My trip started with a taxi and bus ride from Vancouver to Seattle and from there a plane to Taibei. At the border I had a silly discussion with the immigration officer.
“How long are you staying in the States?” “About two hours” “Two hours?” “I’m just here to fly out.” “When are you returning to the US?” “I’m not.” “What do you mean,
you’re not returning?”
After a boring flight with mediocre food, I arrived. Taibei stank like a billion clove cigarettes. The signs were almost all in Chinese but eventually I found some in English and managed to catch a bus into town. The air felt hot and wet and they were digging up the middle of the street to build an underground railway. Street crossings seemed to be overly sturdy metal bridges, to be tramped up and down. The place generally felt grimy and industrial, as if it had all been built the week before. It interested and tired me at the same time.
In the city centre I checked into a low-rent backpacker’s hostel, stumbled off to a bed in a dormitory shared with 9 other people, and fell asleep directly. The next morning at breakfast, a westerner there turned
away from talking on one of the many phones in the lobby to ask me “Hey, are you free for a lesson this afternoon?” He noticed my confused look, realized I hadn’t come
there to teach English, and apologized. This exchange happened a few more times with different people. The foreigners there seemed all to be English teachers, with no
tourists. They all seemed to think “Why come here? There’s nothing to see. It’s boring.”
Were they right? At first I thought he must have been exaggerating. I could see a temple outside the hostel window! I saw the sights; Chiang
Kai-Shek’s gargantuan mausoleum suitably impressed. Snake Alley offered a quick fix of eastern excitement. Rows of merchants
sold counterfeit “copy watches” until a policeman came nearby. Then a whistled bird call went down the alley and within
seconds the vendors had all packed up and run away. The National Museum made the stop in Taiwan worthwhile by itself: I saw more cultural relics there than I later did in all of the mainland.
I wandered through parks and gaped at the crowded, busy and noisy streets downtown. For lunch I joined the crowds buying boxes from street corner
“slop shops”; carts or booths with pots full of vegetable and meat mixes. After a few days of this, I took the train to Hualian, starting off on a circuit around the
island. Two days in Taiwan’s beauty spot bored me thoroughly; the city didn’t impress with its beauty and negotiating it in English proved difficult, so instead of
continuing around the coast I took the train back to Taibei and flew out.
The flight to Hong Kong landed at the old Kai Tak airport. Even though we came in from the sea and didn’t make the most dramatic possible landing, it still gave me a small thrill
to fly in with skyscrapers around us in all directions. The terminal had English signs everywhere, and
when I got outside I couldn’t smell any clove cigarettes, to my great relief. I easily found a bus that dropped me off in Tsim Sha Tsui, and without too much
trouble located Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong’s low-rent tourist refuge. Outside, a sea of touts all tried to drag me off to their guest houses.
Inside, bored queue victims slumped wearily against green walls which looked filthy under the fluorescent lights. I joined a tremendous queue of people melting on the floor
while waiting to enter a lift. On the seventeenth floor of A block, I checked into the Travellers’ Hostel. The closet-sized room I finally got (and shared with three
people) didn’t look like an appealing place to sit around, so I went back out again to see the sights.
Immediately, I got lost. The streets were narrow and incredibly busy, with people bustling everywhere and honking horns and flashing lights and neon signs.
The roads split and met each other at crazy angles and I hadn’t yet learned any of the landmarks.
Also, half the place seemed to be under construction. I did eventually find my way back, and after a day or so learned to navigate the
streets; Kowloon isn’t really very big so it’s hard to get badly lost. I stayed in Hong Kong for three weeks, reading up on China, collecting papers to travel there,
and seeing some of the many sights. The Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery caught my eye particularly, but I liked the views from the Peak as well.
The people in Hong Kong were generally more interesting to observe than the sights, and the newspapers provided an endless stream of weird and horrifying yet
fascinating stories. One day I read about two neighbours in the New Territories (Hong Kong’s countryside) who found a pile of rubbish on their mutual property line.
Each blamed the other for putting it there, and their argument escalated until they settled it with a crowbar and axe. The neighbour with the axe won when he killed
the other. Another common sort of story involved people getting into a punch-up in a queue and eventually somebody being killed. People there told me these things
always happened in summer, when the weather is oppressive enough to drive anybody crazy.
