We were woken up early to heated shouts, looked out of the third-floor hotel window, and saw a line-up of some thirty or forty bakers, dressed in regulation white overalls and caps, standing to attention like floury soldiers as their sergeant major stalked up and down the line shouting at them. This is the Chinese version of staff motivation. On seeing the bright blue sapphire sky shining eagerly above the black buildings, Clive and I were imbued with enough motivation to shower, get dressed and get out of the hotel in half an hour.
Near the bus station we met two men wearing cheap leather jackets and sunglasses, who pointed to their dusty red motorbikes. We bargained and got a price of fifteen Yuan to take us to the Yungang Grottoes. It wasn’t exactly Easy Rider, but the journey across the flat floodplains, along yellow roads, on the bouncy pillions of those little bikes was exhilarating nonetheless. Windswept, with dirt in our eyes and ears, hair sticking up everywhere, we clambered off at the entrance to the grottoes. The two men adjusted their sunglasses and roared off into the shimmering dust. Ahead and above us, the mountain ridges were outlined starkly by the bright blue sky in cinematic superimposition.
The Yungang Grottoes were carved out of and into the high sandstone mountains around 400 BC, the first of the Buddhist revival period and, it is held, the best. They are a series of fifty caves, each with different sitting Buddha figures and high pillars and walls of tiny intricate Bodhisattvas, used as cave-temples by the colony of monks here long ago. The detail and scale of the carvings are astonishing: giant sitting Buddhas, with feet bigger than busses, huge hands held out invitingly on which you could sit a whole coach party of tourists, wide noses and giant smiles, set against the smaller, repetitive decorative carvings in the cave walls, which are like a kind of holy wallpaper, some of which still retain patches of green, red and gold colour. However, the caves were as busy as they were breathtaking. You had to queue before getting a glimpse at each grotto, shuffling and pushing on the dusty paths, as the huge mysterious Buddhas watched the crowds unconcernedly. Perhaps they knew they’d be here for a lot longer than us transitory camera snappers with our peculiar forms of worship.
After we'd seen all we could of the grottoes, Clive and I walked around the corner of a sandstone cliff and were confronted, directly across the road, by a huge coalmine. The mine lay spread-eagled in a series of filthy huts, warehouses, and factories, ugly and black like a stain on the yellow land, huge smokestacks belching smudgy brown pollution into the innocent blue sky. Victorian-style wheel and pulley systems transported the coal from pit-faces to trucks. The trucks then fired their dust-addled engines and chugged off down the sandy roads, spewing black exhaust smoke behind them. The noise of machinery, engines, explosions and shouting men split the pristine sky. Miners, black and thin in the distance, trooped back and forth like rows of Lowrie stick-men. I pondered yet another incongruity in this dry, dirty region: a coal mine built behind the back of a smiling Buddha.
We hitched a lift to the Hanging Temple on a bus from Hangzhou, full of students and teachers from the Television University. At least, that's what they called it. Perhaps they meant it was a university for media studies, or perhaps for drama and the performing arts. Or maybe it really was a university dedicated to training young Chinese for acting in the two kinds of popular soap operas in the country: either tacky, predictable romances (the man always tall, quiet and deep, never showing his feelings, and the girlfriend hysterical, with a penchant for bursting into uncontrollable tears and screams in every episode), or gong-fu stories, set in ancient times (the men either porcine and comical, bearded and nasty, or long-haired and handsome, the girls either an evil queen, a cute and cheeky sister or a stunning damsel who always needs rescuing).
Our coach inched ever-slower round treacherous turns with sheer drops plummeting below, onwards and upwards so slowly, into the spectacular peaks of Shanxi province's Heng Shan mountain range, the floodplains stretching like an endless yellow sea into the distance, the yellow mountains, with their wind-blasted, rain-warped, sandstone rock formations slowly crowding around us. Tiny mountain villages huddle in the nooks and crannies of the rock, mud huts with small areas of irrigated field that looked dried-up and fruitless. Some of the villages consist of cave-houses hollowed out of the mountainsides, rough little oblong windows and doorways winking from the side of the cliffs. It must be a tough, thirsty, physical life of hardship this high up in a cave-house with no running water or electricity, and I didn’t envy the villagers’ life here.
