Below Belief

We wake at 6am no better for the experience, with mouths like rotting carpets, and force ourselves to get up. The train for Shaoshan leaves at 7am and thanks to our “friend” we have no tickets. Reality says we actually have no chance of getting to Shaoshan since queuing for tickets rarely takes less than an hour and this early morning proves to be the start of one long drawn out nightmare which we can only blame on our “friend”. When 7am has come and gone without buying tickets we sit around the filthy station eating dumplings, sipping water and plagued by begging children. We are both feeling unwell – more from the coffee than the brandy I think.
The only bus that goes to Shaoshan today is the 90 Y tour bus. The local bus which should cost 9 Y doesn’t go today because it’s Sunday. We decide to bin Shaoshan altogether and head back to Yueyang. But we need to change money and get the tickets. On a Sunday, and for non-Chinese speaking, hungover and exhausted Brits this just seems too much of an obstacle.
We eventually persuade our hotel staff to books us tickets back to Yueyang, even though we checked out this morning. Then we walk up the main street to the Lotus hotel where money can be changed today. They also have a pleasant coffee shop where our caffiene withdrawal symptoms can be tended. Sitting in there is a big low point on our trip. I look at the tickets and establish the departure time as 12pm. So we collect our bags, go back to the station and go through to the waiting rooms for half past eleven. Only there do I discover I have made a huge error and in fact the departure is at 16.22pm – the tickets cost 12 Y.
So it becomes apparent we have another four hours to spend in Changsha, Satan’s toilet. Even with the benefit of hindsight I cannot describe how bad this felt. We sit outside in the pouring rain almost crying with despair. Then, with almost deadly decisiveness we resolve to rectify our moods no matter what the cost. We go outside, get a taxi, go back to John’s cafe, order a three course Western meal and pamper ourselves completely. We stay until 3.30pm drinking, this time, endless cups of cold water and slowly becoming human again. It turns out to be the best thing we’ve done all week.
It is a good job we have repaired our mood because when we get on board the train, the truth about hard seat reveals its ugly self. Last time, it turns out, we had it easy. This time the carriages are stuffed. Every last inch of space is packed with Chinese people and their baggage. We force our way on, lever some room for ourselves and our bags and try to prepare mentally for the prospect of two and a half hours of this. We are standing with our bags under our feet in the gap between carriages. It is so hot that I soon look like I’ve had a shower and everyone else seems to be spitting, smoking or shouting. At least we are head and shoulders above the crowd and can breathe a little easier. When the train moves there is a slight breeze.
The most annoying thing is the people who try to move through the crowds – supposedly looking for some space where there is none. Two and a half hours of short, fat Chinese women trampling over my feet, and digging my ribs as they barge past, does my patience no good. Often the same woman comes back and forth four or five times. I have rarely been so unpleasantly confined. We command sanity and respect by singing rousing revival hymns at the top of our voices but it is our rendition of “Alice the Camel” starting at twenty humps that really winds the Chinese up…
My horror is complete when a steward attempts to wheel a fully-laden buffet trolley through the crowds. I just can’t believe it. Anyone who has ever witnessed a BR buffet trolley being wheeled along an Inter-City and seen the number of knees knocked and feet squashed will understand instantly the level of destruction and discomfort this one man manages to achieve on a train whose aisles are stuffed full of people who, for the way they are treated, may as well be heffers on a cattle train.
I cannot last one minute longer when we finally disembark and stand dazed on the empty platform at Yueyang. We wait there for a few long minutes in complete silence as the train moves off. The final straw is Llew discovering the bunch of bananas we bought for the trip has exploded all over the innards of his rucksack.
We nearly get ripped off by a taxi-driver who claims his meter is broken on the way to the cheapest hotel in town: at 70 Y a night our place of choice. The girls on the desk rebuild my faith in China. They are friendly and speak English. The nightmare is over. A relaxing cold shower and a fine meal in a nearby restaurant including lobster-like shrimps from a tank outside is all we need to bring life back. I think it is our dogged determination never to give in to frustration (oh, and the revival hymns) that keeps us going and carries us through.