An American couple in the hostel found an unusual way to make trouble for themselves. They had just returned from China and hated it. Fed up with small irritations and constant hassle, they had arranged their tickets out, gone to the airport and checked in. In the waiting area the woman suddenly got up, said “wait here” then went and stole some trivial thing from a duty-free shop and got caught! She went to jail. They both missed their flights (and couldn’t reschedule them). New flights used up all their cash and more. They were in big trouble. Why had she done this? He didn’t know but guessed she had just wanted some small bit of revenge. Visitors to China then very often came away hating the place, and many of these people grumbled freely about it.
One night I sat as a movie extra in a Jackie Chan film, “City Hunter.” If you’ve seen the movie you’ve seen me, briefly: I’m the tall guy with glasses in the tuxedo,
at a small table near the stage in the bar of the Fuji Maru. The studio paid me some $45 US to sit at that table with a pretty girl and be served drinks by
even prettier girls in skimpy costumes. It sounds like a dream job but I found it tiring and uncomfortable. One night sufficed for me.
Late in August, I finally moved on to China proper, arriving at an unknown train station in a concrete wasteland many kilometres from the centre of Guangzhou (Canton). When I tried to get on a bus to go into town, I heard a high-pitched wailing from behind me and noticed the Chinese people around me all jump back quickly. From around the corner of the bus appeared a small man apparently about a hundred years old, but obviously in good shape as he grabbed me by the backpack and threw me out of the way before scrambling onto the bus. The bystanders had a good laugh at that and I eventually managed to squeeze in. I squeezed out again in the centre of town, crushing a few arches and destroying a few hairstyles. The sun had already set so I wandered the streets in early evening looking for a cheap place to stay. I didn’t find any so settled in a medium-priced hotel.
Guangzhou hadn’t looked too appealing in the time I’d spent wandering, so next morning I found my way to the city docks and got on a
boat to Wuzhou, a small town up the Pearl River near the border with Guangxi province. Third class on this boat comprised two stacked platforms separated into trays
just big enough for one person each. I found it comfortable enough, with good food. My fellow passengers sat quietly, minding their own business. The scenery appealed, too; as we moved inland it became less crowded and
much quieter and it started to feel more like a foreign country.
Wuzhou appeared as a simple concrete dock, a set of giant steps leading into the river. I found the bus stop quickly, bought a ticket and pressed on again. The bus wound its way over scenic hills covered with scrub and little trees. We stopped in several small dusty concrete villages, where I tried frantically to match the names on the signs against the characters on my map before we rolled away. Several times we passed minor accident scenes on the road. The bus rattled and clanked in a way that suggested imminent breakdown but we made it.
Yangshuo contrasted well with the dusty concrete blocks we’d passed on the way there. In 1992 it hadn’t grown too much, and older-style buildings made up half of town.
It had already established itself as a backpacker’s ghetto, however, and at night one could wander down the street and choose from many small and cheap restaurants
of dubious quality. I tried to apply the usual rule for these places and eat in the popular ones, but it didn’t work. Too many other people also wandered the streets
looking at crowds, and restaurants would remain empty until one of us, perhaps a previous customer, sat down, at which point they would quickly fill as all the street
wanderers flooded in. It didn’t save me, anyway, and my first case of traveller’s diarrhoea kept me there longer than I had planned. This didn’t really
stop me from doing much. I cycled around villages and climbed a nearby rock formation, called Moon Hill because it has a crescent moon-shaped hole. The food in town
tasted good despite its lack of hygiene, so I found it easy to while away an afternoon sitting in a restaurant and watching interesting street life.
In the evenings, local people held outdoor math classes with the assistance of a loudspeaker, a spotlight and a cheap blackboard. They also went fishing, using
cormorants which would dive into the river and gobble up a fish. To stop the birds from swallowing their catch, the fisherman had fastened tight-fitting rings around
their necks, and when the birds came up with their fish they would tease them out of their gullets and into the boat. Their catch for the night looked small but presumably they made up for it all in the income from the crowds of tourists watching.
I left Yangshuo after ten days, taking an uninteresting bus ride west to Liuzhou, from which I caught a train on to Kunming.
We bought local food before boarding. Mid-autumn festival was near in time then so shops stacked great
piles of mooncakes, a sort of small greasy pie stuffed with sweet bean paste and an egg yoke. The shops also stocked various sorts of candies. Small cupcakes with a sort of sponge-rubber texture were very popular although quite plain-tasting.
