent reason other than to talk to a local. Within a minute he noticed I was staring daggers at him so his foot hit the accelerator again and we continued towards the city. The meter now read Y25 and I was getting worried about this guy.

The taxi climbed a small hill and once on the crest, Dandong’s tall buildings and river to the east were in view. He turned onto the esplanade road at the northern end of the city that runs beside the river and I breathed a sigh of relief as I could see, in the distance, the border crossing bridge near the train station. I was back in the city but now the meter read more than Y30. I ordered him to stop the taxi.

“I’ll walk from here, thanks,” I told him, and handed him Y10 to his dismay.

“Y35,” he said, grabbing my arm tightly, angrily yelling something else at me.

“At the Great Wall,” I said in Chinese, “you said Y10 to Dandong.”

He replied with laughter, but the grip on my arm didn’t ease, and he reiterated the Y35 charge. He knew he’d tricked me. I seethed for a moment, but figured I could bargain with him.

“Wo gei ni Y20,” I said to him, meaning I’d give him Y20, which he was shocked and disgusted by.

While he thought about it, I removed his hand from my arm and placed it on his chest forcefully. A white mark was left on my forearm that transitioned to red as blood began to flow back to the area. Looking him in the eye, I pulled out the other Y10 and opened my door. Seeing this, he grabbed my forearm again, yelling something in my ear.

I quickly dropped the Y10 on the floor and grabbed his hand again, this time having to rip at the fingers to break his grip. He was a strong man, but as I placed his hand on his chest again, his eyes opened in shock. Maybe he wasn’t expecting me to break his grip so easily, or surprised that I wasn’t letting him bully me.

He gave up, and I backed out the door checking for my wallet, camera, and passport pouch. I didn’t want to leave without myself intact. He was looking pretty angry but scared too. I felt my heart beginning to pound and blood started pumping through my temples like a hydroelectric dam on overdrive.

“Zaijian,” I said, not bothering to smile.

“Zaijian,” he replied, picking the money up, also not smiling.

I crossed the street in front of his parked taxi and we continued our locked eye contact until I got to the footpath on the other side. I had to look away to check my footing, and as I looked back he spun the car around and sped back in the direction we had come from.

From the esplanade I watched people fishing from boats in the river while others swam the early afternoon away. Men chose Speedos as swimming garb as per usual, although a positive for the future, some young boys were wearing board-shorts.

A few cruise boat operations took people as close to North Korean soil as they could without touching the other side of the river for fear of being shot at. Photographers offered me the opportunity of a photo taken at the Sino-North Korean border wearing traditional Korean garb, which I declined.

After dinner I returned to the riverside. The mist obscured most of the night’s sights but the old bridge was illuminated in lights, reaching out and ending abruptly halfway across the river. Having been accidentally bombed by the USA in the 1950’s, it now is a bridge to nowhere. The new bridge now in operation was not viewable. With the mist and the darkness, there were no lights on it maybe as protection from any accidental bombardment plans in fruition.

I hadn’t seen any security forces at all. Having expected a strong military presence I was slightly surprised there was nothing to be seen during the day that suggested this was little more than a city nestled by a river with farmland on the far side, rather than having a fascist dictatorship governing within a stones throw.

As I kept walking, I could see war-boats halfway across the river, positioned every thirty to fifty metres north and south, guarding the border. Thinking about it, there was a presence during the day too, although not to the same extent as only a few boats were around. I just hadn’t taken any notice of it. Maybe I was distracted, waiting for the taxi driver’s union to turn up and “prosecute” me.

19. A redistribution of wealth

2007-02-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

After passing several pristine housing estates in the countryside, two hours after leaving Shanghai, we arrived in Hangzhou. Touts lined the train station’s exit gate trying to get our attention by waving photos of hotel rooms and en suites. We walked by and Five-foot led the way to the taxi stand nearby.

The six-lane roads took us through the central city high-rise buildings of Hangzhou on our way to the West Lake, the tourist draw-card of the city. We arrived at an alleyway surrounded by nightclubs, the driver pointing at the sign leading to a hostel at the far end. We walked down the shingle driveway, interrupting builders who had metal and wood material spread out on the ground while they continued working on the buildings next door.

The courtyard of the hostel was surrounded by trees and ponds, home to goldfish, and I left Five-foot to humble people on the Playstation Football inside while I went for a walk. The West Lake was only two minutes walk, and I took a stroll along the shore, greeting people and dodging cyclists as the need arose. The sun was going down, but the temperature was not. The lake’s water seemed to evaporate in the sunshine, hitting me like a sauna on its way up to make clouds. Water taxis cruised in and out of a small dock, taking people to the lake’s islands and far shores.

I walked through a park to a road lined with trees. Large, modern hotels, restaurants, bars and casinos were getting knocked up at every turn. One street over, however, I walked through a street suffering with potholes and unkempt buildings and shacks. Some people washed themselves out of buckets while sitting in the gutter, while others grilled food on skewers placed on tiny charcoal grills. Again, I offered greetings, but I only received stares in reply.

Before returning to the hostel, I passed several car showrooms, such as Porsche, Ferrari, Chrysler, and Mercedes. Glass shop-fronts protected the exceptionally expensive cars from the elements and salesmen dressed in immaculate suits waved to me as I went by. Seeing squalor nestled firmly within reach of extravagance was becoming familiar to me.

I returned to the hostel courtyard and bought a beer, waiting for Five-foot to lose at football. The heat was energy sapping just sitting outside having a beer, even after the sun had set. A few foreigners commandeered a stereo and played some Samba music, dancing and singing the night away.

We took a water taxi tour to the islands situated in the centre of the Lake the next day. Each piece of land accommodated temples, defunct bathing pools filled with lily pads, and tourist shops. Tour guides and groups took over much of the limited space although on the larger islands there was still enough room to roam and relax.

We tagged along behind a group following the noise of a megaphone on bridges above the bathing pools. Some of the Chinese tourists tossed money into the water, I guessed to make a wish or as an offering to something. With the small currency notes and coins sitting on top of the numerous lily pads, I wasn’t shocked when a man with a scoop net promptly redistributed the wealth to himself. It was amusing to see him do this in broad daylight as the next tour group lined up behind us to toss more money in.

Our water taxi tour left us at the opposite side of the lake, so we walked back to the hostel in sauna-like heat. The streets were lined with trees, cafés, restaurants and bars setting up for the evening’s business. Men stood in boats offering rides to us in English and Mandarin. Lily pads engulfed much of the water near the shoreline and we passed a few painters replicating the various landscapes on offer.

The next day, we went to Suzhou, only a few hours north by train. The city was smaller and dustier than Shanghai and Hangzhou, and the streets were mad with taxis, buses, trucks, cyclists and pedestrians. At a restaurant near the hostel we got a room at, we began playing table rugby, other patrons’ looking on intently, as we waited for our dinner. The rules of table rugby are pretty simple: place a coin flat on a table then flick it three times to your opponent’s side and if it’s resting over the table’s edge, you try to flick it in the air and catch it with the same hand. To make a conversion, you spin the coin on the table, try to catch it between your thumbs then project it between your opponent’s thumbs’ held like the letter “H”.

After lunch was finally served, and we’d lost a couple of coins to the tables around us, we went to the Garden of the Master Nets. A nice stroll, the garden was situated in a small, confined compound of many rooms, housing rock gardens, a large pond, and a man playing a guitar. Also found there were landscape paintings for sale.

We left and returned to the hostel to play more rugby. The next morning, Five-foot and I only needed to look at each other to agree that the city was boring us.

After I lost yet another game of rugby while waiting for breakfast, we decided to go to Nanjing. An hour later, we were at the train station. Five-foot lined up to purchase our tickets while I sat by a wall. As I sat on my bag, several people sat down beside me. They had been sitting with their stuff in the middle of the room, but upon seeing me leaning up against a wall, they decided to do the same.

A woman began waving a group of people over and soon I had a dozen people sitting around me, like I was offering a class. Five-foot arrived with our tickets, and I squirmed past the group and headed for the departure lounge.

Five-foot decided to buy our tickets back to Beijing once we arrived at the Nanjing station. The station was under development and our train stopped by a yet-to-be-completed building that we were directed past, walking over rubble, mud and wooden planks, and passing the touts with their hotel photograph books.

We walked up past the new building to a ticketing hall filled with people. The lines stretched nearly to the back wall, where a baggage store was run. I held the bags again, sitting on my own, while Five-foot lined up. As I sat there, several men came up to me and squatted, watching me intently. Their gaze never wavered. I said “Ni hao,” but no one offered a reply. Five-foot returned to save me for the second time in a day and we left the men who stood up to go about their business.

Between losing rugby matches to Five-foot, disappearing coins into water filled pot-plants and out windows, we went out sightseeing the next very hot, humid day. We left the comparative safety of the bar at our hostel and three buses and a twenty-minute walk later, the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre was finally in front of us. We were suffering from a temperature beyond what anyone would consider uncomfortable and everyone was searching for any shade possible, although there was little to be found at the memorial.

The massacre happened in 1937, and on that particular spot, Japanese forces murdered 30,000 people in a major act of genocide. I arrived not sure what to expect, other than a sombre memorial to the dead and maybe a poignant message for peace. Respectful mourners would make their way through the exhibits, considering the people who died, which is stock standard for these places, I thought.

I was disappointed when a few people walking around joked and laughed about whatever they thought was funny. They pointed at lists of names of the dead and laughed and jostled with each other. One guy jumped up on a wall covered in names, I assumed of the dead, earning himself applause from a section of the crowd he was with.

We were then shown to the excavation of a mass grave. Lying in the soil behind glass protection were human remains riddled with bullet and blade wounds, each death described by alarmingly detailed cards placed nearby. None of the people passing by were in any sense mourning or respectfully observing. Noses were pressed against the glass for a better look and people pointed and took photos despite the signs asking not to.

I thought it horrible to dig up the dead for any reason other than giving them a decent burial. The display served to outline a terrible event and something that should never be forgotten, but I didn’t think the bones of the dead needed to be on show.

In a time where Chinese-Japanese relations are strained, to say the least, I wondered what the motives for this place were. My thoughts leaned towards the Chinese government trying to encourage a sense of nationalism throughout a country that may lack a lot of things, but a hatred of Japan it does not. This Memorial, for one, expressed China’s plight against the Japanese in the past, something that the Chinese want to keep very much in the minds of the people.

Quite literally, I believe, the government dug up the past to serve themselves through the polarisation of the population. The country of people agreeing on their hatred of Japan is much easier to control than a country with no sense of agreement at all. For those means, they took away the dignity of the murdered people from years before. I personally found it disgusting.

The museum hall beyond the excavation sight was filled with stories from the murders, each one horrible and absorbing giving blow by blow accounts of the actions of the Japanese. Each chilling photograph and caption gave a sense of how little regard for life there was during the occupation in 1937 yet the others around me laughed and joked about it.

Whether it was a reaction to the confronting nature of the exhibits, I didn’t know, but I found it rude and disrespectful. I found a lot of that place disrespectful to the dead and not least was the actions of the people who went there. And they were Chinese. This was their history. And they didn’t seem to care about the people who died, they just hated the Japanese because of it. I left with a disconsolate feeling about Chinese people and the government, although I didn’t think any less of Japanese people. Maybe it’s due to my British ancestry and wanting to put New Zealand’s own brutal and manipulative history in the past.

As we left, Five-foot and I crossed the road to a bus stop outside the memorial, and were soon taken directly to our hostel, saving us the twenty-minute walk and three buses that we’d done foolishly earlier. I managed a smile when I finally beat Five-foot at rugby. Then he kicked my ass when we played pool.

Communication between us had reduced to little more than grunting. One of us would point at a restaurant and the other would grunt in agreement or rejection. We didn’t really talk anymore. We were like an old married couple, all topics dried up. At least we had sports.

The hill to the northeast of central Nanjing is, amongst other tourist haunts, home to the resting place of Dr Sun Yatsen, father of the modern nation of China. It’s another one of those pilgrimages that Chinese people “have” to make. Braving the sunshine and ridiculous heat the next morning, we joined the thousands of others on the hill choosing, as always, to make our own way up rather than join the many tourist groups that obligingly donned red and yellow hats and followed the flags waved by their omnipotent megaphone wielding guides.

Climbing the hill was insane as the heat sapped exponentially greater amounts of strength with each step. The forty-degree heat, a constant red-hot sun offering no mercy, had me dripping in perspiration while I poured water down my throat by the litre. The staircase stretched up the mountain from the south directly up between forest, with shrines offering intermittent spots of shade on the way. I kept muttering positive thoughts to myself, trying to get to the top and survive getting roasted alive at the same time, passing families and tourist groups by the dozen.