The day warmed like a turned-up oven, the sun beating down on the shining metal of the unsheltered coaches, which smoked and struggled up the slopes like an army of giant mechanical ants. Our bus ground to a halt, engine steaming. Feeling traitorous, we left our TV friends and tried to hitch a lift with one of the passing line of busses, but none of them would stop. Perhaps they didn't want to stop on this steep mountainside, just in case they never got started again. The TV coach's engine roared back to life and, shamefaced, we jumped on again to insulted looks. Half an hour later, we eventually reached the Xuan Kong Si, or Hanging Temple.
There has apparently been a temple on this site (a sheer, unforgiving cliff face of sandstone rock) since the Northern Wei dynasty, which makes the site more than 1,400 years old. In heavy rain, the Heng river, which used to flow right alongside the original temple, would burst its banks and wash away the temple with it. So, the monks came up with the ingenious (or crazy?) idea of building the temple higher and higher up the mountain face, holding the foundations of the temple steady on high stilts above the water. Every time the floods washed away the temple, they’d build it again, only higher up. The cycle of destruction and rebuilding ended when the Heng river was dammed off, leaving the temple literally hanging hundreds of feet up the rock wall above a dry bed of pebbles. Its name in Chinese, which translates as Temple Suspended over the Void, seems appropriate.
The temples are a chain of two- and three-story pagoda complexes with the sandstone face of the mountain as their back wall and a frontage of ornate carved wood, painted in reds and greens, hanging grandly, surreally, from the mountain. I'd love to be able to describe the insides of the temples, but we didn't go into them. As we approached the entrance, marvelling at the precarious beauty of this feat of holy engineering, we were confronted by a huge crowd of people. The Hanging Temple just wasn’t designed for this volume of visitors. Once you've queued in cordoned-off lines to buy your ticket, you’re let out into a wide open space, with no guards or ushers demanding you stand in line and wait; therefore, a couple of hundred tourists, penned into this space, were surging and pushing against each other like a football crowd after a goal to get to the entrance first. We saw that to get up to the temple, you needed to pass through a gate then ascend steps no wider than two or three persons abreast. The Chinese people, with their inability to queue politely, were clustered around this bottleneck. At least two hundred people were trying to squeeze all at once into a gap for two.
It was horrendous. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was only one guard at the gate, and I thought he was about to get over-run. He screamed nervously at the crowd through his loudhailer. Another large surge began as even more people were allowed into the pen, but not enough people had either left or entered the temple to make room for them. People behind unintentionally pushed those in front, who turned around in anger and started pushing back, throwing punches, arguing and grappling. Little children were getting crushed against the legs of adults and crying shrilly. Men were fighting each other around the bottleneck entrance. Tourists coming back down from the temple couldn’t get out for the mass of people below them. It was an absolute shambles. Ridiculous. Dangerous. Nick and I, slightly shaken by these scenes, walked in the opposite direction up the mountain path to the viaduct. Heng Shan mountain presides over a reservoir of still blue water, which sparkled serenely in the spring sunshine. Swifts and martins swooped and played over the water, chasing insects. It was amazingly quiet and calm. Yet only a few hundred feet below us, people were jammed in tight together, screaming, pushing and fighting.
Today I saw how the internal tourism of China is destroying every place of historical heritage or natural beauty it purports to protect. More and more people in China are now making enough money to have a holiday yet, as the holidays are controlled by the government, everyone travels at the same time. Also, not many holidaymakers are allowed a visa to travel out of the country, so everyone heads for the same places. They do not have a choice of France, Spain or the Canaries, Peru or Hawaii, Sydney or Delhi. They have a choice of Tai Shan and the Hanging Temple, or Dali and Lijiang, or Guilin and Yangshuo, and therefore descend on these beautiful little places in huge numbers, leaving destruction in their wake. And it's not even fun! The pushing and shoving endemic in Chinese culture is intensified by the sheer mass of people, so that you have to fight for every bus, hotel and photo opportunity you can get. Countries such as Brazil, Peru or Thailand have complained that the new force of colonial destruction endangering their culture and environment is that of tourism. 'We' go to these countries, stay in nice hotels, visit safari parks, climb mountains, but don't realise the destruction and the draining of natural resources the tourist industry masks. Sure, we bring money to the local economies, but in an industry which is long-term unsustainable. China, however, is managing just fine to destroy its cultural heritage and scenic spots all by itself. Perfectly happily, in fact, as its making money out of it. Is that the difference between an under-developed and developing country, that the developing country is much more capable of ruining its environment without outside help?
