Change is going to come
Posted in China | By tim |
Sleep is comfortable until 9am when a cold shower wakes me up for today’s ferry catching. We check-out and grab some food on the way to the port. I leave Llew with the bags eating breakfast while I trek off to do some brief supply shopping. Since we have such a long journey ahead of us, I decide to stock up, but carrying ten large bottles of beer in my arms, half a mile down a hot, dusty road proves to be a bit of a challenge. I am rewarded by a million smiling Chinese stares and all I can do is laugh and pretend I’m doing a deodorant ad for Lynx.
Our little incomprehensible friend on the 3rd floor of the backstreet ferry office has some bad news for us. His “felly engine ithe wlong[sic]” which we take to mean his ferry is inexplicably broken or else non-existent. Luckily he is prepared to refund us and apologises profusely but nothing he can say can reinstate our plans which now lie in tatters. Surprisingly unfrustrated – we’ve grown used to expecting the unexpected now – we catch a bus back to the other Pavillion port. Here we are lucky to get tickets on another boat leaving at 6pm tonight. It is even slightly cheaper than the first. We dump our luggage and aim to fill our afternoon at the Pavillion itself which was on our to-do list anyway. The Pavillion is another typically commercialised Chinese tourist place, consisting mostly of over-priced trinket shops and over-descriptive Chinglish. In the heat we fall asleep on benches inside the walls and while away the time that way. Later we head for a huge slap up meal which is superb.
We talk of home, day-dreaming of cool summer drinks in Cambridge, English food or rowing at sunrise – all thoughts designed by our subconscious to spirit us away from this world and keep our sanity intact. As we board the ferry I am sweating more than ever before – it really is very, very hot today but still the sun stays weakly behind its cloudy shroud.
We have decided to change our pre-planned route quite drastically once we reach Chongquing. Originally we intended to travel by train down through Guiyang, Guilin and Canton – three major cities on the route back to Hong Kong. But we are tired of cities. Tired of the dirtiness and the relentless building work. Also, the train schedule means we would get at most three days in each city – not enough time to get to see them properly. So we have changed our minds. Now we will travel by train to Kunming, Yunnan province in the south-west corner of China and then by bus to Dali, an ancient walled town and a mecca for travellers, still in Yunnan province but at the Tibetan foothills. There we can spend a week in more relaxing surroundings and meet some other travellers. Finally, to get us back in time we will fly out of Kunming to Hong Kong. It’s a more expensive option but not by much and it will be far more enjoyable.
The ferry is a bit scabby but we have a sink and air-con – all the necessities. It seems pretty empty. As we set off we sit on two beds facing the window with the last of our unreplenished stock of English books and the sweat running off us in rivulets. At least now we know we can relax totally for three days. And the scenery? Reeds, flat reeds as far as the eye can see.
Doing our washing in a huge bucket on the foredeck, we bump into a young Chinese lad who speaks some English. We soon realise any thoughts we had of peace and quiet are to be nullified by this one lad who hopes to spend the next three days with us practising English. Oh thank you lord. He is nice enough, but it is late in the evening and neither of us is really in the mood for small talk. His pronunciation is terrible – “Lolls Loyce” being his most memorable phrase, leaving us puzzled for minutes in a conversation on high-class cars. Later, he returns with five student friends of his, three girls and two more lads, all travelling together on our boat. They would provide an interesting insight into Chinese student life I’m sure, if only I could keep my eyes open and concentrate on asking them profound questions.
Talking to them is made even more difficult by the need to cope with their never-ending flow of compliments for us. Flattering though it is to be constantly told we are strong, tall, handsome and beautiful, we can hardly reply. Although these students are our age, they seem remarkably innocent and immature. I guess it is the result of over-extensive censorship on everything they are told and a very careful policy to ensure children grow up slowly. The difference is very noticeable. When I ask them whether any of them have girlfriends or boyfriends, they look at their feet very shyly and then shake their heads. At University, girls and boys sleep separately in bunk dormitories of twenty or more in what must be rather worse than an extension of English boarding school-style life. I can’t help feeling sorry for the lack of privacy they must endure during some of the most important years of their adult lives. However, the legal marriage age in China is 20 for women and 22 for men, so I suppose there is no rush.
Another very clear example of censorship comes when one of the girls asks us about the Tiananmen incident while reading our guide book. We read out and explain the story as it is written in our book including the rather tragic part where Chinese tanks drove through and over groups of student demonstrators. Our Chinese friends have obviously been only told a fraction of the truth since they claim there were no tanks and no deaths – only arrests. Even when we describe our personal memories of watching the tanks squash one particular demonstrator on BBC news at the time, they are unable to believe our story. In the end they agree on a compromise between the two stories but seem to have been so heavily brainwashed into thinking the Chinese news agencies publish the whole truth and nothing but the truth that they are unprepared to believe anything different. I had no idea censorship could be that effective. Llew and I hurriedly try to usher the conversation onto topics free from content we could be arrested for divulging.
Eventually, with promises to return tomorrow, they all go to bed and we collapse. We enjoy speaking to Chinese people for the stories they have got to tell, but it always seems such an effort to make conversation.
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