Finally, we got to the top, Five-foot smiling at me as if it wasn’t hard for him and we managed to crawl into the blessed shade of the mausoleum, a nice breeze flowing through to cool us off. Filing in with the masses, we stood in a circular room shaped like a dome, the outer circumference operating as a platform overlooking the centre of the room below, where a coffin carved in stone lay, shaped in Dr Sun’s image.

I wasn’t exactly excited once I got in there. I was relieved to get it over and done with, but also felt a little short changed. Apart from the view of a coffin that looked like Dr Sun, the mountains structures all seemed to be a little redundant. As we walked down the steps to the bottom of the hill to visit the other sights on the hill, I mentally ticked that box but couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

The view to the south and out to the west was great, even with the pollution haze having a strong grip on the day. Forest spread out along the hills both to the east and west and swept down to the edge of the city, which was surrounded by the remains of its ancient fortress walls. The magnificent concrete staircase led back down from the mausoleum beyond the shrines and into the trees in the distance.

I liked the natural beauty of the area, but couldn’t let go of how over-priced it seemed. The place seemed to be set up for the reaping of cash, and felt like a con job by a country that was full of them.

The Mausoleum and the mountain are considered a conjoined sacred place and maybe I should’ve felt honoured to have been allowed to visit. But people were selling tickets, hiring out tour guides, selling t-shirts, carvings and so on, on the basis of the mausoleum being there. I may have failed to be as gracious as I could, but saw few shows of honour from those who were profiting from Dr Sun’s memory.

Profiteering from those supposedly sacred shrines and monuments is something one can’t avoid all across China. It was something I didn’t know how to respond to. People have got to eat, but I wonder where most of the money really goes.

Maybe I was having a whine, just for the sake of having a whine. The place was pretty interesting but this travelling for the sake of box ticking was getting a little old.

The next day, we pottered around the city and did some DVD shopping while we waited for a train that night. It’s illegal to sell pirated DVDs in China, but if there weren’t any on display in the many roadside CD stores, all we had to do was ask for DVDs. A minute later, the staff would have a large box placed in front of us full of cheap movie discs, all of dubious quality. It was a bit of a lottery as returning them if there was a fault was not usually an option.

After dinner, we caught a taxi to the station and were taken for a joyride by the driver. He took us all over the city, while he racked the fare up over Y30. Ignoring my complaints, Five-foot tried to tell the driver we were in a rush, receiving nods and mumbled agreements in reply.

We got there just before the train left and as we got to our bunks, Five-foot told me this would be his first overnight Chinese train ride, which seemed unbelievable.

“How long have you been in China?” I grunted.

“I’ve been coming and going from Beijing for two years,” he grunted back. “How many have you been on?”

“Five?” I guessed. “How can you travel around China and not use overnight trains?”

“I just never thought about doing it,” Five-foot said.

He looked around like he felt out of place and unsure what to do with himself.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“Sleeping, reading and chatting are all allowed,” I said.

Before long, the lights were out and everyone in the carriage was quietly in bed. The air-conditioning unit was situated directly above Five-foot’s top bunk near the ceiling. The next morning, having had no sleep due to the humming above him, he said he’d never take an overnight train again.

18. Conquering the night sky

2007-02-07T08:36:00.000-08:00

Five-foot and I left Shanghai’s Pudong Airport via the extremely quick Mag-Lev train, travelling at up to 433 kilometres per hour. For the eight minutes the train travelled, I watched out the window as we flew above the city’s outskirts towards the high-rise buildings. From the train terminal we boarded a subway train for the western side of Huangpu River, Shanghai’s old shopping area. Exiting onto Henan Zhonglu, we followed a walled map in the subway station, heading what we thought was south. Within a few minutes, we were both confused, as the street signs didn’t match our little map, so went back to the subway. The compass on the walled map had north pointing down, which turned out to be the problem.

We walked to a hostel nearby, the blistering heat sapping my energy, and were given a bunk and a locker each. We headed to a restaurant nearby for lunch and then walked around Renmin Square, sitting in the shade where possible. Five-foot went for a walk while I sat and had a drink, and returned to tell me he’d found somewhere for me to buy a hat.

At an underground mall nearby, I bargained myself a floppy bucket hat similar to Karl’s, hoping I’d avoid getting burnt to a crisp constantly.

The view at night from the bar of our hostel was fantastic as we faced east, across to the Pudong side of Huangpu River. Five-foot and I had a big glass of overpriced beer each while watching the constant light show that used the canvases of the globally-recognised Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jinmao Tower, and the other high-rises around the central city.

Interspersed with other billboard announcements, one building broadcasted giant television style Coke ads starring a Taiwanese girl-band called S.H.E. who were making their mark on the Asian music scene. Lights climbing the Pearl Tower continuously changed the colour of Shanghai’s most famous skyline attraction, which looks like an inverted hypodermic needle. It looked like a spaceship straight from the set of a Flash Gordon movie all ready for takeoff.

Light pollution filled the sky, while overcast grey clouds intermittently reflected the pinks and blues from the public broadcasts. Any contemplation of stars and the moon wouldn’t lead to any such sight from here. Shanghai’s modernisation was taking upon itself the spellbinding of the people, leaving the stars to generations past.

Cruise ships and transport barges coasted up and down the calm river, blinking their own illuminations out to the world. People on board the cruises could be seen dancing, dining and drinking while the barges were less lively. Dark silhouettes watching the same light shows as us sat on piles of what could’ve been coal or rubbish.

Flashes constantly caught my eye from the footpaths on the opposite side of the river as photographers, both professional and amateur, from the Pudong vantage took in the views we sat amongst.

The Bund, on the western side of the river, is home to early twentieth century buildings constructed during the foreign control of the city. These buildings are also illuminated in the evening, although without the fanfare of the modern drama across the river.

Of the others drinking with us, a young British traveller had a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. He’d bought it from a tout on the street and liked to flip to a random page and read a little when in need of inspiration.

“If the rice crop fails, we shall plant again,” he quoted, nodding an agreement.

We all raised our glasses to that. The country certainly has sewn a metaphorical new crop of rice for themselves in the past couple of decades.

The next day, Five-foot and I went for a tour of the city via the subway to the south and west. We got lost on the way from the underground trains to the light-rail and ventured around the parks, streets and alleys of an unknown area of the city. Five-foot blamed me for the mix-up, as time and time again, whenever I said I knew where we were, we’d end up lost within a few minutes again. Finally, we got out of the scorching sunlight and made it to the elevated light-rail train station. As the train left, we could see to the west, on the central city side of the tracks, pristine high-rise estates with large communal squares full of people playing sports such as badminton, exercising, flying kites and relaxing in tree shade. To the outer-city side of the tracks, massive piles of rubble and waste surrounded old, derelict buildings in varying states of disrepair. The separation of housing standards, at least in these areas, was dramatically divided by the train tracks.

We arrived at Shanghai Train Station, a central hub where we boarded an underground train and headed for Pudong, the other side of the river. To end the day, we headed to Jinmao Tower, as standing on the platform at the top is one of the must do sightseeing ventures of Shanghai.

We exited the station, looking up to see several tall buildings surrounding us. Between the buildings was space like I hadn’t seen in most central cities. We walked to the tower past green lawns and gardens that served as breakwaters between the huge edifices reaching to the sky.

The sign at Jinmao Tower stated it was Y100 to get to the viewing platform on the eighty-eighth floor. We both noted that blue skies and sunlight were absent and the top of the building was obscured by the mixture of cloud and clogged up smoke pollution that hadn’t lifted from the city since we had arrived.

“We’re not gonna see much from up there,” Five-foot said, his nose pointed to the sky. I grunted in agreement.

“Skip it?” he asked, “or grab a beer?”

The guidebook suggested that a bar on the fifty-third floor was free to get to. The views are on sale for the price of a drink. And we thought about it for barely a moment.

The ride up in the elevator was quick as fifty-three floors in half a minute makes for a fair rate of ascent. We were led to a seat with a view of the western city reaching into the distance. Huang Pu River wound from the base of the Tower stretching to the foot of a dirt haze, smudging the city beyond and rising directly up into the heavens, a boundary for the view from the Tower’s vantage point. To the immediate west, the river dissected the central city separating the old buildings of the western shore, established during European involvement in the early 20^th century, from the developing Pudong area to the east, which includes the Tower. Along the river to the south of the older European structures, buildings had been flattened, rubble and demolish waste piled around the area in preparation for modern Shanghai’s ever-expanding set of high-rises.

A lounge act practiced over Five-foots shoulder, preparing for busier times as we were delivered two bottles of Hoegarden. The beer prices were exorbitant, to say the least. Y130 for two bottles, including a service charge, would nearly have wrecked me but for the establishment we had chosen to patron.

We had both been walking for hours in the hot, humid Shanghai summer day, carrying bags and generally sweating profusely. I felt uncomfortable and was scared that I smelt like margarine left out of the fridge too long. Five-foot comforted me by saying I shouldn’t be scared of who I am. With beer consumed and comfortable couch seats to sink ourselves into, we quietly waited for the waitress to ask us to buy another or leave.

“A tick in the box?” I asked, savouring the taste of a beer that had just cost me over twelve New Zealand dollars.

“Yeah,” Five-foot said, “close enough for me.”

The next day, Five-foot wanted to visit the Shanghai Museum in Renmin Square. I had visited quite a few museums since arriving so it wasn’t really for the exhibits but for the culture clash with the Chinese people that I went.

I don’t stand very close to the artefacts. I like to stand back, take in the whole exhibit and allow others the ability to read signs and information while I do so. This, I guess, is quite common for Kiwi’s as it is for many others in the world.

Doing so in Chinese museums invited people to stand in front of me. It was uncountable the number of times people walked in front of me while I read a sign or looked at an artefact and would stand directly in front of me. It was incredibly irritating and predictable.

Of course, my opinion was that Chinese people that do this are just rude but maybe they thought I was standing in the middle of the floor, getting in the road and being rude in my own way.

On this particular visit I got sick of people doing this, so stood as close to the displays as possible. I failed to see the benefit of it. I suppose Chinese people and myself seek different views of perspective, literally. No matter how close I stood, I still had people trying to squeeze between my nose and the glass barriers. It could’ve been a set-up. I did wonder if Five-foot was paying people to do it.

After another day in Shanghai, having a beer and reading, we left for Hangzhou, in the southeast.

17. Waiting for my wife

2007-02-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

I only managed three hours sleep as the boat docked in Yiching at 530AM and Postman Pat ushered everyone off the boat quickly. I was exhausted, having failed any great amount of rest in days, and grumpy as hell.

We boarded the prearranged bus for Wuhan and found a comfortable seat with a footrest, and I was looking forward to more sleep. Before we settled in, Pat swapped Five-foot and I to another bus due to it being closer to departure. Five-foot had a flight to catch, hence the need for speed and Pat was trying to help. Five minutes later, he swapped us back to the bus we had been on previously, only the comfortable seats were taken and I had to sit at the back with my feet on a step instead of stretched out or on a footrest. Having my feet in such an uncomfortable position, after the swapping around, I was not going to get any sleep at all and I was fuming.

I didn’t know if I could contain my absolute fury at Pat who I now wanted to hit. He was trying to help, but as far as I could tell, was incompetent and hurting more than helping. I sat in silence, stewing over my feelings and bitter about my situation. I was beyond laughing at Pat’s incompetence now, having been jerked around one last time. Maybe I had found my breaking point. Before I could hit him, and I really, really wanted to, Postman Pat walked off the bus and in the direction of the car park, where a little red van probably waited for him. I knew my opportunity to hit him was gone as I would never see him again. Not surprisingly it was a relief. I was glad to see him go. The bus left as morning sunlight burst through the clouds.

After watching crops go by for a few hours, as the roads passed through farmland, I had a sense of calmness back, and it wasn’t too difficult to bare a traffic jam on the expressway. It had been caused by an overturned truck, which was being unloaded by hand. The delay continued for some time, so people poured out of vehicles including us from the bus. I took the time to chat to Bethany and she took a quick toilet break just behind the metal barrier. I thought it would be too public for a woman to be comfortable with but she wasn’t concerned. She suggested my ginger goatee suited me but I didn’t believe her.

All of a sudden, the truck up the road was unloaded, traffic began to move again so the bus filled up and the driver took off quickly. It was then that I noticed that the seat beside me was empty. Until then, with my dark mood engulfing me, there was a shoulder I had been squashed beside, but now it was missing, as was the person it belonged to. Two Korean women were alarmed, wondering where their friend was. He was standing back on the side of the road, that’s where.