Monday, December 29, 2008
Datong
The five-hour bus journey from Tai Yuan to Datong, through sprawling arid mountains and across flat yellow floodplains, proved to be more spectacular, but no less diverting, than our destination. Datong was once an ancient city of some renown. A glazed screen of nine beautifully depicted dragons, which used to be the frontage of an imperial palace, still remains like a single soldier flying the flag of a fallen company. There are a few old temples and, in the centre of the city, an impressive, well-preserved Drum Tower. Now, however, all about you, filthy black buildings crumble and fall, some through old age and neglect, some through the unstoppable will to progress of developing construction-crazy China. Datong is one dirty, smelly, derelict building site. At night, off the main drag, there are no streetlights and no pavements. Instead, you walk up and down huge piles and mounds of broken earth and concrete in the dark, sometimes a drop of six or ten feet behind the ascent awaiting the oblivious pedestrian like a bear-trap. The dirt streets are flanked by squatting men and women, who display their wares of screws, nuts, bolts, engine parts, shampoo, face cream, hairbrushes, on dirty sheets or rugs. They call out to you in Chinese as you pass, Spark plug? Wanna buy a spark plug? Or, Nuts and bolts! Nuts and bolts for sale here! (At least, I presume that was what they were saying.) And yet despite the crumbling chaos, it’s a huge city, developing, destroying, rebuilding, regenerating, regurgitating. Tai Yuan now seems positively modern, Harbin a gilded metropolis.
Late afternoon, from the top of the Drum Tower, Clive and I watched a department store on the main street stage a fashion show of wedding dresses. The girls were stunning, although totally depressed. Despite the sunshine, the temperature was chilly, and these delectable young girls had to walk out, strutting and pouting, to the high-pitched refrain of Chinese pop songs, in skimpy white, peach, pink or purple dresses, pose alluringly, then leave the stage, to hoots and whistles from the huge crowd of dirty workers and scruffy young families gathered around the raised stage. The incongruity of it, the majority of the onlookers surely unable to afford these skimpy yet extortionate dresses, the girls, certainly not from rich families themselves, or they wouldn't have had to do this, being ridiculed by them, the attempt at glamour, sophistication, sexiness, in this run-down, beat-up mining town, the miners, workers and housewives, beset by conflicting feelings of jealousy and glitter, wanting more but hating every minute of it. Throughout this weird sideshow, all around for miles the city of Datong lay before us, crumbled, broken, rows of tumbled down, windowless shacks interspersed with huge concrete blocks covered in soot.
Tonight we ate sushi in a wonderful restaurant called the Yonghe Dajiudian, which is credited as being the best restaurant in the province. It stands like a neon beacon amidst the broken pavements and run-down streets. We were given warm facecloths to wipe our grimy hands, china cups filled with delicious green tea, well-presented dishes brought by the polite pretty serving staff. The floors and tables were shining and pristine, the tablecloths a sparkling white, the wine glasses polished to a perfect shine. We ate and drank like kings for an hour and a half, without even having to refill our glasses. As I sat back in my mahogany chair, sated and tired, I looked out of the window and saw a little boy, only six or seven years old, standing alone on a huge pile of beaten earth and stone in the middle of the dug-up road, silhouetted darkly against the dusk, brandishing a long stick like a tiny warrior celebrating some kind of hollow victory. As the sushi turned in my stomach, guilt, horror and sadness combining to pin me to my comfortable chair, the little soldier waved his stick and conquered his imaginary world from the summit of his huge mound of muck.