I can’t help but think of Liz and how much a hug would repair my mood.

Rise at 9am to purchase the ferry tickets and find breakfast on the streets. This is successful and a tempting coffee at MaccyDee’s rounds off an enjoyable morning. The rest of the day is spent trying in vain to find an English bookshop and checking out of our hotel which proves unexpectedly expensive. We are charged an extra 50% for staying in our room after 12pm (at least we had a rest…) and I have to pay another £2 for a peppermint mouthspray which was in our room and I thought was free. Ripped off and fingers burning I change my mind about the friendly Chinese and see their sweet helpful little smiles as they present our bill to us as antagonistic…
At the ferry port after some rushed shopping and a KFC, we meet a french girl, Clare, who gains our respect for having travelled on her own for 10 months around India and China. She is remarkably non-mad for a lone traveller and we enjoy our first conversation with a third party not involving the sentence “Hello, can I practise my English?” for a good four or five days. Unfortunately she is not on our boat so we can’t continue the conversation, but we sit and chat to her while we wait, soaked in sweat after running to get here and sipping cool beers. She tells us that many travellers go downstream on the Yangtze since this means they spend less time on the boat. Perhaps this explains why we have seen so few Westerners on our upstream route.
The boat is basic but okay. We sit at the front, have our first glimpse of a clear night sky and enjoy some beers in the breeze and the moonlight. We end up having a particularly deep but enlightening conversation about home, and life until midnight comes around and beds beckon.
Saturday 12th July
Our overriding first impression of Yueyang as we berth is of a weary fishing port. The walkway pontoons are shrouded in a damp fog and it is drizzling. We console ourselves with a big breakfast of dumplings and noodles at a restaurant on the seafront. A young girl working there surprises us with remarkable English and comes over to tell us, without being asked, how to get to the station. This is the kind of helpful Chinese we like. Getting to the station is clearly documented in our guide book anyway but perhaps we look lost and bedraggled. Either that or our beards are a cry for help.
However, she is able to take us to a back-street ferry ticket office which seems a little dodgy but where we book our onward tickets to Chongquing. Writing out the Chinese request for these tickets draws our largest crowd yet, all fascinated as I laboriously copy symbols they recognise instantly. We consider passing a hat round for spare change and paying for our trip that way but don’t think we could stick the attention. The paper is passed around confusingly by the ticket man and his card-playing mates and when we hand over £40 each for the four day journey I just hope that the whole thing is legitimate. I get the distinct feeling we’ve come in through the back door and that it might just slam shut in our faces.
Anyway, feeling confident now we have our passage out of Yueyang assured, we are free to escape its confines and head to our real destination, Changsha and finally, tomorrow, Shaoshan, the birthplace of Chairman Mao. Quite why we seek the insignificant birthplace of a man whose ideas, while revolutionary, probably did more harm than good for the people of China, I never quite understand. It was Mao who instigated the Cultural Revolution, a period of four years in Chinese history from 1966 to 1970 during which all physical reminders of China’s ‘feudal’, ‘exploitative’ and ‘capitalist’ past including temples, monuments and works of art were ruthlessly destroyed at the hands of the so-called ‘Red Guard’. Schools, universities and monasteries were shut down and academics and artists were dismissed, killed or sent to hard-labour in the countryside. Mao was, it has to be said, a very unpleasant dictator – although inexplicably even after his death he is still raised to near God-like status in the minds of many Chinese people. Nevertheless, Shaoshan is our destination and a bus takes us to the station where we are in for another close encounter with the Chinese.