We were almost six kilometres further down the road before they got the message through to the driver that the bus was a passenger light and that he needed to stop. Because it was an expressway, he couldn’t just do a u-turn and he probably wasn’t going to anyway due to conserving fuel. The driver, one of the Korean girls and a random passenger who was pissed off with the situation, ran and walked back to find our absent friend while most of the passengers sat outside and chatted.

It was over half an hour before some cops came past wanting to know what was going on. Bethany tried to offer some semblance of order to the search, which was slightly amusing. The cops just smiled, nodded and jumped in their car without listening. Bethany walked back to us and took a seat on the roadside metal barrier, not hiding her hopeful yet despondent demeanour.

It was a very serene place to stop, with large green paddocks just beside the road, and cows grazing maybe fifty metres away. If you could ignore the large vehicles passing occasionally, it was great as green pastures lined with trees stretched in all directions, the motorway splitting them in two. I was feeling sorry for Five-foot however. If he was awake, he was probably worrying about making his flight.

An hour and forty minutes after we had first hit the traffic jam, the cops arrived back with their car overloaded with people and dropped off everyone that had departed the bus, along with the formerly missing Korean man responsible. There were a few irritated and bemused eyes looking in his direction while he ducked his head in shame.

Five-foot had to get moving if he would make his flight when the bus first got to Wuhan. It was 1230PM and he had less than an hour to get to the flight. He got off at the first stop and caught a taxi leaving me by myself, which I didn’t think would be a big drama.

At the main bus station, I was supposed to meet a man holding a placard with Five-foots name on it. He was to be holding a pre-booked train ticket for that evening that I had paid Postman Pat Y100 deposit for when we were on the boat. Wuhan is on the main trunk line between Guangzhou and Beijing, hence it's travelled a lot and to travel quickly, tickets need to be bought in advance. Unfortunately the man, or more importantly, my ticket wasn’t at the bus station when the bus arrived nearly two hours late. Without this ticket I could be stuffed for any travel that night plus out of pocket.

I enquired at the information desk in the bus station, entering into a discussion in broken English and Chinese that grew more and more frustrating by the moment. I tried to explain to the kind lady who was trying to help that I was looking for a man who had my train ticket for this evening. I thought this statement was within my Mandarin vocabulary, but I was wrong. She looked very confused, so I thanked her for her time and walked away.

Outside, standing beside a line of taxi drivers who all called out to me continuously, I tried calling the company Five-foot and I had booked the ticket through but got no answer. The lady from the desk joined me outside and while I continued telling her the same thing repeatedly, that I was looking for a man with my train ticket, she seemed more confused than before.

She suggested I should sit and wait for my wife, which confused me as I never mentioned I had a wife. It was at this stage I knew I should call Five-foot, because maybe I had mentioned my wife when I was trying to refer to a ticket, a man, a train, or me. As the phone rang I cursed my relaxed approach to learning Mandarin. I knew B+ averages wouldn’t be good enough but I had to come to China to prove it.

Five-foot answered and I told him the situation, telling him I was going to the train station as soon as possible in the hope I could get a ticket if things turned to custard. It felt like everything was already congealing until he said he had time before his flight to organise the company representative to contact me.

In my haste to get to the train station I accepted an overpriced taxi fare from one of the bastards who had been watching and laughing at me during my unfortunate conversation with the helpdesk lady. All the drivers refused to put their meters on and would only take the fare for, at first, Y30, but after a little bargaining, Y20. They could all probably tell I was in a hurry so knew I would be susceptible to being ripped off.

In my haste, I inadvertently jumped in a taxi driven by an absolute madman, endangering my life. As we left the congested streets and reached the less busy road north to the train station, he began weaving in and out of traffic at high speeds and asked me questions in Chinese. I could only answer with “Budong”, meaning that I didn’t understand.

As we sped along, I fielded a couple of calls from Five-foot, the last to explain the tour company representative would call me soon to organise a place to meet, if I was still alive. I thanked him profusely as the taxi driver accelerated to get through an already red light.

A slow moving truck turned onto the road directly in front of us as we approached it at great speed. My driver, without slowing, swerved to the left to pass then swerved again to the right to mount the footpath so we could avoid having to stop for traffic lights. Pointing back at the truck, the taxi driver turned to me and said, “Dangerous”. One of the few English words he knew and it nearly made me piss myself laughing.

I think he knew I was in a hurry, so obliged by nearly ending the race early for both of us. While we were still on the footpath, weaving between the sporadically planted trees, I received the call from the guy from the tour company. We agreed to meet at the square outside the train station.

The car screeched to a halt and I staggered out of the taxi trying to find my feet, thanking the driver for the ride of my life and walked to the meeting spot. The man with the ticket turned up promptly and soon overcharged me, which I realised after doing the maths an hour later. I'd paid more of the deposit than he said I did. But I had my ticket, and allowed myself a massive sigh of relief, and it was only NZ$10 he stung me for, which seemed inconsequential at the time.

I called Five-foot to thank him for the help and noted that if it weren’t for him, I would be stuck in a completely foreign city for maybe longer than 24 hours with little more than NZ$35 in my pocket.

After checking some emails at the Wangba at the station, failing to find a live-scoring page for a New Zealand rugby match, I went for a walk. An hour or so later, after visiting a lavish toilet in a lavish furniture mall, I stumbled across the McDonalds the baggage storage attendants at the station suggested was ten minutes away. The other couple of places to eat right next door looked okay but the air conditioning sold me. Macca's it was.

Wuhan had more empty buildings waiting to be filled with residents. The city is also on the banks of the Chang Jiang so will have a population increase due to the flooding in the west. It’s a very modern city, much like most other Chinese cities and wasn’t particularly clean while I was there.

I pottered around reading and writing for an hour or so in Macca's with all the patrons watching me intently. If I looked up, someone would be staring at me without a sense of him or herself, so I smiled and offered them a greeting in return. Mostly, I got rose coloured cheeks, a giggle and a “Hello” from the women, and the men were just as embarrassed. I meandered back to the train station, getting there too quickly with still two and a half hours to waste before the train left. I walked in the opposite direction from which I’d gone before to a street with quite a few empty looking shops and restaurants.

“Xiaojie,” was the only word I recognised when a woman asked me a question.

“Budong,” I replied, offering an ear for her to repeat herself.

“Xiaojie,” she repeated, pointing at a couple of younger ladies, wearing very little. It wasn’t as if the days’ heat suggested they needed any more clothing but it was pretty obvious to me that I was in the red light district.

“Xiaojie,” she repeated herself again after I realised where I was.

“Bu yao, xiexie,” I said to the woman, who laughed either at my attempt at Chinese or at how polite I was. I turned around and headed back towards the train station.

On the square outside, a man flashed a badge in my face, spoke and pointed at my pockets. I said I didn’t understand what he was saying and he showed me his badge again. I said I didn’t understand and he became angry, pointing at a couple of Chinese characters on the badge and speaking harshly at me. I said I didn’t understand again, and when I indicated that we could get the English-speaking ticket counter clerk to interpret, he gave up and moved on.

Sales people approached, saying stuff to me in Chinese and when I said I didn’t understand, they spoke slower and louder.

“Ah, well,” I replied, “now you put it like that, I still don’t understand.”

They continued even more slowly and even louder and I just repeated myself. They didn’t go away so I ventured into the waiting halls.

With the departure hall packed with hundreds of people heaps vying for seating, there was a lot of screaming and shouting. I hadn't had much sleep or food and my senses were overrun with the noise and activity around the room from the kids running around to the parents chasing them. A combination of all these led to my anxieties and emotions getting away on me.

I began dwelling on the fact that I was in trouble as soon as Five-foot had left me alone, yet I had thought I was quite competent beforehand. I saw another foreign backpacker turn up for a train and he looked confident and happy by himself. I wondered what I was capable of and began wondering if I looked confident to everyone around me. Maybe the other backpacker felt just as frail as me but was faking it. I considered I wasn’t that frail because I got sorted, but I needed Five-foot’s help. All of a sudden I was in a downward thinking spiral I couldn’t snap out of.

There was no record of my train up on the screen at all, and I was getting anxious about it. With no check-in time and no departure time listed, it looked like Z86 to Beijing West Train Station did not exist, as trains departing after mine were already represented on the boards. The announcements were all in Chinese, and I could decipher that they kept mentioning Beijing west station, yet nothing was written up on the board. It was much easier for me to work out what was written rather than what was announced so I wasn’t feeling confident at all. What I was going to do if it was cancelled or postponed, I didn’t know. Then I worried that my ticket could be faked. As I studied my ticket, checking the printed date, time and destination, I thought about how much money I had but couldn’t think of any alternative plan should I not be on a train that night. I couldn’t think straight.

I began thinking about all the places I would rather be. I wished I could be back in my old bed at my mother’s house in Christchurch. I wished I could have someone with me. And I started to take notice of how lonely I was. Not just lonely now but simply and completely alone in the world. And my fears came to me while I was sitting there, like, what happens to me beyond when I’ve died? What happens to me when I’ve been to heaven? Where do I go when the next thing ends? And the last thing ends? What happens to my soul when God has finished with me? How do I prepare for the ultimate loneliness?

And I choked back tears in the Wuhan train station departure hall. And I realised why I had come to China, finally.

Waiting for the train, I was losing the plot because I felt exposed and frail and wasn’t sure of where I would be sleeping or if I would be safe soon. I wanted, more than anything, to be safe. I wanted somewhere to hide and was hoping like anything that the train would be that place. It was the only sanctuary I could see possible that night. Sanctuary from I’m not sure what.

Why I had come to China was for the same reasons. Here I was in a country where I had an excuse to fail with women thanks to the language difficulties and to not bother looking for work because my time here wouldn’t be permanent. The plan was that I could avoid my past and my future here. I was trying to hide from everything in my life.

I had wondered if this trip was a test of how much stress I could take, or looking for a wife because the women in New Zealand I liked took no notice of me. Now I knew I was travelling because I was a coward and couldn’t deal with the ex-girlfriends and the prospective ex-girlfriends from the past. And I couldn’t handle the idea of failure looking for work. The only problem was my life followed me wherever I went.

Now these senses of failure were being displaced on my inabilities as a traveller. I was a terrible backpacker, naïve and unprepared, and a failure. Hiding from the people at home was being replaced by needing to hide from all the people in this waiting room. I didn’t want to be around people and I didn’t want to deal with my failure.

The feelings I was avoiding at home had caught up with me in China.

I sat there for an hour trying to read, feeling sorry for myself, when a new train to Guangzhou appeared midway up the departures screen, above other trains that hadn’t yet departed. Ignoring the noise of the hordes of people, my eyes were trained on the board hoping train Z86 would pop up too.

Then, like a beacon in the night, illuminated in blessed red electronic-board writing was Beijing Xi Z86, and I instantly relaxed. I was assured that a bunk would be welcoming me soon, and I would be back in the capital city in the morning, and the noise of screaming kids and parents couldn't bother me anymore.

During a day which I thought service in China had proven itself to be completely shit, the lady from the train station service desk proved that it was a variety. Whether she saw me looking anxious or distraught, or she just felt it her duty to help a foreigner, when the time came to check in she came and told me in English to go to my train before she called all passengers to board. I didn't really need the help by this stage, but I did appreciate it. As I strode towards the boarding platform, I felt a massive weight flying off my shoulders.

Aboard the train carriage, a mother and two kids shared the same cubby hole with six bunks as me. The boy was around seven years old and was excited to be on a train. The little girl was only three or four and either scared of the train or of me. I got the boy into trouble as his mum wanted him to sleep, while the two of us looked out the window and I pointed at stuff whispering “Kankan”, meaning “look” and he did the same for me. After a while, his mother spotted this and got up to smack him lightly then closed his side of the curtains, offering me a dirty look.

I managed to sleep quite well, although I woke up thinking it was morning only to find the boy next door had his personal light on, maybe as a nightlight. I lay there awake for a while, unaware of this until I looked out the window seeing complete darkness. I looked at my watch and it was 2AM.

The kids woke me up again at 6AM as they grew a little impatient and bored, which quickly became loud and whiney. They weren’t anywhere near as loud as the cabin-mate from the boat though. These kids were bliss compared to him.

The train arrived in Beijing at 7AM and as I exited the absolute pig that is the Beijing west train station, I gave up on the difficult acquisition of a taxi. I approached the private car drivers in the square outside who all seem to be waiting for dumb, rich foreigners to come their way.

“Wudaokou,” I said to the first guy I saw, rubbing my thumb and index finger together to make the international signal for money.

He scanned me from head to toe and offered “Y100.”

I laughed and walked on, instantly receiving better offers from the other drivers without even speaking.

“Y80.”

“Y70.”

“Y60,” one man said, and I bargained him down to Y50. I was paying him a lot but I was feeling exhausted and generous and couldn’t be bothered looking too hard for anyone cheaper.