Late afternoon, from the top of the Drum Tower, Clive and I watched a department store on the main street stage a fashion show of wedding dresses. The girls were stunning, although totally depressed. Despite the sunshine, the temperature was chilly, and these delectable young girls had to walk out, strutting and pouting, to the high-pitched refrain of Chinese pop songs, in skimpy white, peach, pink or purple dresses, pose alluringly, then leave the stage, to hoots and whistles from the huge crowd of dirty workers and scruffy young families gathered around the raised stage. The incongruity of it, the majority of the onlookers surely unable to afford these skimpy yet extortionate dresses, the girls, certainly not from rich families themselves, or they wouldn't have had to do this, being ridiculed by them, the attempt at glamour, sophistication, sexiness, in this run-down, beat-up mining town, the miners, workers and housewives, beset by conflicting feelings of jealousy and glitter, wanting more but hating every minute of it. Throughout this weird sideshow, all around for miles the city of Datong lay before us, crumbled, broken, rows of tumbled down, windowless shacks interspersed with huge concrete blocks covered in soot.
Tonight we ate sushi in a wonderful restaurant called the Yonghe Dajiudian, which is credited as being the best restaurant in the province. It stands like a neon beacon amidst the broken pavements and run-down streets. We were given warm facecloths to wipe our grimy hands, china cups filled with delicious green tea, well-presented dishes brought by the polite pretty serving staff. The floors and tables were shining and pristine, the tablecloths a sparkling white, the wine glasses polished to a perfect shine. We ate and drank like kings for an hour and a half, without even having to refill our glasses. As I sat back in my mahogany chair, sated and tired, I looked out of the window and saw a little boy, only six or seven years old, standing alone on a huge pile of beaten earth and stone in the middle of the dug-up road, silhouetted darkly against the dusk, brandishing a long stick like a tiny warrior celebrating some kind of hollow victory. As the sushi turned in my stomach, guilt, horror and sadness combining to pin me to my comfortable chair, the little soldier waved his stick and conquered his imaginary world from the summit of his huge mound of muck.
Pingyao, A One Hundred Year Old Egg and Monks with Rolexes
01/05/02
Today we found ourselves on a seventeen-seater bus with twenty-five other people, the driver a madman, the conductor a psychopath with scary insect eyes. I was seated alongside a fat man in green camouflage jacket who farted continuously throughout the journey until the crowded bus smelt like a one hundred year old egg. This was the bus ride to the fortified town of Pingyao.
The original reason for this little town's existence was money: it was home to the first bank in China. The reason for its existence now is exactly the same, money, although this time the business is tourism. The surrounding wall was begun in 827 BC. The wall was to keep raiding bandits away from the money-pots, and for a long time Pingyao was such an economic centre of importance, it was nicknamed 'Little Beijing'. Now, the town is protected by UNESCO, and is considered an important historical site of cultural heritage. One wonders if the fortified wall during ancient times hadn't proved more efficacious than the town's modern form of UNESCO protection, as being an important cultural heritage site now means that the raiders are not violent tribes on horseback, but armies of tourists flooding out from coaches and storming through the gates.
Today is Labour Day, the first day of the weeklong May national holiday. The narrow streets of Pingyao are heaving with people, shopping, taking photos, pushing, shoving, laughing and spitting, tour guides whistling and clapping their hands, coach upon coach pulling up outside the main gates in a haze of exhaust fumes to spew out their unruly load. The attractive, authentic Han dynasty buildings, with their intersecting inner courtyards, well-kept wooden decorative latticework and carvings, separated by rough cobbled streets, are subjected to a rampage of looting and pillaging quite unlike anything that had once endangered it in the past. You could almost hear the small town creaking under the weight of it, just one more coach load perhaps being the final straw, whereupon the town would collapse, implode, descend into the pits of pandemonium, brought down by its own helpless greed. Once such a beautiful, authentic and ancient place has been officially declared beautiful, authentic and ancient, it's the signal for its surrender.