We barge our way into the ticket office and identify the appropriate queue by a series of mumblings, pointings and stabbing at the book. We are interrupted by a girl who speaks English and says she can help us buy our tickets. Expecting this to be an innocent offer to help translate for us, we are slightly taken aback when the girl ushers us outside – away from the gaze of the PSB and the sure sign of a scam – where her boyfriend produces two appropriate tickets and some pieces of paper. All well and good except she demands we pay 120 Y for the tickets and even to a foreign eye, printed on each ticket it blatantly says 14 Y. After a few trialling minutes standing in the rain, struggling to overcome a strange embarrassment which seems to prevent us walking away from these people obviously ripping us off and buying pucker tickets for ourselves, we manage to get her to drop to 50 Y for both tickets. This is just slightly more tempting than going back to queue for ourselves, so we take the tickets, refuse her bizarre offer to eat with them – no doubt more ripping off was intended – and run for the waiting train.
Hard seat is everything we have expected : scabby, smelly, full of smoke, noise and spittle. However, we do actually find seats and the journey passes reasonably quickly once we begin. In Changsha we find the “Railway Hotel” to be the most convenient, having as it does a main entrance leading onto the platform. We take a large triple room because it is oddly cheaper than a smaller double room – the logic escapes us too – and after dumping the bags head into town. We have some errands to run like changing money, buying train tickets for tomorrow and finding some English books to help maintain our sanity on the four day ferry trip. Walking towards the centre along a long straight road, we choose a reasonable looking restaurant and go in for lunch. As usual our timing is impeccable, we have missed the Chinese lunch time (whenever that is) and disturb at least eight waitresses from their own lunches. However, all eight are determined to play some role in the preparation of our table so we are instantly the focus of a whirl of activity.
The service here could be described as either sharp or tremendously inefficient, depending on your viewpoint. We make fools of ourselves ordering in Chinese and then discover the only other customer in the place speaks good English and could have helped us. He is eating a meal with his mother-in-law and her mother and, incredibly, he has not yet been eaten alive or even had his eyebrows singed by their dragon breath. It is clear that under such extreme conditions he has achieved such a calm state only thanks to the three bottles of beer which decorate his table.
The food is plentiful, if a little bonier and less hot than our usual choices. As we proceed, our friend, obviously keen to escape from his terrible company, comes over to speak to us and offer us beers. We are at first difficult to persuade. ‘Beers at lunchtime are never a good idea,’ we claim, filled with a kind of idealistic sobriety uncharacteristic of us. But this man is persistent and claims he, and the rest of the Chinese population, will all be mortally offended if we do not accept his willing hospitality.
Not wishing to anger a whole nation, particularly one full of 1.2 billion hot-tempered Chinese, we give in and accept a beer each. We understand about one word in three of the ensuing English ramblings but the gist is that he is filled with an enormous happiness because his mother-in-law is coming to his home city of Canton to stay with him and his wife. We can’t quite understand his emotions – he must surely be the only exception in a world full of men programmed to hate their mother-in-laws. Anyway, he claims it is the greatest honour for him to share his happiness and buying our drinks is a matter of pride because, he says, we probably have more money than him. Since his business is exporting leather-goods in Canton, this qualification is somewhat dubious but nevertheless we accept his hospitality. What follows is a slow and necessarily painful spiral into chaos.
After an hour we make our excuses to leave but he is having none of it and returns from the bar with a large bottle of Cognac. His various motherly relations tootle off to have a sleep somewhere and he invites us to ‘drink brandy and talk politics’. Questioning our ability to do the former and definitely knowing we can’t do the latter, Llew and I formulate a failsafe plan to get us out of this man’s fatal grip. It is quite simply to humour him, drink him methodically under the table and then make a hasty retreat once he can no longer walk. There is no plan B. We learn the Chinese for Bottoms Up! – Gampei! – and call the shots on knocking back half tumblers of this actually quite pleasant brandy.
We listen to his tortured English, nodding when it seems appropriate, as he proceeds to say very worthy things about the political-economic differences between China and Britain. I fail to understand the finer points of his argument, lost as they are in the slurred, cotton wool of his brain before even reaching my ears. Basically he seems to be very friendly but bitterly jealous of us and our freedom. Fair enough.
