Why travel?
Posted in China | By tim |
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.
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