While wandering Liuzhou on this shopping trip,
we stopped to look at a movie poster and a crowd began to collect around us, just watching us. We forced our way out while
there were still few enough people for that to be relatively easy. The train arrived, we got on, and rode went through scenic country but this did us no good for sightseeing purposes as night
had fallen then and the whole ride took place in the dark.
Early in the morning, we arrived in Kunming, a modern-looking concrete wonder. Yunnan province is known for its mild climate and most people
rate Kunming as one of the nicer cities in China. In World War II it had tremendous strategic importance as the end of the Burma Road and the base of the Flying
Tigers. Travellers can’t see much of this now, but on a hill just outside town one can see the Bamboo Temple, a rare surviving bit of culture (or perhaps one
rebuilt after the Cultural Revolution). Kunming’s back streets also contained many interesting sights, such as black-market rabbit dealers and mysterious
market stalls. My curiosity particularly was piqued by a birth-control poster with a happy mother, father and baby beaming above the slogan “1+1=3”.
People-watching was another easy attraction, because people in China like to stare and accept it. Fistfights drew the biggest crowds and
these appeared everywhere, every day. Fighting seemed at times to be the Chinese national sport, and they indulged themselves for the smallest reasons. If two
crowds tried to cross a street in opposite directions, the high chance of a fistfight occurring made it worth stopping to watch.
Their activities descended a scale to more passive pursuits, too: In a city park, old communists played party tunes and danced and clapped in their blue pajama-like uniforms. I went into a large
department store to buy some small item and found the staff all sleeping on the counters.
Language difficulties abounded there and elsewhere in China, although they rarely caused trouble as the infinitely practical Chinese worked around such minor nuisances as the lack of a common language.
Strangers ran up on the street shouting “thank you thank you” for no apparent reason, except perhaps a gross misunderstanding of English. On the other hand, I quickly
learned not to ask for directions. When people answered, the answers I got rarely made sense. If they did make sense they were usually wrong, but I suspect this
resulted more from some Chinese inability with directions than from language troubles.
To get out of Kunming,I needed to buy a plane ticket, and this meant going to the office of CAAC and standing in line. Queue-jumpers abounded there
and overwhelmed the lone queue policeman, so getting to the ticket desk required a bit of direct physical action. Recalling the little old man in Guangzhou, I
simply picked up the worst queue-jumpers and threw them to the back of the line. Less pushy ones I only pushed aside. Looking back, one can easily see how arrogant
and rude this was, but in China and other places I often found myself in these situations where if I behaved in a polite and respectful manner local people
would trample me. This has remained one of the more problematic issues I’ve faced in years of travelling; how to balance a respect for the people you meet with
practical needs. I think it is difficult because local people sometimes don’t make any special concessions for foreigners, and we in turn don’t know any better way
to do things than to join the crowds at the wrong time or the wrong place and fight.
Despite these battles, I did get a ticket. From Kunming I flew to Xishuangbanna, a triangle of land between Laos and Burma. The people there are mostly not Han Chinese
but hill tribes and minority groups such as the Dais. The Mekong is very young there and the landscape hilly with lots of terraced farmland. Where most of China seemed rather dry and dusty, this corner of it closely resembled the jungle scenery one associates with south-east Asia.
The capital, Jinghong, had an excellent restaurant serving strangely-named but tasty dishes like “deep-fried cow hide,” “strange-tasting
vegetables” and “fried river moss”. The colonial-style guesthouse had a pleasant veranda with bamboo furniture and river views.
Despite this pleasant atmosphere, Jinghong didn’t compare in interest to the things one could see on a day trip to the countryside.
Market days were good times to see the tribal villages farther into the hills. Tramping around one such village, I shot photo after photo as colourful people struck
impressive poses. The muddy streets tossed up some bonus sights, also; a giant satellite dish on top of a mud hut, and a crowd of young Buddhist monks waiting outside the
door of a small mud video cinema showing “Terminator II.”