The driver spoke English well and we chatted about Beijing and football for a few minutes, but I was too tired to talk for long.

During our travels, a major downpour had flooded parts of Beijing and almost a week after the rain, any ground not concreted over was still sodden. Wudaokou smelt terrible when I got out of the car, like the sewers had overflowed and ran into the streets. The mid-summer heat made the smell nearly intolerable.

16. The Chang Jiang

2007-02-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

We took a taxi from the hotel at 7AM to a makeshift bus station, which was actually an alleyway at the rear entrance to another hotel. Lots of Chinese and a few foreign tourists boarded the bus with us, and we were seated with Michael from Australia, and Tim and Maria from Denmark. They were recuperating from their own mad taxi ride. Five-foot gave up on Karaoke and was asleep before we departed so he managed to avoid the ensuing driver madness.

The expressway to Chongqing was new and impressive, so the ride could’ve been more relaxing had the bus driver driven at less than 130 kilometres per hour. The bumpy ride freaked all the passengers out as we overtook on tight corners and rode the median barrier constantly. Gasps gripped the air as the bus swung from one side of the road to the other, winding its way through lush green trees in rolling hills and mountains as constant overtaking manoeuvres were undertaken with no consideration of what may be around the bend.

Those of us awake swapped a few stories regarding the treacherous bus rides we had endured in the Middle Kingdom. Michael took the cake with a harrowing journey he had taken through lowland Tibet, the crazy drivers nearly driving off cliffs, evading falling boulders and dumping him in the middle of fallen landslides with instructions to find another ride on the other side of the rocks. The two of us agreed that we had been somewhat desensitised to the driving, although it hadn’t stopped fazing the Danes. We could still tell when a driver was a shocker and the guy at the helm of this bus was a shocker. Thankfully, he was failing to put us into orbit.

We rolled into the especially grey and brown metropolis of Chongqing, on the banks of the Yangtze River at lunchtime, and as we stepped onto the street, the heat was unbelievable. I could feel my skin roasting despite the sun being completely blocked out by the brown sky, and sweat was pouring off me just from standing still.

I couldn’t be bothered walking too far up the hill from where our bus dropped us off, so Five-foot and I let Michael scout out the city on his own. He reported later that a central shopping area was a pleasant experience. Five-foot and I saw a KFC and managed to down a burger before our next adventure, travelling the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River.

The gorges are only around for a limited time now, before they’re forever changed by flooding which is being caused by a hydroelectric dam the Chinese government built further downriver. Once fully flooded, the waters up the Yangtze, or “Chang Jiang” in Chinese, will be raised by up to 175 metres in places, which will flood many cities and homes, displacing millions of people and submerge parts of the gorges plus other historical sights.

The others on the bus to Chongqing were destined for the same boat, and we all spent the afternoon buying provisions for the trip. We met up with Michael, Tim and Maria, and gathered our bags from the cruise tour operator’s office, along with the food we’d bought. Michael was looking for his own plastic bag full of food that contained cheese in particular, but it was nowhere to be found.

“I’ve lost my cheese,” he repeatedly griped while walking to the road where he cornered the tour guide. “I’m not getting on the boat without my cheese.”

“It’s okay,” the guide said, “your bag will be waiting for you.” The guide spent the next few minutes on his mobile phone to another guide at the boat, hopefully tracking down the cheese while we approached the docks. Once alongside the boat, Michael was instantly approached with a bag full of his food, including the cheese. Relief spread across his face and he gave the guide a can of beer and thanked him profusely.

A Chinese tourist had taken the bag and we were sceptical as to whether it was taken by accident, as Michael had placed it under his own pack. It was filled with particularly foreign food like the cheese, which Chinese people don’t usually eat. Michael mentioned he wondered who the thief was. This was a difficult way to begin a three-day voyage.

Boarding the ship, the current of the river was extremely strong, the water extremely brown, and the planks extending to the shore extremely flimsy above the rushing brown surge. It was a decent boat without being fantastic, mainly populated by Chinese tourists with a few foreigners from America, England, a couple from Belgium, and the rest of us from the bus.

Our second-class cabin was small with four beds, and good enough for me, although my standards may have dropped by this time. It could have been very, very crap. A Chinese businessman who constantly smoked and spat, choosing to do so into the rubbish bin by his bed, occupied one of the other bunks. Being relatively irritated by his methods of filling the bin, I figured he couldn’t do these practices in his sleep, so it wouldn’t be much of a problem if I just avoided him during the day.

The afternoon became early evening, and all the passengers stood out on the deck watching the city disappear as the boat departed. Chongqing, with its neon lights surrounded by grey hills and brown buildings seemed like a much nicer place to leave than to arrive in.

As we were standing on deck, I met a teacher who spoke English very well, and he explained he’d been teaching himself the language for twenty years.

“New Zealand is a very beautiful country,” he said.

“Have you been to New Zealand?” I asked.

“No, but I have seen photographs and on television,” he said, and began a very one-sided conversation. “New Zealand was founded in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi. There are 3.5 million people living in New Zealand. New Zealand has two islands, the North Island and the South Island. The Prime Minister of New Zealand is Helen Clark, a woman. New Zealand people play rugby and farm sheep.” And he continued.

Michael walked by. He had been adopted by the large, loud family sharing his cabin and was already feeling like one of the crowd in a twelve-bunk lower-class room. He had even been talked into sitting out on the deck with them.

“This is Michael,” I said to the teacher. “He’s from Australia.”

“Australia has 19 million people,” he said, instantly gaining Michaels attention. “The country served as a prison colony for Europe.” And I slipped away, leaving the two new friends to get acquainted while I hid behind Five-foot.

In the darkness, the shoreline with the breaking, foamy waves was barely visible and there wasn’t much else to see. There were no stars due to the grey skies, with Chongqing’s electricity needs probably emitting more pollution into the air in a day than New Zealand could ever hope to avoid producing. The only things I could spot were red lights situated near the shoreline, guidance for the boats along the river.

When we got back to the room, our cabin-mate enquired as to our ages and marital status.

“You should be married if you’re 26,” he said to me. I shook my head and laughed at him. I climbed onto my bunk and pretended to be asleep.

My expectation that our roommate wouldn’t be able to spit in his sleep was proven completely incorrect. He kept waking me up by constantly hoiking up and spitting literally every five minutes or less. The constant barrage of snore-spit-snore-spit kept me awake nearly the whole night.

At 5AM, Muzak was played from the speakers in the rooms and tour guides walked the corridors knocking on doors and calling out to all the passengers to wake us up. They were preparing everyone to visit the town of Fengdu and the Abode of Ghosts Temple on Ming Shan, the hill behind the town. Under demolition, Fengdu was being levelled due to the rising waters leading to its imminent flooding in less than five years. Construction machinery was scattered around the now deformed town and rubble and waste was being separated from the bricks and wood that would be recycled further up or down river.

The people were already selling fruit, toys, and whatever they thought tourists would buy at 6AM in the morning. Leading towards Ming Shan, the road was bordered by a row of shops on each side, standing lonely in the otherwise flattened town. Surrounded by former housing land that was now covered in piles of rubble, these shops were left standing for the moment, like the inverse of a tornado had ripped up the rest of the town and left a strip of buildings untouched. Sooner or later however, those shops would be gone too as the river would inevitably rise.

At the Abode of Ghosts, hundreds of passengers from two different boats grouped together waiting for their tickets to be provided by the respective tour guides. With maybe five hundred people lining up for the cable car, our tour guide was decidedly slack in distributing tickets compared to the others. He didn’t seem to be too concerned about the short time frame and had proven to be pretty slack about herding us into a group too. He was finally handed the tickets at the counter and sauntered back to us like Postman Pat coolly strolling through a crowd with a happy-go-lucky smile on his face, not a care in the world. Meanwhile the other groups had lined up for the cable-car in front of us, tickets in hand so Five-foot, Tim and Maria, myself and a few other foreigners decided to walk up instead.

I had complained constantly about Chinese tour groups, with the megaphones and large groups causing traffic-jams and hold-ups at landmarks, so decided to not be part of one. I ran up the hill before the groups could all get to the top of the cable-car and assert themselves en masse.

By doing so, I gained fifteen precious minutes to myself at the top checking out the temple full of sculptures of demons and other creatures much alike the Bhuddas I had seen in other temples but with a dark, evil twist. There were gargoyle type images, and evil spirit representations and a tall pagoda, which I climbed up so I could have a good vantage point to watch others walk up from the top of the cable car.

I enjoyed a moment of bliss by myself and listened to a woman play a musical instrument designed like a cross between a piano and a harp before the tour groups arrived. I escaped down the hill again, passing my friends still on their way up and found an open gate that hadn’t been opened when I had passed it earlier, so followed the path in.

The “Path of the Dead” was a narrow road leading up the hill, and, at the top of some steps, I was directed into a haunted house by a group of friendly staff. Histories, legends and stories detailed beliefs regarding evil spirits of the surrounding regions all written with English translation. Whether it was true or just tourist planned crap, I didn’t know, but I found it entertaining. I kept walking and found myself at a tourist trap where I was expected to pay for some random photo at the end of the house. Instead of paying, I backtracked through the haunted house and found an emergency exit door.

Outside, I warned an Australian journalism student, Conner, of the tourist trap and after doing so, he chose to join my walk back to the boats. Since the Chinese government was aware he was, in effect, a journalist, he was a little paranoid his emails were being hacked into. The lengths to which the government went to conceal some things I wouldn’t be surprised if they could and would do it.

We chatted about the dangers of buying red meat in China, Conner being vegetarian, and how to avoid getting ripped off. Basically the only way we could think of staying safe was staying at home.

The touts were beginning to pack up, but still trying to sell the crowds whatever they could, letting off fireworks for attention or effect. I bought some bananas for breakfast and bid Conner farewell.

The boat seemed empty between stops as hardly anyone walked around. Chinese people on board sat in their cabins watching television and chatting while the foreigners were more outgoing and could be found on decks watching the sights go by. I was avoiding the Chinese businessman in the cabin, as he hadn’t stopped smoking all day and constantly spat into the rubbish bin. Five-foot could handle the man’s company better than me, but would venture outside every now and then for a break.

Michael found a remote part of the boat down by the engine room where I joined him for a while. The noise of the chugging was deafening but oddly relaxing, as we took in the upriver views. The crew watched us intently but didn’t indicate that we should move on.

The boats stopped at a temple on a small peninsula, which would become an island due to the rising water level. I found the temple pretty boring, being more interested in the marker for where the water was expected to rise. There were many of these white markers along the river, like a row of headstones creeping up the hillside, showing the projected water level of the future. Many homes and farmer’s crops were beneath the top markers. According to the markers, the steps up to the temple’s front gate would soon be gone.

On the way back to the boat, I bought some fried potatoes, paying Y4 for a small container full. Five-foot bought the same amount of spuds for Y1, even though he wasn’t hungry. He only did it to prove a point. He said he didn’t even need to haggle.

When the boat docked at White King Town, night was well and truly upon us. The Belgian couple, Thomas and Bethany, and I went for a walk to another temple up the hill. After dinner the Belgians had seen a bloated human corpse floating down the river, and noted that we, along with every other boat on the river, disobeyed international waterways laws, which stipulate that when finding a dead body, you must contact the authorities and stay with the body until they arrive.

Bethany seemed a little upset having seen the body, while Thomas didn’t seem to offer any emotions about it. It struck me, a while later, that if someone told me about a body floating down a river in New Zealand, I would’ve had a large emotional reaction, like I was connected to it. Here though, I just figured that we were in China and I wasn’t really surprised.

It was great to get off the boat and take a walk up the hill, despite the already dark, raining evening. The temple charged Y55 as an entry fee and I wasn’t that interested, so did an about turn and headed back down the hill to the boat. It was a nice thirty-minute walk regardless. In our cabin, Five-foot was watching Drunken Master Two, a Jackie Chan classic film, and in the businessman’s blessed absence, I joined him.

When our cabin mate arrived at 1AM, waking me from a deep sleep, he nearly drove me to helping him join the bloated corpse down the river. First he went to the toilet and had a shower, both with the door open, then collapsed on his bed and continued with his spitting all night. He topped this off by snoring the entire night.

The Muzak was on again at 5AM, as the boat was passing through the first gorge, Qutang Xia, and Postman Pat strolled up and down the corridor waking everyone up loudly. The morning being pretty dark and misty added to the occasion and made the tall walls of the gorge a sight to behold. It also meant that taking a decent photo was incredibly difficult. Handy cams were out as people flooded the decks for a look and a megaphone was produced by a guide to tell us, in Chinese, about the wonder and awe of what we were looking at. The gorge was soon left behind and I was left practically alone on deck. Most others went back to their rooms for more sleep or to get ready for the day ahead. The major attraction felt like it was over before it had begun and before I could fully wake up.