Our plan goes remarkably well, although it does call for us to consume a foolish quantity of brandy. When the bottle is finally empty, after many, many Gampei’s and our friend begins pulling other customers off their chairs and talking of karaoke, we decide it is time to leave. We bid him a testy goodbye and make a run for it. If he is not arrested by the PSB tonight he will surely be eaten alive by his mother-in-law when she wakes up.
The plan may have worked but it is now 5pm and we are no longer in any fit state to be running errands. We eventually find solace in a restaurant called “John’s Cafeo which has a string quartet playing and serves sobering coffee. We stay forever, laughing in disgust at our wasted afternoon, and whenever we finish our cups one of a huge number of hovering waitresses comes to fill up our cups. When we final stagger out at 9pm with ten or twelve cups inside us, our bodies’ are spoilt for choice on intoxicant – alcohol or caffiene. The trouble is with so much caffiene inside us sleep proves to be tormented and we both live to regret the afternoon’s behaviour.
I have vivid and tortuous dreams in which our “friend” turns out to be a Triad boss who hunts us down for forcing him to lose face in public in such an ugly fashion. I wake frequently to stare at the bright circle of light coming from the railway clock outside the window but always when I fall back to sleep I am in the same dream: running from the Triads. The night seems to last forever.

Breakfast is a rather repugnant vegetable stir fry with whole green chillis sold over the side at a local port. It is the best we can hope for. Llew has seen the on-board canteen serving what he referred to as sewage and I know Llew well enough to suppose that when he refuses to eat something, it must be really bad. I’d rather go hungry.
I sit writing this at the front of the boat in our viewing lounge which is pleasantly breezy and has huge leather sofas. A relaxing day reading on board is ended by a calming hour watching the darkness close softly around rural expanses of flat farmland. There are no stars, only dark clouds, but the flickering, twinkling lights of the ships and buoys ahead are beautiful. Peace and calm and time to think. This is why I have come travelling.
Back in the cabin a nasty leak from what we hope isn’t the toilet upstairs has left us with a growing damp patch on our carpet and an acrid smell. And we have been joined by two business men. They seem a little annoyed at first to be sharing their presumably high status 2nd class room with two scraggy Westerners but fortunately they cannot express their feelings in English so we sink into an uneasy silence and get along just fine.
Thursday 10th July
We arrive in Wuhan early – 7.30am. We disembark and try to buy our onward tickets for Yueyang but eventually discover – having painstakingly copied out the Chinese symbols – that we must buy them tomorrow on the day of departure. Undeterred we decide to head to the Yin Feng hotel, a short walk via some filling pancakes. The hotel is clearly too stylish for us. We have ensuite bathroom, a gym somewhere downstairs and satellite TV. We head out to see a temple, one of Wuhan’s scarce attractions. En route we pass through a street market which is probably more interesting and certainly more full of life. Amongst the chillis and the ridiculous vegetables are live frogs in bags, snakes, eels and chickens cooped up in cages, every now and then getting to watch one of their number having its neck wrung before being sold. But despite the background of nature at its harshest, the snacks being served up are delicious. One particular satay stall owner seems to take great delight in making the world’s hottest kebabs for us to eat. We justify ourselves and elevate our status by putting them away with delight much to the amusement of the Chinese, before dashing round the corner as gracefully as possible to purchase and consume two bottles of iced water each.
Later we try an authentic (that is, basic) restaurant and order by pointing at dishes other people seem to be enjoying. This works both ways. The Sichuan chicken dish we order is excellent (and hot) but the sauteed Eel not quite so good, bringing back as it does memories of the street market. Sucking pieces of squidgy fish from its backbone will never be one of life’s greatest pleasures for me, although, to be fair, it actually tastes pretty good and comes with a sauce containing whole garlic cloves. bRight up our street.

It is Isabell who wakes us today at 8.40am, twenty minutes before she promised, and finds us in no fit state to sight see. I get this sinking feeling that the relentless pace of yesterday is going to go on and on until we leave Isabell behind. It’s not that we are ungrateful for her showing us round, just that her pace and unending enthusiasm for finding Llew a wife never gives us much choice in what we really want to do – which is sleep some more. At least, though, she has brought us a great dumpling breakfast.