Flying back to Kunming proved no easier than flying in from Kunming. The airline staff told me I could not fly earlier than Friday that week. Every earlier flight was
full and no amount of begging got me a ticket for Wednesday, when I wanted to go. Back at my hotel I mentioned this to a friend, a German Sinology student,
who also wanted to fly back on Wednesday. “No problem,” she assured me. Then she went to the office and, weeping and wailing, explained how she had to fly back
immediately because her father had just died. When she got her ticket I suddenly appeared and she added that I had to go also because I was her brother. Suddenly I had
a reservation for Wednesday on a flight that the airline had said was completely full.
At the airport Chinese officials and businessmen waited impatiently by the waiting room doors. When the plane landed the doors opened and they flooded out, racing to the
plane to get into their already-reserved seats. This seemed like crazy impatience but they may have known something I didn’t. As I got on the plane, two passengers were
pummeling each other with bare fists over their choice of seat. The co-pilot came back and broke it up, without getting himself broken up, and we flew off.
From Kunming I took an overnight “sleeper” bus (with beds instead of seats) to Da Li, a famous stop on the old Burma Road. Da Li is China’s other backpacker’s
ghetto, after Yangshuo. China supports a few of every known species of traveller but Da Li
particularly attracted neo-hippies, backpackers and self-anointed “Travellers” wearing strange tie-dye clothes and ethnic pillbox hats. They were largely English and
European with lesser numbers from Canada, the U.S.A., and other places. The town sits on a hillside above a lake, and is walled
with gates at each end. It has a long history, partly as capital of a small independent kingdom, and around town are colourful temples
and buildings.
I rode a bus one day north to Lijiang, a town in a green valley in the Tibetan foothills with even more colourful old
stone and wood houses. In some ways it looked like central Asia, which after all was not too far away. Locals told
horror stories from the Cultural Revolution but in the nineties it was quite a peaceful place. The people there
were another minority group, the Naxi. Their society is matriarchal and women run everything while men do the
menial jobs. Women still took my order in the restaurants but if they didn’t like it they just told me what to eat.
Lijiang remains one of the most memorable places I’ve been. Near town there are many scenic treks to be made, Tiger Leap
Gorge being the most famous of those. The thought also tempted me of
simply striking out despite rules and heading for Tibet (and in fact people do exactly that), but it didn’t tempt
me seriously. I did wander up and down hills and out to see the famous Dr. Ho and his herbal medicine/tea shop.
After a few days I hopped another bus back to Kunming. In these recent bus trips my count of observed fatal accidents had soared ever higher. Every road trip in China seemed to toss up another crash scene, and most trips were much worse than my initial impressions during that ride from Wuzhou to Yangshou. I particularly remember one ride in Yunnan where all the bus passengers gaped open-mouthed as we passed the naked body of a dead woman lying in the middle of a road. How had she come to be there? Had she been hit by a car and then had her clothes looted by someone? Simply dumped there after being murdered somewhere else? Of course, I never learned the answer.
However dangerous it seemed, China’s traffic probably kills a lower percentage of people than in a lot of other poor countries. This
early exposure to it taught me a good lesson; things like Malaria and petty crime tend to concern us much more than they should. To stay alive in these poor
countries, one should really try hard to exercise good sense about which vehicles to ride in. Statistics back this up; surveys regularly report that traffic accidents are the number one cause of death among tourists.
Back in Kunming again, I fought my way through the airline ticket queue one more time and onto another airplane, then flew to
Xi’An, the most ancient Chinese capitol. The city may be ancient but it also had the most modern airport I saw in the country.
In fact, it had many sights. Most foreigners know best the buried funereal army of some six thousand terracotta soldiers built by the
first Emperor of China. Lesser things to see included the city wall and various museums. At the time I visited the local government had gone a bit crazy with
foreigner’s prices, causing me considerable annoyance. I didn’t mind paying $9 US to see the terracotta soldiers, even though it was ten times local price, but I
absolutely refused to pay $5 to climb the city wall or $7 to get into a third-rate museum. The city itself, a curious mix of the oldest civilization and the newest
construction, offered many pleasant strolls. After seeing the sights I settled down in the Small World restaurant, on the main road in the southern part of town. There I could always find someone to sit and chat with, discussing anything from Chinese history to
international politics. The cold and damp weather there at that time encouraged this idleness.