Five-foot joined me outside again after a while, telling me the businessman had just apologised for his overnight behaviour. He’d been drinking bai jiu all night, a very powerful Chinese alcohol.

The city of Wushan is the base of operations where most people on the tour boats go to see the Little Three Gorges, a trip that I decided to skip due to depleting funds in the bank. Five-foot went, as did most of the other foreigners onboard, while I thought it would be a grand time to catch up on some sleep as our cabin mate had gone along too.

I lay on my bunk and closed my eyes, feeling that wonderful sensation of drifting off to sleep when the door opened. I heard a hoik and a spit and then the flick of a cigarette lighter. Even though I lay on my back my head managed to sink further. Soon enough, snoring and spitting ensued. I had to leave, for the sake of my own sanity.

I took a walk through Wushan, a city with major renovation underway. At river level the buildings were under demolition, like Fengdu, but up the hill brand new empty buildings stood prepared for new residents to arrive. Surrounded by all these unlived in buildings waiting to accommodate the displaced locals from up and down the rising river, I realised the magnitude of the work this government had put in. New roads, shopping centres, and residential buildings: this manufactured infrastructure carried the weight of being a ghost town in reverse. Instead of an abandoned town, Wushan was a major city awaiting people’s arrival.

The stalls at river level were selling all the usual crap stuff like toys and jade carvings. I looked for some home made noodles or some dumplings but there were none on obvious display and I couldn’t read any of the signs. I returned to the boat, and read on deck for a while, awaiting the return of the people who had gone to the little three gorges. The best thing about having so few people around was that the Muzak was turned off. I quietly rejoiced.

Once the passengers had returned and the boat was moving again, the river led immediately to gorge number two, Wu Xia. I really enjoyed travelling through this gorge, thanks in part to the mist and cloud that made the tops of the cliffs rising up from the river difficult to see adding to the mystique. In the middle of these vast isolated canyons were houses and crops with no means of travel to and from other than a boat. Many of these homes and small towns were below the white headstone-like markers showing the future height of the water.

Many of these farmers were expected to move into cities like Wushan and take employment in the factories planned to produce there. Some, however, looked like they were relocating directly up the hill from their current location.

I went for an unofficial tour of the boat that Michael had been on the day before and walked through the kitchen, the engine room, the staff quarters and even sat out the back with the kitchen staff who were fishing off the back of the boat. They saw me walk in and looked disapprovingly, but never told me to leave or barked any orders in Chinese at me. I think they didn’t really care.

Michael had heard that an Australian had walked into the control room of another boat, offered the captain Y100 to drive through the first gorge and duly took the wheel. It wouldn’t be shocking, considering the boat captain’s normal pay was probably a quarter of that per day, or less.

Every foreigner on the boat seemed to have a story about a Chinese cabin mate or family of cabin mates. Michael was starving, having had all his food eaten, including the cheese, by the family in his room. This was the end of an unpleasant rooming experience with the “family from hell”, which included daylong screaming arguments and complete ignorance as he tried to sleep at night. It was in complete contrast to the expectations of the first night on the boat when he thought he was being adopted by a loving, caring group of people. Sophie, another Dane, had similar experiences with a mother and daughter hurricane in her room. It wasn’t all bad news, however, as the Australian who commandeered the other boat had been adopted by a wonderful family who respected his privacy and sleep time and paid for his meals in the dining room as well. This man’s life sounded more and more like a fairy tale to me as Michael spoke about him.

I spent a lot of time with Thomas and Bethany during the day, who were great people to chat to. Thomas was a translator for the European Union and I enjoyed learning a little more about European history and politics. Admittedly the cruise had its boring moments, which could last hours, so it was nice to meet other English speakers.

In the evening, a few of us were sitting inside chatting about our respective roommates and happened to be sitting outside the masseuse’s quarters. We weren’t quite aware of where we were sitting until we noticed that a procession of men continued to walk past us into her waiting room. Five-foot noted we had been stared at quite a bit by passing women as if we were lining up for some action. It was quite funny to us that there was a special masseuse on board a three-day boat. Then again, it did get more than a little boring.

Michael told us about his mission to avoid the English-speaking teacher I had introduced him to on the first night on the boat. According to the Australian, the teacher was definitely a child of the propaganda machine as he could recite sayings and poems of Mao and seemed brainwashed by everything the governments of yester-year wanted him to believe.

“Nobody could write poetry like Chairman Mao,” he had told Michael. “His voice was beautiful, stirring and unique.”

When Michael challenged him with some high school learned Shakespeare, the man was visibly shaken, not sure what to say but denied that it could ever be as profound as Mao.

The boat cruised through the final gorge, Xiling Xia, at night so there was little to see. We spent the evening on the deck with all the foreigners discussing how it would be great finding some privacy from our cabin-mates again. We were all scared of being racist or bigoted, but couldn’t help but think that without the Chinese people we had shared rooms with some of us on the boat would have had a much nicer time. I doubt it was a fact of them being nasty to us, but more culture clash. While I don’t think I did anything to irritate our roommate, he may feel differently.

The boat docked before arriving at the dam to let a few people, including Thomas and Bethany, board buses to the walking tour of the hydroelectric dam. They would meet the boat again on the other side. When the boat continued on, I thought I could see something large and well lit in the distance but not quite clearly a wall of concrete. Apparently the dam is the largest single engineering project ever undertaken in the world and the second largest construction behind the Great Wall. The boats lined up outside the locks, waiting to be lowered to the river level beneath the dam.

We approached as one of a group of eight boats, which all passed through the open first gate, parking in front of the closed second gate in a two hundred metre by thirty-five metre channel surrounded by tall concrete walls. The boats were tied to the walls while the first gates closed and a red light came on to tell us the gate’s water-tight seal was safe. The water began draining out, dropping the water level and thus also the boats, by ten metres. There are measurements on the wall so we could watch this drop take place. This water level drop took less than five minutes although as the water was drained inch by inch to get us to the correct level for the next lock it became more time consuming. An hour after we began moving into the first lock, the second gates opened and we moved into an identical channel, the boats were tied up, gates closed and sealed, red light on, and this time the water dropped by twenty metres in five minutes.

The whole event was breathtaking, being surrounded by light and concrete, and an organisation to a level unheralded, to me, in China. Looking up from the boat, the gates and walls were huge. With both gates closed at either end, towering thirty metres above me, horns blew and lights flashed, then a booming voice loomed over, sounding a warning in Chinese. It felt like I’d paid to become a prisoner in a new, modern concentration camp. It was absolutely fascinating and an engineers dream holiday attraction, I would think.

Lowering the boat to the downriver level included going through five or six locks in total, but it was 2AM after the second lock and I was in desperate need of sleep before disembarking in the morning. Hoping the businessman wasn’t in the cabin, I left the deck, engrossing as this process of lock transport was.

Like so much of this trip, the locks are something to go and experience for oneself. I can't explain the magnitude of the place and my photos don’t do it justice. With the questionable rationality behind the construction of the dam and the sheer size and audacity of the project, this could be another Great Wall type relic in two thousand years. Let’s hope it doesn't crumble quickly, however as, if the dam fails once the waters are fully flooded, the city of Yichang will be gone in an hour and the floods will kill millions more within a day, not to mention the damage it'll do in a week and a month.

15. Hotel on a mountain ridge

2007-02-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Heading south from Chengdu, Five-foot and I were nearly at Emei Shan experiencing the best of roads and the worst of roads earlier in the morning, and were passing through broken down, dirty old towns. The bus driver overtook the many three wheeled trucks that wavered all over the road while being driven as slowly as possible. A large truck that had been parked in a ditch had subsequently overturned and was being unloaded by hand. This would’ve held up traffic on the blind corner had the bus driver, or any other drivers cared to take precautions.

“So are we gonna walk up?” I asked, not really favouring the hard slog option of climbing the mountain we were approaching.

“There’s a bus that goes nearly the whole way up,” Five-foot replied. “If you’re not feeling up to it, there’s always that.”

“Dunno,” I said, “I might look a bit too much like a Chinese tourist.”

Five-foot looked me up and down and said “I don’t think anyone will mistake you for one. There’s still a bit of a gut there.”

The week in Beijing after returning from my trip with Karl was spent mainly on Five-foot’s couch, as I had a head cold stuffing up my nose, throat and eyes. The cold was so severe that I couldn’t do anything and needed Five-foot to turn nursemaid for me providing food services to save me from going outside. He had been great although I’m sure he would’ve drawn the line had I needed a Vicks Vaporub service. Now though, I still wasn’t 100 percent and Five-foot wasn’t feeling the greatest either. Neither of us felt up to the task of climbing to the top of Emei Shan.

At the city of Emei, we caught a private but to the township at the bottom of Emei Shan. The township is very tourist focused with each hotel, restaurant, grocery store and public toilet sponsored by the same brand of iced tea. Every building to be seen along this street had the same billboards and the same branding materials above their doors. Each hotel, side by side, looked like one large establishment.

We went for a walk up the road to the entrance to the mountain path and met a few German tourists who asked for directions to a hotel. Their bus had dropped them at the top of the street whereas our taxi had stopped midway up directly outside the hotel we agreed to stay at. We helped them out by pointing down the town’s one street with all the buildings on the one side. It was going to be a challenge for them to become somehow lost.

At dinner, I read the notes written on the wall from foreigners who’d been to Emei Shan in the past. Some were positive and some were not.

“The views from the top are magnificent,” James wrote.

“It’s just a big tourist blight,” wrote Hans.

“Emei Shan sucks,” wrote someone anonymously. “I wish I never came.”

“I quite liked it,” wrote someone else as a response.

I wondered what Five-foot and I might write on the wall in a couple of days.

The hotel we stayed at was situated above the outdoor dining area where we had dinner that night, which was subsequently filled with lots of noisy people drinking well into the small hours of the morning. As a result, we got little sleep.

We hadn’t decided whether to walk up or take a bus, but the visit to the station two minutes walk down the street made the decision for us. Due to Five-foot and I both recuperating after said head colds and both being decidedly unfit anyway, we caught a bus up the mountain the next day.

The road was surprisingly well built. I was expecting a goat track, shingle and potholes all the way up, but instead a sealed, two-lane road carried vehicles to the top. It was testament to the demand tourists placed on the area. Sometimes the comforts of tourism were too enjoyable to complain about.

The ride was enjoyable for a while with nice green scenery surrounding the road winding up the steep climb until the driver stopped and handed out vomit bags. Promptly a woman filled up a bag threw it out the window and continued to fill more bags over the course of the next hour’s zigzagging. The bus arrived at the large car park at midday.

The options from the bus stop were to walk up the staircase to the summit, which would take two hours, or line up for the cable car with the hundreds of others. Without discussing it, we headed for the staircase probably due to feeling dirty for taking the bus.

Similar to Hua Shan, the path and staircase were made like a brick road. We passed all manner of people walking up and down, and again, the clothes Chinese people were climbing in were hard to ignore. Dress shoes, like those Kiwi men wear to the office, and high heels like Kiwi men wear when their wife is out of town, was the norm. It wasn’t such difficult hiking that one would need boots but Five-foot and I both wore running shoes, which I thought would be essential for comfort. Maybe Chinese people are tougher than me.

Small housing areas, food stalls and restaurants, alike the ones Sam, Karl, Jan and I encountered while climbing the Hua Shan staircase, were situated along the route. Chickens and dogs roamed free, and people were perched on seats enjoying a drink of tea or coke, or burying their faces in a bowl of rice. Walking past, I would gain the usual attention and a quick smile and greeting would be returned tenfold.

The summit of Emei Shan, at three thousand metres, offers amazing views in all directions, an amazing Buddhist temple sitting at the edge of a sheer cliff face. It is phenomenal that a staircase has been built this high and even more phenomenal that at the top of that staircase, there is a large temple centuries old. It must’ve taken amazing dedication getting those materials to the top of the mountain without the aid of today’s technology.

Hundreds of metres below, with cloud resting in between the bottom of the mountain and the top, farmland and forest merged in the distance, rivers looked like worms, and there was no sign of civilisation in any direction. Surrounding the mountain, other towering peaks were all covered in lush green vegetation and clouds rolled over the peaks leaving a breathtaking sight.

The summit proper was maybe a hundred metres away from the temple, but the only way to get there was via monorail priced at Y50. It took passengers only a few metres higher than the temple so we skipped it. There were the medallion salespeople at the temple too. We skipped them as well.