It is not long before we are herded onto a number 1 bus and taken to see a museum of Chinese history. Overriding most of our discussions is still Llew’s future choice of Chinese spouse and even Llew is getting worried now that Isabell might be serious in wanting to set him up with a good cook. I picture him shacked up with the large breasted lady from the restaurant last night and hurriedly usher the mental picture away; it’s not very pretty.
After a quick lunch in the same simple place as yesterday and a further recital on the piano to satisfy Isabell’s desires we go to our room to pack. Isabell insists on helping but eventually we convince her to leave. We have enjoyed her company and are grateful for it, but the whole experience has left us drained. Travelling is really about solitude, or if not solitude, then at least the freedom to choose what you do and when you do it. For me, being guided is what cheap American package tourists get and not what I really want. We wave her off, promise to write to send her some photos and then collapse for an hour, relieved we are finished.
When the cleaning lady seems to make it broadly apparent, even in incomprehensible Chinese, that we must leave, we gather our belongings and head for the port. Our taxi driver loves his horn (don’t they all?) and delights in giving us a ride we’ll never forget. My sarcastic laughter – designed for Llew – only drives him on and he seems to think he is impressing us with his film-style car chasing. The glint in his eye as he sends bikes and mopeds scattering makes me fear for China if she ever grows up and starts having private cars. Shaken, we arrive at the port and sit to wait for our ferry. A watermelon gathers us a large crowd and dark eyes watch us consume it. Later our “helper” from the ticket office makes a second appearance. Gossip or news of two whitemen clearly travels fast here. He invites us into his office to wait, which sounds remarkably civilised until he tells us he is a policeman. But we’re not under arrest, he just wants to practice his English on us. Once again we become reluctant guinea pigs for a pronounciation class. He is desperate to exhaust our small talk and wear our fractious patience paper-thin. We last for an hour and then make our excuses to leave.
Our boat has even more pseudo-class than the last one. On our floor are potted plants and leather sofas and in our room we have en-suite bathroom and TV. This is the life. There are four beds in our room and for a moment it seems we are to get two more passengers but one look at us is enough for them to change their minds and go elsewhere. This gives us the perfect opportunity to enjoy a spontaneous and relaxing evening drinking beers and eating the noodle packs we brought with us while watching, amazingly, the British Lions Rugby match in Johannesburg on TV. Just like home really.
It is not until long after we go to bed that things begin to go wrong. There is a lot of noise outside around midnight and suddenly our door bursts open and a young couple are ushered in by the austere stewardess. She switches on the light and the young couple are treated to what must be a truly horrid sight. Their gazes flit from the two prostrate Westerners lying in underpants and barely covered by sheets in hot and sweaty beds to the mountains of half-cleaned washing dangling from string across the windows, from the travel-worn rucksacks half spilling their contents of dirty socks across the carpet, to finally rest on the empty beer bottles and half-eaten noodle packs scattered over the dressing table. It is hardly an inviting sight for what I later presume could have been a honeymoon couple hoping to enjoy their first night of marital bliss. I wake up and smile half-lidded at them, but this could hardly be expected to help and their poorly disguised reaction of disgust is audible even across the language barrier.
They are ushered out and I turn out the light in the rather premature hope that now we might be left to sleep. In fact the stewardess goes off in search of a most unfortunate and awkward threesome of Chinese men who are substituted as our room guests and expected to make whatever use of the two remaining beds they can. They make considerable noise and in the end two of them sleep, rather willingly it seems, head to tail in one bed. Luckily, they leave at 10am and neither Llew or I move until then.