From Xi’An I took the train to Beijing. Where Xi’an had somehow seemed cold and dark, Beijing seemed bright and sunny. In fact, it was October already and the
temperature was nearing winter levels, but the broad streets and open squares of the city made it seem warmer. Beijing more than anywhere in
China abounded with cultural sights, and it presented a microcosm of Developing China. One could travel the inner city on an underground railway, popping up in front of historical sites hundreds of years old. The Great Wall, an ancient defence, lay just north of town.
Underneath downtown Beijing lay a more modern defence; the “underground city”, originally a series of air raid tunnels to protect the government against a nuclear attack from Russia.
When I visited they used it for housing and shops. Back above ground, temples and Parks dotted the city, as well as numerous shopping districts where
souvenirs from across China were offered up.
Many of the cultural sites seemed boring and empty. This included the Temple of Heaven and Forbidden City. While touring the latter, I
recalled the National Museum in Taipei. The curators there had maintained that the history of China showed in "small things" rather than architecture.
At the time I had wondered if this was a self-serving rationalization: the museum in Taiwan could only show small things because those were all the Nationalists
could carry off when they fled from the mainland. From where had they carried them? Now I had a good idea. I don’t mean to suggest that the Nationalists were
completely wrong in this. Had their mountain of loot remained in China it might well have suffered the fate of so much of the rest of China’s cultural relics, and
been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Beijing’s ancient cultural sights were barren but at least they still existed; that was an improvement over
what I had seen in the rest of the country. If not for the natural setting and street life, many people
would simply conclude China has nothing to see. The most famous sights around the country seem to prove the rule by being exceptions; the Terracotta soldiers have
survived for thousands of years because they lay buried and unknown during the Cultural Revolution, only dug up in the 1980s.
Another famous cultural survivor, the Great Wall, took too much space and piled up too much material to destroy (although nowadays they seem to be trying their best.)
I thought I knew the statistics of it beforehand but found it quite a different thing to see it stretching along sheer cliffs and over sharp peaks, off
to the limits of vision in each direction. I had heard all sorts of hype but it in no way ruined the sight. It was simply and literally the most awesome thing I had
ever seen. I could stand on it for hours picturing it in reality and in my mind’s eye, envisioning it stretching off to far away western wastelands, imagining
trekking along the entire thing.
Beijing city life amused for endless hours, as Hong Kong’s had. The bus system particularly entertained me, topping even Guangzhou for aggressive crowds. There were
no traces of line-ups, just big mobs trying to get on the bus, which was already packed, while other big mobs tried to get off. Your only real hope if you
wanted to take one of these was to wait in the crowd at the first stop and swing your elbows wildly around you while lunging ahead of the mob as it surged in
through the bus doors. Getting out may have meant climbing out the window to get off the bus again, but you only had to pay about half the time because often the
conductor couldn’t reach you through the crowds.
My dormitory in the Hotel Qiaoyuan turned up even more interesting characters than I had met in Da Li. Every night I could count on being woken up at about three o’clock by a young Japanese man grinding his teeth in his bed on the other side of the room. I later discovered that this is common among Japanese travellers and infinitely preferable to screaming, which some also do in their sleep. One Sunday morning an old Spanish man down at the other end of the row began his prayers. By the time I came back in the afternoon he had reached full flight, weeping miserably at the thought of the crucifixion. However, he paused briefly to greet me in a calm and collected voice as I came in the door.
Getting a train ticket back to Guangzhou made my earlier airline battles in Kunming look trivial. At the station I went through several wrong queues, often arriving at the front just as the clerk decided to close up for a break. After a few trips there I lost patience with this and got my ticket by towering over clerks and refusing to move until they told me or gave me what I wanted. Others fared even worse than I; I recall an Israeli man shouting at a woman in a counter “This is a foreigner’s ticket office; you MUST speak English. Now give me a ticket.”
The train ride itself was a much more pleasant experience; I travelled in “hard sleeper” class, taking the middle bunk in a six-bed compartment. At that late time of year the countryside had turned grey and brown but the trip offered a chance to rest and reflect. Guangzhou seemed even more ugly and hassle-free than when I had first arrived there, so I wasted no time and didn’t even attempt to cross the border by train. Instead I took an expensive mini-bus direct from the train station to Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong. I no longer cared about costs and fuelled my mad rush for Hong Kong with a steady flow of money, keen to return to comfort.
© 1997-2004 Stephen Bougerolle - all rights reserved