I took a few snapshots and was approached by a couple of people, including a monk who wished to have a photo with my now grown out blonde Mohawk. Five-foot suggested they were also attracted by the ginger-ness of my beard. It was difficult to refuse so I cheesed up and continued baring teeth while others lined up for a photo with me. My cheeks were aching from the strain within a few minutes, so Five-foot saved me by telling the gathering crowd we wanted to eat lunch.

On the way down from the summit, we passed a few different groups of pilgrims who were making their way to the Buddhist temple at the top. They stopped every three steps to drop to their knees and touch their foreheads to the path in homage. They do this all the way from the bottom of the mountain. It must take a week.

We had to dodge the many porters as they ran past us at velocity. They were similar to the men carrying provisions up Hua Shan, although instead of provisions, these men carried people. With two men to a seat or harness, hikers would pay to get carried up the hill by these extremely fit men. We would be walking down, hear a thump-thump-thumping accompanied by heavy breathing and then, from around a corner, men would come running towards us from up the hill or down, carrying people. We could barely carry ourselves down and they were running. The staircase was very steep in places and at the speed these men travelled, I wondered what would happen if one lost his footing. Three people lost over the edge of a cliff, I suspect.

At 2070 metres, Xixiangchi, Elephant Bathing Pool, sits amongst the plant life on a peak jotting out from the mountain. It is mainly a large monastery, but also consists of a hotel and restaurant. An hour before we got there, the staircase above gave a great view of the brown roof of the monastery all but shining like a beacon on the otherwise forest rich green ridge. With darkness approaching when we arrived, stars and the moon shining in the still blue sky, we didn’t have much choice but to stop there for the night. We rented a room at the hotel, foregoing the very humble beds available at the monastery, and sat outside enjoying the view above the minimal clouds. The Hilton it certainly was not, with a communal toilet that consisted of a pit with four gaps for people to squat over.

Five-foot and I walked around the monastery for a short reconnoitre before dinner and saw a young man get attacked by a couple of monkeys. It left everyone else alone, so I jumped to the conclusion that the man was teasing it. I couldn’t understand why, because these violent little critters weren’t so little, and were scary as hell when they bore their teeth and began barking. It was the first we had seen of any monkeys, and the sight made me feel like we were walking into a very untamed part of the jungle. The locals explained that monkeys tended to dominate the jungle further down the mountain and we would encounter them sooner or later.

Still browsing around the monastery, we saw a mother monkey carrying her baby on her back. Five-foot tried to take a photo of this unique bit of nature but the mother got spooked by a man walking down the path and took off into the jungle.

While we were eating, the hotel was surprisingly busy with barely a seat in the place empty. Staying there was a mixture of young Chinese travellers of university age, the mountain porters and a few older men wearing the old blue uniforms known as the Mao suit handed out by the government forty years previously. Others wore old army fatigues, probably all the clothing they had after being made redundant from the Chinese armed forces. When the government dishes out redundancies from the army they do it by the million.

We sat at a table with the owner of the hotel and a few porters, eating a big meal that was surprisingly tasty.

The owner asked me how old I was and inquired if I was married.

“No,” I said.

“In China, if a man is not married by the age of twenty-six, it probably indicates something,” he said, Five-foot translating.

“Not in New Zealand,” I said, trying to hold onto any self-esteem I had left. Even in China I couldn’t avoid my failings with women.

One of the porters began talking Five-foot into using his crew for a ride down the hill the following day. Five-foot was keen to try but I couldn’t afford it.

“I won’t do it then,” he said.

“I don’t mind meeting you somewhere,” I told him.

“Yeah, but getting separated here, it’s not like you can get the mall intercom to page me when you get scared.”

“So my trick of walking around crying until someone helps will be kinda useless, you think?”

“Yeah,” Five-foot said. “Let’s skip it. Best to stick together.”

It turned out Five-foot was going to offend the porter due to already expressing interest and now having to turn him down. It wasn’t as easy as telling him that we were no longer interested.

“Tell ya what,” I said to Five-foot, “I’ll pretend to be interested right now, but say we’ll work out if we can afford it later. I’m not going to do it though.”

A few minutes later, after Five-foot had been speaking to the porter, the hotel owner spoke to him about me and Five-foot interpreted. It turned out this guy understood some English and knew what I had just said. All I could do was smile at him and excuse myself and hopefully learn from my mistake.

Sitting outside under the stars would have been amazing considering the absolute isolation and beautiful terrain was lit up by the moonlight, but the hotel staff warned us that the monkeys were less timid at night. So we went to bed after dinner, the hotel being extremely loud with creaking floorboards and monkeys barking into the night.

The clock read 715AM when I gave up trying to rest. The sounds of monkeys and hotel patrons kept me awake all night. Five-foot had the same problem.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue and the mountains looked pristine as we set off from Xixiangchi walking through the monastery to get to the staircase down the hill. Birds sang and monkeys barked so we were easily talked into buying a walking stick each for protection purposes. I would rather have had Steve Irwin, the crocodile guy, but we were in a pretty remote area to expect him to happen along.

Thirty minutes after resuming our long walk down the mountain, we bumped into the German tourists from the town at the bottom of the hill as they sat at a shop on the staircase. They were on the way up, having started at the bottom the day before while we took the bus, and offered a few warnings about the monkeys and restaurants along the way. We explained that we were from New Zealand, not Australia, and in turn they said they were from Norway and Denmark, not Germany. They told us to refrain from feeding the monkeys as that just encouraged them to gather around and demand more.

The path was busy with porters racing up and down carrying people in the harnesses and other groups of walkers making their way around too. While passing a group of older women who were also walking down, they enquired where I was from.

“Women dou Xinxilan ren,” Five-foot said, which translated means we’re both New Zealanders.

“He’s from New Zealand,” they said in Chinese, pointing at me, “but where are you from?”

“I’m a New Zealander too,” Five-foot said.

“You can’t be, you look Chinese,” they said.

They then entered into a discussion about Five-foot’s family emigrating. He soon got very irritated by the questions as he tried to explain he was a New Zealander with Asian heritage but these women couldn’t believe, or understand, the concept of him being foreign. It indicated that not all people in China have got to grips with the wonder and joy that is emigration. Then again, plenty of Kiwis are still coming to grips with it themselves.

When the ladies said something about Five-foot’s mother, he stopped talking to them and raced ahead.

The sporadic monkey barking became much less sporadic and much more concentrated at around 1030AM. Mere metres from the path, an intimidating communal noise emanated from all around. The monkeys didn’t like us being around so were trying to scare us into going away. As they barked as one, its sounded like five hundred of the beasts were out there, but more likely there was only twenty. Every now and then, a bush would rustle only arms length from the path, which, coupled with the constant barking, freaked me out each time.

We caught up with a group of elderly women and young girls who were also descending the mountain.

“Let’s stick with them, ay?” I said to Five-foot, slightly out of breath due to increasing our speed in the previous twenty minutes.

“Yeah,” he said, “just so they feel a little safer.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “I’m sure they’ll feel safer with us tagging along.”

Much like the top of Hua Shan, our descent was interrupted near a monastery not far from the bottom by thousands of people walking around, taking photos, eating at restaurants and lazing the day away. Very much like Hua Shan, it turned out there was a cable car running to this area from further down the mountain that tourists use then walk down to visit a special pagoda. Unfortunately, the pagoda was in the direction we were going.

Our progress was slowed down dramatically by high heels and dress shoes and by women walking in groups linking hands to form roadblocks. The wonderful photo opportunities halted everyone in their tracks, including those not photographing anything. The pagoda everyone came to see was a nice construction in what could once have been a quiet jungle, and it would’ve been an idyllic spot if not for the crowds screaming and shouting. We gave up taking photos as we jostled through the area filled with thousands of people. The aim now was to get out of this nature-walk version of a feeding frenzy.

As we followed the path down, Five-foot befriended a couple of monks, one of whom shook his hand.

“That’s really odd,” he said. “In south-east Asia, physical contact is forbidden for monks. Maybe it’s different here.”

After over an hour of filing out with the crowds, we got to the bottom of Emei Shan, but the path led through two kilometres of stalls trying to sell the usual crappy nick-nacks. The final stretch was a flat path passing through a valley alongside a picturesque river, with restaurants and touts lining the way of the roadside. The feeling from Xixiangchi earlier in the morning dissipated more with each step, having those fond memories of interesting nature tarnished by the road block that was the literally thousands of people we battled past and the shopping stalls all trying to sell us Chinese name stamps, postcards, figurines, and so on. To say it ruined the experience would be an understatement.

I accepted that I should take the good with the bad. The road to the top was comfortable and enjoyable due to the demand of the same crowds with whom we had to share the final hour of the walk. Without those people, I could’ve been cursing a rocky bus ride or perished in a fatal accident on the side of a cliff. Without them, maybe I would’ve had to walk all the way up and all the way down. The tourism at the mountain was a fact of life and without it the experience would’ve been very different.

When we left the mountain, we collected our bags from the hotel and headed for the bus station. I couldn’t think of anything to write on the restaurant wall that could sum up Emei Shan in a few words.

The karaoke tour bus to Leshan had music videos and lyrics scrolling along the screen above the windscreen inviting people to join in. The tour guide gave a running commentary via microphone all the way into the city, which I didn’t understand, but alas she failed to pass the microphone over to any passengers for their chance for a sing. Five-foot was obviously disappointed as he warmed up his voice repetitively.

Upon arrival in the city, we boarded a tricycle at the bus station and a man peddled us towards the riverside and a hotel of his choosing. He struggled away with our weight as he made the slow climb from the bus station under a hot, sweltering mid-afternoon sun while Five-foot and I willed him on and hoped our efforts on the mountain had lost us a few kilograms to ease his work. I was hoping we wouldn’t cause the guy to have a heart attack. To the relief of us all, the ascent flattened out and the tricycle reached a slight downhill towards the river. Once he got us to the hotel, I rewarded him with Y10, a payment he was more than happy to accept before he collapsed into one of the seats in the foyer. Once we had a room he would get a kickback from the hotel staff for facilitating our patronage.

Searching for breakfast, lunch and dinner rolled into one meal, Five-foot found a dumplings restaurant, a small grimy street-side establishment, and introduced me to the delicacy of pan-fried dumplings. The dumplings were fantastic although I was quickly filled up. We had both lost our appetites during the traverse.

Back at the hotel, I couldn’t find the room key that Five-foot had entrusted to me. Having searched all of my pockets and pouches three times each, I went back to the restaurant and crawled around on the greasy floor under the table we’d eaten at. I’d thought the place wasn’t particularly clean before but after sliding around in the slime and goo on the floor I wished I hadn’t dined there. Regardless, I returned to the hotel without the key, grime covering my knees and forearms, and had to pay for a new lock on the door.

After I had a shower, Five-foot and I were limping along the riverside with half the population of the three million strong city. Ballroom dancers took over public squares, as did people exercising with tai chi or playing badminton. Jumping into the brown water, men were swept downriver by the extremely potent current, then caught a rope at steps where they climbed back up to the footpath. They then ran back to the diving spot to jump in again. Running amongst the hundreds of people out for a stroll, all these men wore Speedos just like Qingdao and Beidaihe swimmers.

Up and down the country, it seemed that every man had to wear dick-togs when going for a very public swim. I can see myself being dragged into ballroom dancing and tai chi in public, but not wearing Speedos. If these men had six-pack abs and a rock hard ass, I could understand it, but they did not. They squeezed wobbly, stringy little bodies into these tight little elastic bands and didn’t reserve any thought for those who had to see it.

Across the river from the city, the Giant Buddha, the largest seated Buddha in the world, is carved into a cliff. The next day, we limped and hobbled our way around the Giant Buddha’s park, battling the crowds all scrambling towards the viewing platform at the riverside. The park is situated on a hill level with the Buddha’s forehead and as we walked down the steps to the viewing platform at river level, people pushed and shoved their way down callously with no consideration for each other’s safety. At over seventy metres high the zig-zagging path down was treacherous enough without the crowd’s impatience.

I was pretty irate by the time I got to the platform at the bottom due to the pushing and shoving. It was cool to look up from the toes of the massive Buddha but I wasn’t keen to stick around due to the crowd. Five-foot followed me as I walked off in a semi-huff, and we struggled back up the seventy metre climb to the top of the cliffs.

“We should’ve come here before Emei Shan,” Five-foot said between breaths, to which I grunted an out-of-breath agreement.

We caught a private boat back to the city that took us past the Buddha again for a great view from the river. It was magnificent from the river’s vantage point, as the driver turned into the current and revved the engine so the boat was stationary for a few moments. We took more photos of the Buddha and watched the crowds continue to push their way down to the platform until the driver spun us back downriver heading back to the city. I was beginning to calm down now we were away from the crowds and after a dumpling dinner I was a happy chap once again.