This morning we are up early, anxious to be looking our best for Isabell. For some reason we feel something is expected of us today and so we’d better look smart. This is difficult to achieve with few clean clothes and a ragged beard, but the thought is there. We spend the day traipsing round the Purple Mountain which is, for the Nanjing people, the equivilent of one of our stately homes. There are museums, temples and craft shops and a hugely impressive mausoleum built for Dr Sun Yatsen, the man who led the Kuomintang Nationalist party in the early 1920′s and who is hailed by many as the founder of modern China. Unfortunately his body was pinched and now resides, perfectly preserved, in Taiwan where the Kuomintang party sought refuge in 1949 from the newly formed PRC. And their leader’s body was not all they pinched, when they left they took with them the entire gold reserves of China. Good skills.
Ours is a day of interesting but exhausting walking. We learn a lot about Isabell and she a lot about us. She thinks Llew is very handsome – particularly in sunglasses – and can’t understand why he hasn’t got a girlfriend. Is there no end to this man’s powers? She has a boyfriend too. Today is the day I take my first real experience of proper Chinese toilets. These consist of a hole in the floor and two foot-plates, and usually, but not always, some sort of flushing mechanism. The ones in the hostel are, I’m assured, relatively clean but nevertheless the smell of ammonia is overpowering. The appropriate etiquette is something that must be experimented with – I certainly don’t get it right on my first go. Balancing over a stinking hole is not one of the easiest nor pleasant things I’ve ever done. But even this unpleasantness is beaten later by the sight of Llew scrubbing his underpants clean. It seems he has only brought one pair.
We eat in a very simple, basic, restaurant with Isabell. The food is delicious and prepared so quickly I wonder if they have all the dishes on the go all the time. The cook is a large-bosomed middle-aged lady who is very keen to check we are enjoying her food by sitting around watching us eat. Evidently foreigners are a rarity. Later we drink some beers in Jack’s Place while Isabell drinks tea and tries to determine the type of Chinese wife which would most suit Llew. This turns out to be one who cooks good Chinese food and doesn’t understand any English.
In a piano shop, bizarrely located two doors down, I am forced to play for Isabell, having foolishly revealed that I played earlier on. I manage to draw quite a crowd and it is good to know that with Llew’s singing ability and my playing we could always busk our way around China if we run out of cash.

I wake this morning after, on balance, not a bad night’s sleep. It is surprisingly cool and outside the wide, silty, chocolate-coloured waters of the Yangtze flow past us rapidly. We stopped in the middle of the night at Natong where the noise of dropping anchor sounded, to my dreaming brain, like a thousand jittery tea trolleys being wheeled along a metal corridor.
At 10.30am, all set to disembark at Nanjing, it suddenly transpires we aren’t yet at Nanjing, we’re at a small town called Yangzhou. Realisation dawns that we’ve managed to board the slow boat to China and it takes a minute or two to realise that the sailing times given in Lonely Planet are for travelling downstream rather than upstream against the current. All of our timing estimates are wrong. Still the nice thing is we have no urgent needs to attend to, no places to rush to, so we can just sit back and enjoy the experience of travelling itself. At the time, travelling seems to involve a whole lot more sitting and staring at passing scenery than memory ever recalls.
The stop does bring one good thing though and that is breakfast. There is a rush for everyone to get off the boat to buy their dumplings and noodles and to get back on again while some more lumpy looking freight is stowed on board. No one seems to understand the concept ‘to queue’ and it is a challenge to fight your way in, demand what you want and pay for it, then retreat rapidly clutching hot dumplings. The prize is well worth it and breakfast is filling and tasty.
Now all we can do is sit out on deck with our hats and our sunglasses, enjoying the heat and waiting for Nanjing to come to us. At 5pm, after a considerably longer time than expected, we finally arrive in Nanjing. In the port, we are faced with our first real taste of staring. All the Chinese and especially the older generation are incredibly curious of us and gather round to look. Just me buying an ice cream becomes a huge entertainment for them, especially as I misunderstand that the seller has no small change. We are once again indebted to an English speaking man who steps in to help is as we try to buy tickets and get hopelessly confused. Without this kind of polite help, progress would be very slow.
After an unneccessarily long taxi ride into the centre of Nanjing by a driver who seems to think we’re here to be ripped off, we arrive at the University where we hope to get some beds for the night cheaply. We are halfway through our ‘looking lost’ routine when a girl who turns out to be a student here offers to help. Our plan has worked. We are very grateful for meeting Isabell, as she calls herself, who proves to be extremely useful in our quest to get to know Nanjing. It turns out the taxi driver dumped us on the wrong side of the campus but Isabell kindly agrees to walk us over to the accommodation and within half an hour we have student rooms for two nights pretty cheaply. They’re on the 17th floor, have beds like planks of wood but have their own (Chinese) TV.
Isabell dashes off but says she’ll come back tomorrow at 9am. There seems to be little choice in the matter for us but we don’t mind – she thinks Cambridge is a “very famous University” and seems quite impressed that we study there. It must be our four day-old stubble making us look stupid. Directly opposite our block are some restaurants which look promising for filling empty stomachs. We have less than £7 between us but still manage a fantastic meal of Sichuan Chicken, Roast Duck and rice and dumplings plus six large bottles of Tsingtao and still have enough for a taxi fare tomorrow. It is without doubt the best Chinese food I have ever tasted, here or at home, and I am suitably impressed.
The beers are consumed at “Jack’s Place”, a quiet little bar over the road. Inside we swap our stories with Adrian, a traveller and general bum-arounder from Liverpool and Brian, an American studying Chinese here. It is good to talk.

Sleep at the hotel is refreshing although there is not enough of it. We intended to get up at 7am and go for our tickets but that was clearly too ambitious. It is 12pm before we are standing outside the ticket office and have that soon-to-become-familiar realisation that we’ve turned up in lunchhour. After a wait, obtaining tickets still proves tricky. Having found the appropriate ticket counter we survive only with the help of a local man who cannot speak any English but whose success in helping us lies in repeating loudly at the clerk whatever Chinese words we manage to pronounce. With our guidebook and much finger stabbing at words like ‘boat’, ‘today’ and ‘Nanjing’, we eventually come out with two tickets for this evening. A great sense of achievement overcomes us – the triumph of human spirit over the language barrier.
I jump forward in time slightly now to sitting in the ferry terminal waiting to depart. I am sitting writing my journal and we are the only two Western faces in a sports-hall sized waiting room stuffed with Chinese and their assorted brightly coloured luggage. Behind me are a dozen Chinese men all staring over my shoulder and exclaiming loudly as they watch me slowly write this sentence in English. They are incredibly curious to see us Lao Wai (lit. pale faces or foreign devils) as they call us, even in a place so seemingly Westernised as Shanghai. Wherever you look there are dark eyes trained upon you, watching your every move. There is no resentment or hostility, only a kind of curious awe. I’m sure if I had as little money as some of these people and saw some obviously relatively-rich Westerners strolling around, able to travel freely and having a great time, I’d probably think the world was pretty unfair. It seems their well-nurtured National pride prevents them feeling such resentment and presumeably the careful censoring of external news means that many of them know little about the rest of the world. If they do then they are deliberately given the impression that the Chinese are superior as a race. There seems to be nothing wrong with this though and the Chinese are, for the most part, remarkably courteous and helpful.
Jumping back, we eat lunch in Sichuan Lu, a street devoted to snacking. The fried and steamed pork-filled dumplings are really very appetising as well as very filling. A lunch for two costs £1.50. In one place we are called into a tiny restaurant to sample their dumplings and to be watched by a group of five or six people who we take to be the owners and cooks. Remarkably the owner speaks very good English, apparently from his “business in Europe”. He assures us that Llew has very good chopstick technique (and by definition I don’t!) but that we both eat like Westerners, by tearing the food apart. Quite how we should be eating we never find out but I fail to see how I could be any more dextrous or delicate in my rather awkward control of these two bits of wood.
We while away the afternoon in the Yuyuan Bazaar and Gardens. The Bazaar consists of a million and one trinket shops set in fabulous “real” Chinese buildings – putting me in mind of a Buddhist monastery. The gardens are a tranquil array of fishponds, bridges and houses, reputably 19th Century in design although we find that Chinese architecture seems to have changed little in two thousand years of history. Clearly they discovered the right blend early on – red stained wood in a snaking design – and haven’t seen fit to change it ever since. Either that or all the old buildings are modern fakes. Amongst the American tour groups we find some space to sit and relax and see more white faces than we’ve seen all day.