We visited a wangba in the city where people lined up to read my emails over my shoulder. Leshan didn’t seem to have many foreigners around so with someone proficient in English typing at a computer, people were drawn to have a read and see what they understood. I turned around and one woman smiled and continued reading. She wasn’t harming anyone, as I wasn’t giving up the secrets of cold fusion, so I kept writing about the place. She soon got bored and moved on.

We returned to Chengdu the following day in preparation for the next adventure, and the Karaoke bus tour guide again failed to allow anyone else a turn with the microphone. Five-foot was getting pretty irate.

Five-foot was happy with the hotel we’d stayed at previously so we returned there and got a room.

On the English news television channel, an item talked about the police of newly formed East Timor. They were in need of training and the Chinese government had offered to send some police to instruct in general policing strategy. There’s a couple in Chengdu, I thought, who’d be fantastic ambassadors to send.

And then the phone rang.

“No,” Five-foot said, and hung up. “Do we want a “health” massage?”

14. Calls in the night

2007-02-07T07:54:00.000-08:00

After a week of planning and playing video games in Five-foots apartment, we set off on another trip, this time to Sichuan, a province in the centre of the country.

Five-foot and I walked through the departure gate at Beijing Airport an hour after the original boarding time and were loaded onto the bus from the terminal to the plane. Squashed in like rush-hour commuter trains, people struggled for space for themselves and their twelve items of carry-on luggage. At the steps to the plane, the crowd formed the usual Chinese line in the shape of a mushroom, pushing their way up to the door.

We were flying Sichuan Airlines, the cheapest tickets available, saving us a day of train travel. Within a few minutes of sitting down, the plane began taxiing to the runway over a bumpy tarmac, like we were hitting turbulence before taking off.

The flight was bumpier than the taxiing and the lady sitting beside me dropped a cup of hot coffee on us both. She had placed the drink on her tray and didn’t bother holding it while the plane was rocking from side to side. When the cup eventually tipped, the coffee went all over the two of us. During my flights to China, I had a baby first kick a drink onto me and then literally spit his dummy at me. Later, I assaulted myself with a cup of orange juice, which wasn’t easy to forget due to wearing beige cargo shorts.

The plane landed at the airport at Chengdu, and I was surprised at how very modern the city was. The airport terminal and the roads and highways into the central city were very new. Green grass and trees lined the roads until KTV outlets and billboards lit the night. Traffic circled around the city’s central square, with Mao again represented in stone standing as a centrepiece, semi-waving, semi-hailing. We were taken to a hotel nearby, and Five-foot soon had us a room.

I was quite disappointed by how much of a Las Vegas-like sight the city was in what I expected to be a remote, isolated place in the middle of the country. Chengdu is the last stop before Tibet and I expected something a little more rural. Each city I had visited had been sprawling high-rise buildings with shopping and restaurants along each street, not the quaint village-life I thought would be more prevalent.

It was late, but before bed we went for a walk around the city, looking at a couple of night markets and not much else in the concrete jungle we were in. Men began approaching us to enquire our business in the city and ask if we’d like to do business with them.

“Ni yao xiaojie?” a man riding a bike asked me, enquiring as to whether I wanted female company for the night.

“Bu yao,” I said.

“You want girl?” asked another, offering us his card.

“No,” Five-foot said.

“You want girl, you call me,” he said. “I’m your man.”

Five-foot took his card but threw it away when we walked down the road. These offers continued and we got sick of them so went back to our room for sleepy time. Once we were ready for bed the phone rang.

Five-foot answered and replied in the negative.

“What was that about?” I asked as he hung up.

“You didn’t want a massage, did you?” he asked with a smirk.

“Um, no.”

“Well, they’re available here.”

The hotel provided a complementary breakfast, which, the next morning, I chose to partake in while Five-foot slept-in. The restaurant on the ground floor wasn’t busy but there were enough people there for me to notice the room become silent as I entered. Ignoring them I went to the buffet, got myself one of everything because I didn’t know what any of it would taste like and sat at a large dining table by myself. The long bean and potato dish was as spicy as anything I had eaten in China, although the doughy buns were easily consumable. I couldn’t work out how I was going to eat the weird looking soup as the only utensils I could find were chopsticks. It was so spicy my nose was running just from sniffing the bowl. I left much of the food uneaten and ran to the shop for a bottle of water.

A small market operated in a quiet street surrounded by downed power cables from the poles overhead near the hotel. Five-foot and I braved the less-travelled path, my eyes following my footsteps while I avoided any possible live electrical current. The people in the street directed their attention at me as we headed to another large road. We walked past large shopping malls and high-rise buildings and arrived in the square in the city centre at midday. The large statue of Mao Zedong overlooks the vehicles and pedestrians moving around him in the centre of a giant round-a-bout. He was standing in front of what probably had been a grandiose building but was now in a dilapidated state with broken windows and crumbling walls.

The numerous food stalls distributing hot pot meals to people on the roadside emitted such spiciness just being near them made my eyes water. There were many options for food around but we held off from the spicier choices due to the tang of my breakfast still resting uncomfortably on my tongue.

We continued walking, passing many construction sights suffering from work either being abandoned or suspended. The skeletal constructions reached into the sky as birds flew from floor to floor.

We strolled around the river to the southeast of the city centre, and found the bus station we would be using the following day. Nearby, we indulged at a western-food restaurant, as I’d been scared off the local food. They dished up half-assed burgers on sandwich bread accompanied by warm coke.

Despite the brown water and ships in the distance, the river and trees reminded me of the Avon River cutting through Christchurch city surrounded by restaurants, gardens and old buildings. I laughed at the thought, as I have never been able to afford to eat at a restaurant by the Avon River. I had to travel to central China to have an experience similar to that.

The inner-city traffic and road conditions were mad, as drivers fought the way to get around Mao. Crossing the road was the usual fun experience and hopping out of the way of cars driving on the footpath was becoming natural to me. I had lost my trepidation for the sound of horns, although the odd one or two did startle me from time to time.

That evening, at a restaurant next door to the hotel we ate a meal called “Noodles over the bridge”, a hot pot meal based on the legend of a man who was working late, so his wife had to deliver his dinner. As it would always arrive cold she devised a way to keep the food hot during transport that included crossing a bridge. She’d found that using certain oils in the soup kept the noodles at temperature and a new cooking sensation was invented. Five-foot explained this in much more detail than I could remember.

There was a spicy and non-spicy version available and after experiencing what the term “spicy” means in Chengdu, both Five-foot and I wimped out and went for the non-spicy. Certainly, people in Sichuan can handle their spicy foods. With a bowl of soup boiling, we took raw meats and vegetables from a platter and threw it into the soup to cook. A few minutes later, we scooped it out and dug in. This is a great way to eat.

Before returning to the hotel room I stopped at a market over the road to buy some bananas from a vendor. I pointed at the bunch I wanted and he started up the bargaining. As a haggling beginner, I was becoming, if not savvy definitely less petrified.

“Shi,” he said to me, meaning Y10.

“Uh-uh, si,” I replied, offering Y4 to his dismay.

“Jiu,” he said, going down to Y9.

“No, wu,” I said, meaning Y5. This was as high as I was prepared to go, as this was how much I had seen Jan pay on our last trip.

“Ba,” he said, Y8 which I shook my head at.

“Wu kuai,” I said, reaffirming Y5 was the offer. He then stopped at Y8, and wouldn’t go lower, so I began to walk away. He instantly went to Y6, grabbing my arm to stop me. I said Y5 again and he let go of my arm. I took another step away and he called out Y5.

I paid and he ripped off the bananas from a larger bunch. I had just bought four more bananas than I had wanted. Maybe I had just bargained my way into the history books, actually winning in the exchange for a change.

While trying to convince Five-foot of this when I got to our room, a dubious frown showing his disbelief, the phone rang. He answered and replied in the negative again and hung up.

“Do we want a massage?” he asked me, as he had the night before.

The next morning, we were walking along the riverbank in remarkable peace and tranquillity on the way to the bus station, when we came across a couple of cops kicking and slapping two young men. There was a police car parked beside them, rear doors opened and it seemed the aim was to kick them into the back seats. Whether they were thieves or jaywalkers, we didn’t know but the cops didn’t care that they were doing this in front of a growing, interested crowd.

The cops looked up and stopped, mid-kick, to stare at me. It was second nature for many Chinese to be surprised by my presence, and for the cops it was no different. They looked at me looking at them standing over these two kids and then something clicked in their heads. They went straight back to kicking and slapping the boys into the car, and Five-foot and I continued towards the bus station without speaking.

13. The character building option

2007-02-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

We met Jan and Justin and spent the afternoon in the central shopping precinct of Tianjin stopping at Starbucks for a coffee before being approached by hundreds of beggars. One in particular was memorable. He moved around on a skateboard as he had no legs, and displayed his deformed spine with no shirt on his back. A ball of skin and vertebrae protruded out two inches from the small of his back. Seeing this deformity five minutes after spending Y20 on a hot chocolate made me question my priorities.

We went to the train station where Karl, Jan and I were leaving for Shanhaiguan, northeast of Beijing. Supposedly a short trip, we took the cheapest option available, the Y25 bench seats. As we were saying goodbye to Justin outside the station doors, a woman walked up to tell Karl and I to go home.

“China is a dangerous place,” she said, Jan interpreting. “You foreigners should go home.” It wasn’t clear whether she meant that we Caucasian foreigners are the danger or if she meant we foreigners are in danger. Either way, the situation seemed ironic when she began hitting me quite hard in the gut and chest.

The call came to board the train at 630PM, and the sweatbox with wheels offered no comforts. The train carriage was packed with people and horribly uncomfortable as with no air conditioning the air was sweltering. We fought our way past the many people in the aisle and booted the people in our seats off them. The panelled wood floor was covered in mud and grease and the walls were covered in condensation. It was loud, smelly and people shuffled about without really moving much as we were packed in like a stock truck headed for the freezing works.

Again we were the attraction of the month, with all eyes on the non-Chinese men, which was obviously intimidating me to such an extent that Karl felt the need to ease my nerves.

“They’re all saying ‘check out those two handsome devils’,” he said.

“I never thought of it that way,” I muttered under my breath.

After sweating it out in the sauna for twenty minutes, the train began moving, and with the windows down, the wind chill cooled us off.

People standing in the aisle had to lean on me for leverage as the train shook from side to side while we clipped along. There was nothing in the way of handles or bars for them to hold on to so all the people sitting on the end of the rows were used as props.

After a few stops, the crowded aisle began to thin out and people moved around looking for vacant seats to fill. A man stood beside me and used my shoulder as leverage, however he didn’t used his hands, his hip, or not quite as acceptable, yet at least understandable, his bum. Instead, he thrust his pelvis out and rubbed his groin against my shoulder. As the train rocked from side to side his penis rubbed against me repetitively. Uncomfortable with this, I bent over, moving my shoulder towards my knees, but his groin followed. I kept bending down further and once I had my chin at kneecap level, he finally got the message that he couldn’t lean on me like he was. I was near crying, near punching him in the face, and near throwing up when he gave up and moved on. I felt violated.

Jan and Karl were laughing, and I could understand their amusement. Jan explained and I had noticed it myself that Chinese people have less of a personal space than Kiwis. That may excuse some things, but not a penis rubbing against me. If it were a woman or child in my position it wouldn’t be funny at all.

The short trip turned out to be longer than anticipated, after a few excruciatingly long stops to let the express - read more expensive - trains go by. We passengers were forced to sit in the stifling heat without air conditioning again. With people disembarking with regularity, more space was available and families began to stretch out over the carriage sleeping under tables and seats, babies and small children resting on chests and bosoms. The floor was no less hospitable from earlier, mud and grease covering every square inch, yet they lay in it anyway.

Some men were drinking and playing cards loudly, throwing their empty bottles out the train window and having a jolly old time. All night, glass smashed outside as the train trucked on leaving their mess behind.

Night was upon us and the windows began to be closed as if it was too cold with the outside air flowing in. Jan began a running battle with two gentlemen across from us for control of our window, as they seemed to be freezing with it wound up, and we were stifling when it was wound down.

I finally stopped complaining about our surroundings after a while. Here I was going through a few hours of torture for the sake of saving a few dollars during my adventures and the rest of these people were just trying to get home.

The train finally arrived at Shanhaiguan at 1144PM, over-friendly taxi drivers outside the station as per usual, whom we ignored. Ignoring them didn’t work, as per usual, so we tried to tell them to go away, which also, as per usual, didn’t work. The cheap hostels said they couldn’t accept foreigners telling Jan the government wanted foreigners to use the more expensive hotels. We had to go looking for the next best option.

We reached the old town walls and followed the tall ancient stone construction northwards to a road with a gate to get inside. A taxi driver followed hell-bent on earning our dollar. None of the streets were signposted and no hotels were open. The taxi driver and his accomplice continued following, yelling that we needed their help.

It was harrowing, yet for some reason I was kind of enjoying it. It was a damn site better than being on the train, that’s for sure. I was the first to concede defeat though.

“What are we gonna do?” I asked the others. We hadn’t discussed what we were doing, and no one had shared a plan they’d thought of.

Karl’s nose was buried in the map that was illuminated by the dull street lamps and Jan was looking around aimlessly.

“Look, I can handle taking turns to sleep in one of the parks back down the road,” I said, “and I can handle jumping in the taxi, ‘cos he seems to think he knows a hotel. You guys need to decide.”

The taxi driver was standing beside us as we had our discussion, Karl waving him away and even pushing him away in his irritation. Jan and I moved over to the car while Karl looked up and down the road in desperation, as though he was searching for an escape hatch.

Finally, he conceded the defeat Jan and I were resigned to and jumped in the taxi with us. A five hundred metre drive later and the taxi arrived at the gates to a hotel without any signs. It looked more like an embassy than a hotel with six-foot high steel fences and a security guard on the gate. The driver had to lean on the horn for the gates to be opened, the staff not seeming too enamoured by our presence. Jan bargained for a room for us that proved a much better option than the park down the road.

Before I went to bed, I was thinking how stupid it was arriving at night, in a town without pre-organised accommodation.

“I’m never doing that again,” I said in the luke-warm shower, scrubbing my shoulder vigorously.

The next morning, we took a bus to Laolong Tou, Old Dragon’s Head, where the Great Wall meets the sea. There was quite a few people crowding around the entrance gate and an elderly Chinese man turned and asked me, in English, where I was from, which I replied to.

“Ah, New Zealand is a beautiful country,” he said.

“Have you been to New Zealand?”

“Yes, when I was young and an academic,” he replied. That made me wonder who this guy was. Judging by his age he could’ve been an academic before or during the Cultural Revolution, and if that was the case he either is an extremely lucky person to have not been targeted by the Red Guard or he was on the Communist party’s side. For him to have been allowed to go to New Zealand I was guessing the latter and for him to be an academic communist suggested a certain amount of power. While touring around the countryside, one doesn’t come across many elderly Chinese nationals who speak English.

“Why did you come to China?” he asked. “Are you an English teacher?”

“No,” I replied, “I… um… I came to see the sights.”

“Ahh, okay,” he said, nodding and wished me farewell. The conversation seemed to end abruptly, maybe because of my answer. I think he could tell I just reached for an answer that sounded nice.

Much like Badaling, the Wall at Laolong Tou was refurbished with polished stone and jotted out into the sea half the length of a football field. Legend suggests a dragon’s head was connected at the very end and has disappeared in time. We visited a shrine nearby and watched as speedboats filled with tourists swung around the sea taking them for a wild ride with no one wearing lifejackets. Maybe they were not a requirement for Chinese thrill-seeking companies.

Later, Jan, Karl and I had returned to Shanhaiguan looking for any kind of dinner available. The hotel we were staying in was situated within the old town walls, the northern wall being a section of the Great Wall. These walls collectively protect a part of the town that consists of run-down housing made of concrete brick and tin, streets ranging from shoddy to literally dug up pits, and a large communal dining area that looks more like the blackened concrete handball courts of New Zealand high schools.

Amongst this mess of bricks and tin, we walked down what, in a previous life may have been a street, but was now a narrow track wide enough for people to walk single file, planks crossing deep trenches to link with the shops on either side. The food shops looked half stocked with few cans and bags on the shelves. The people and place seemed to survive on very little with no cars to be seen and nothing much available in the shops. I was thinking the place was obviously a deprived area until we passed a plank that led to an Internet café filled with young people playing computer games like Counter Strike.

To one side of a small alleyway nearby, an unwashed, unkempt old man, dressed in crappy old clothes, sat on a bucket. His beard covered his chin and upper-lip in a black and grey fur while his eyes, half-closed with wrinkled corners, were fixed on me. My first consideration was that he was probably a beggar as he looked, dressed and sat exactly like many beggars in Beijing and other cities. He was staring at me like a lot of people did. Normally, saying “Ni hao” worked to get a smile out of people, so I tried.

“Ni hao,” I said, smiling, which was greeted with not a stir. He just continued staring.

He had probably been sitting there all day with nothing to do. I was waiting for him to thrust his hand or pot out to ask for money, but then a mobile phone rang. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a flip phone more technologically advanced than mine and raised it to his ear.

“Wei, ni hao,” he said into the mouthpiece as he looked into the distance. It was becoming more and more difficult for me to ascertain just how incongruous this country could really appear.

The southeast corner of the town walls had been breached leaving a gap for pedestrians and small vehicles to get through to the town outside where more restaurants and hotels surrounded the train station and major roads. A small roadside restaurant beckoned, and with Jan to do the talking, we drank some beer and ordered some food.

“Would we like to try the bird dish?” she translated for the waiter.

“Should we ask what kind of bird it is, or just say yes?” Karl asked.

“Just say yes,” we agreed on.

Three skewered birds the size of a robin were placed in front of us, barbequed charcoal black on the outside, with dry and bland meat on the inside.

I didn’t want to eat it all but Jan implied it was a bit of a delicacy and to not eat would be an insult. I smiled to the cook at the grill surrounded by caged birds inside and gulped down an extra bottle of beer to make up for the bland taste of the food.

“Why did you come to China, Chris?” Jan asked as we ordered another beer in case the taste of bird returned.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know either. To see the place, I suppose.”

Maybe I didn’t need a reason, I told myself. People make up reasons that are complete rubbish all the time, and all I did was buy a ticket, save some money and get on a plane. Why I needed a reason wasn’t really for me anyway. It’s almost as if people wanted my excuse for being there. I downed another beer and tried to not think about it.

We stopped at Beidaihe, a small coastal resort town due south from Shanhaiguan, as Karl and Jan wanted to go for a swim. They ran into the yellow sea, joining the many men in Speedos, and I was left on the beach watching the tide wash in plastic bottles, Styrofoam, and cigarette butts.

Fishing boats cruised the waters in the distance and what looked like oil drilling platforms sat on the horizon. Describing this place as a beautiful resort beach was a stretch. After her swim, Jan went for a walk down the beach, returning to report the cockroach-like bugs had taken over the rocks to the south, like Weihai and Chengshan Tou.

Salespeople interrupted our rest selling beaded bracelets and necklaces or shells off the seashore. Jan refused to talk to them as she had sworn a vow of silence in Chinese. When the touts noticed she was with two white men they saw her as the path to selling us crap. With her telling them she didn’t speak Mandarin, Karl and I were left to mock them instead.

The sales pitches were lasting anywhere from five seconds to ten minutes. One man showed us a shell, which we tried to ignore so he took another one out of his bag, which we tried to ignore so he took another one out of his bag and so on. I felt like paying him just to get lost. He tried to get us to buy one for Jan, pointing at the shell, then me, then Jan, who wasn’t watching.

“Jan, would you like this seashell?” I asked.

“No,” she said, not looking up.

“Sorry mate,” I said to the salesman, “she’s not keen.”

“Maybe if you showed us a different seashell,” Karl said, which the man seemed to understand. Finally he gave up and the beach was bliss again until the next sales people breached my sunlight bubble.

As we left via the promenade near the beach, Karl and I went looking for a toilet and Jan sat by the roadside waiting. There was some odd music growing louder by the moment and could only have been a band travelling around the area by vehicle. When we came back, the music was gone and Jan was pissed off.

“Did you see that?” she asked.

“What?”

“The band on the truck?” she said, pointing down the now empty road.

“Um, no.”

“Fucking Chinese people,” she said.

“Huh?”

“A band was throwing pamphlets advertising their show from a truck. On the truck with them were two caged lions and a chained bear.”

“Shit,” Karl and I said, looking at each other.

“Some Chinese people are assholes,” Jan added, looking down the road the truck had gone down, not hiding how upset she was. “This country is fucked.”

“Mmm,” we agreed half-heartedly.

“So, I’m going to get an ice cream,” Karl said. “Who’s with me?”

“Yup,” I said, “and you Jan?”

“No,” she mumbled, beginning to sulk, “I don’t feel like one.”

We nodded and walked over to the stall across the road and bought something chocolate in a cone each. As we walked away, one of the women at the stall said something to her friend.

“Fuck you,” Jan said in a rage and directed a tirade of mumbled swear words at the women at the stall. Karl and I stood frozen by fear. “She just said, ‘They’re so mean, not buying their translator an ice cream’. Fucking Chinese people.”

“Oh.” A lot of people thought Jan was our tour guide, which was kind of true since she did a lot of our bargaining, but they also thought she was our lackey too. It was a rough situation for her to be in considering she wasn’t expected to be foreign. At times this was a blessing, she admitted, but at times such as these, very irritating.

On the way to the train station the band with the caged lions and bear went past, still playing the terrible music and throwing pamphlets at people on the streets. I was instantly pissed off too.

The cages were barely large enough to fit the two fully-grown lions, and the bear was squashed into one by itself. Their plight was magnified further by the absolute din the band was making, with irritating noise from drums and wind instruments barely able to be described as music although loud enough to drown out the sound of the very sick diesel engine of the truck they were on. Any respect I had for the Chinese authorities and government was severely tarnished in that moment. If there had to be officers on every street corner in central Beijing policing the way pedestrians cross the street, they could afford someone to do something about caging lions and bears cruelly.

The people of this town followed our every movement just as every other group of people from every other town we’d been to followed our every movement. I was getting pretty accustomed to it but I couldn’t help but note it.

“Surely these people have seen a foreigner before,” I said. “I know it’s novel, but still, why do they get that interested in a couple of white guys?”

“It’s still a relatively new experience to see foreign tourists,” Jan said. “There just isn’t the same mixture of cultural heritage here compared to other countries.”

“Just consider,” Karl offered helpfully, “they’re all thinking ‘Hey, look at those handsome devils’.”

We bought tickets for a high priced train with fantastic interior, hot water for drinks and meals, well managed toilet facilities and air conditioning. It wasn’t just a contrast from the train to Shanhaiguan we had endured; it was a completely different world. I much preferred this stylish carriage, as opposed to the character-building option from a few nights previous.

We bid each other farewell and went our separate ways once the train arrived in Beijing. It was early evening and the sun had gone down when I walked to the subway to meet Meang in Wudaokou. On the steps down from the station square, I passed a man sitting on an old leather briefcase, attired in striped polo shirt, black dress pants and shoes. He looked up at me, smiled, produced a cell phone from his pocket and placed it to his ear. He didn’t dial, he didn’t press any buttons to receive a call, nor did he speak. He just kept looking and smiling at me.

I smiled back, trying to hide my bemusement by remembering to remain polite and continued walking down the steps toward the train platform. Soon, he strode beside me, briefcase in hand, not saying anything yet still holding this phone to his ear. I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my head.

Waiting for the train to arrive, he stood only at arms’ length from me, still with phone to ear, still not speaking and still watching me intently. I waited for the train hoping to lose him in the mad scramble for seats that was always on the cards.

Once the train arrived, people pushed on and off the carriages. I found a space standing in the aisle with my pack, while the man took a seat directly in front of me. His phone was glued in place and his silent, smiling gaze freaked me out more and more by the moment.

The entire ride, this man watched me with his phone up in position and not a word uttered from his lips. I waited and waited for the interchange station stop, feeling the pressure of this man’s interest in me, hoping he wasn’t a mad man but resigned to the fact evidence so far suggested that he was. I considered he could’ve been listening to a message service, but reception on the trains was usually terrible.

The doors opened at my stop and I practically leapt from the train, throwing my bag out like a lifeboat to land on. I looked to see if he was following me, but he wasn’t.

Still seated, he calmly pressed the aerial of the phone back into the casing, closed the phone with the flick of a wrist and placed it back in the pocket from whence it came. He was smiling to himself now, seemingly proud for whatever reason. The train began moving again and I spun on my heels, breathing a sigh of thank-fuck-that’s-over, and headed for my next train’s platform.

Sitting on the bench seat aboard the light-rail train as we were approaching Wudaokou, a few Americans stepped on board. I was soon engrossed, watching their every movement. As they stood around, chatting about sightseeing in the capital, I couldn’t help but listen in on the conversation. It was a big shock after a couple of weeks, to see foreigners and hear English in a conversation in which I was not involved.

And to an extent, I was actually thinking, “Check out that group of handsome devils.”

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

2007-02-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

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.

11. Speedos and seafood

2007-02-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

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.