Certainly in the wait for the ferry we are the only ones. We had hoped there might be some Western travellers to meet up with on the ferry but it seems unlikely. Without exception our fellow travellers are Chinese with huge lumpy baggage, going home or going away we can’t tell, but they’re clearly either exporting or importing something. As the boarding gates open there is a huge surge of people – seats or beds are to be fought over. We sit back and let the crowd subside, hoping desperately that our 2nd class accommodation is not too heavily competed for. Luckily we get preferential treatment with a separate stairway and plenty of uniformed cabin crew to show us to our room. We are on the upper floor with windows onto the deck and the room is very nice… at least compared to things we could have imagined. There are two beds with rush matting and blankets, a sink, bedside lamps, velvet curtains and a blissful air conditioning unit.
A subsequent exploration of the rest of the boat justifies entirely our extra expenditure. Below us is a seething mass of people stuffed into 12 bunk dormitories (it’s worse on the floor below in 4th class). The air is hot, full of smoke and walking down there the nostrils are immediately assaulted by the acrid smell of urine from the latrines. There is no air conditioning, only fans to spread the smoke about. But to be honest the Chinese don’t seem to mind these conditions – I begin to understand now why they show no compassion for the conditions they subject their captive animals to: they quite happily subject themselves to worse.
They set about their business making noodles and tea with boiling water provided in huge jugs. Someone is selling bananas and watermelons, another ice-creams and a third, somewhat more tenuously, is selling poor quality women’s clothing from lurid manikins. We feel distinctly superior in that we can retreat to our cool cabin upstairs whenever we need to. Our toilet has a locking door and a wooden seat, their’s has no privacy whatsoever. Our cabin attendant, a chubby middle-aged woman in a badly fitting uniform, pops in to throw us (literally) our keys. And then once again to throw in some blue boxes which turn out to contain soap, toothbrush, flannel and combs – neatly increasing our feeling of superiority even if having them thrown to us makes us feel like animals in a zoo.
As dusk settles and the dockside lights recede, I spend a few moments leaning over the deck rail in the warm evening air, enjoying the breeze and watching this strange country go by. In four weeks we cannot hope to understand how the Chinese work. We can only watch them go, enigmatically, about their strange business and learn to give them some of the respect they deserve. Their cities may be polluted and wasteful but they are decent, honest, exceptionally hard-working, long-suffering and friendly. And they have a spark of life about them which is hard not to like.
Like the closet-romantic that I am, my thoughts drift to the future and to home and I wonder, not for the first time this trip, why it is that I actually come travelling. In my experience travelling can often be harsh, confusing, sometimes sad and frequently, great expectations are slashed by the unforgiving blade of surprise. But always travelling gives you an unparallelled ability to watch another world from the inside, to experience exclusive sights that others seldom see and to feel privileged as a first time explorer observing life’s wonderful spontaneity. Always it is interesting, stimulating, exciting and without doubt relentlessly and (when you’re not doing it) annoyingly addictive. All I know is that moments like these, watching the gently glowing lights on the bank as they float by and day-dreaming of everything ahead, can never be taken away; never written down or re-lived. They can only be experienced by actually being here and living through these minutes. And herein lies the attraction of travelling. It is not borne out of the conditions you put yourself through, but how they change you inside, how they make you see yourself, for the first time, from a different and enlightened perspective.
It is for all these reasons, positive and negative, that travelling appeals to me. Llew and I have decided to grow beards whilst we are in China. This is the second day of unshaveness and not the first, I’m sure, that I will live to regret the idea. However, as we both agree, this is probably the only time we’ll ever get to grow a beard and not have to be around people we know. How long I manage to last the experience without reaching for my Gillette Sensor, only the photos will tell.