The surreal thing is, the workers just keep on working. Apart from the population of the town who are actually involved in the tourist trade, every other person just goes about their daily business, cooking, hanging out washing, fixing bicycles, as crowds of mad tour groups fall over each other to take pictures of them. Tourists creep down narrow alleyways for a quick peek, stare into doorways and windows, explore private courtyards, and even go into people’s houses, thinking them exhibits when they're really just homes. At one stage, trying to escape the madding crowd, Clive and I found ourselves in the middle of a wedding party in a secluded courtyard, feeling like skeletons at the feast. Instead of inviting us to join them, the people quite rightly looked daggers at us until we slunk away. It must be strange to live, work, love and die in this place, under the careless scrutiny of absolute strangers. It reminded me of Luss, the small village where they shoot the popular soap opera Take the High Road, in Scotland. When filming is not in progress, tour groups from America, Canada, England, everywhere, are shown round this quaint little Scottish village while the residents, not actors but real people who happen to live there, just carry on regardless as if it's perfectly normal to be ogled at by a bus-load of Australian grannies while you're chopping carrots.
Perhaps because each tour group has only a limited amount of time, allotted to them by their commander-in-chief, the guide, not many of them had managed to scale the fortified walls, so that’s where Nick and I headed. We met an old man up top who hired out bicycles and we cycled round the perimeter of the ancient town. It took us only about an hour, but the tranquility, the fresher air, and most of all the stunning views of Pingyao below us, huddled ancient rooftops like sheep clustered in a pen during a storm, set against the immense dusty yellow flatlands, with mountains looming to all sides in the distance like protective shepherds, proved to be the best part of the day. The wall itself is ten metres high and constructed in the shape of a rough square. It has 72 watchtowers (to represent the 72 sages of China), and 3,000 parapets (standing for the disciples of Confucius). Below you the town lies in higgledy-piggledy criss-cross fashion, and you can see people on the flat rooftop gardens feeding livestock, washing vegetables, throwing sticks to dogs, cleaning machinery. When they look up and catch your eye, you’re left with a choice: hang your head in shame and shuffle off, or brazenly take a photo like a true, unabashed voyeur.
We arrived back at the Railway Hotel in Tai Yuan to find it taken over by a convention of maroon-cassocked monks, each looking identical with their shaven heads, shiny fake Rolex watches and white sports shoes, some of them Reebok, Mizuno or Nike. A monk with a Rolex watch? Weren't they meant to reject materialism and devote their time to inner contemplation? And wasn't a watch pointless anyway, as the monk should surely believe time immeasurable, as he would be reincarnated again and again into eternity, thus time becomes negated, their very idea of it infinite and circular? Maybe he needed a watch so he didn't miss his train when going on holiday. But, aren't holidays in themselves just a materialist construct, and a deviation from the contemplation of... whatever.
Today we found ourselves on a seventeen-seater bus with twenty-five other people, the driver a madman, the conductor a psychopath with scary insect eyes. I was seated alongside a fat man in green camouflage jacket who farted continuously throughout the journey until the crowded bus smelt like a one hundred year old egg. This was the bus ride to the fortified town of Pingyao.
The original reason for this little town's existence was money: it was home to the first bank in China. The reason for its existence now is exactly the same, money, although this time the business is tourism. The surrounding wall was begun in 827 BC. The wall was to keep raiding bandits away from the money-pots, and for a long time Pingyao was such an economic centre of importance, it was nicknamed 'Little Beijing'. Now, the town is protected by UNESCO, and is considered an important historical site of cultural heritage. One wonders if the fortified wall during ancient times hadn't proved more efficacious than the town's modern form of UNESCO protection, as being an important cultural heritage site now means that the raiders are not violent tribes on horseback, but armies of tourists flooding out from coaches and storming through the gates.
Today is Labour Day, the first day of the weeklong May national holiday. The narrow streets of Pingyao are heaving with people, shopping, taking photos, pushing, shoving, laughing and spitting, tour guides whistling and clapping their hands, coach upon coach pulling up outside the main gates in a haze of exhaust fumes to spew out their unruly load. The attractive, authentic Han dynasty buildings, with their intersecting inner courtyards, well-kept wooden decorative latticework and carvings, separated by rough cobbled streets, are subjected to a rampage of looting and pillaging quite unlike anything that had once endangered it in the past. You could almost hear the small town creaking under the weight of it, just one more coach load perhaps being the final straw, whereupon the town would collapse, implode, descend into the pits of pandemonium, brought down by its own helpless greed. Once such a beautiful, authentic and ancient place has been officially declared beautiful, authentic and ancient, it's the signal for its surrender.
The surreal thing is, the workers just keep on working. Apart from the population of the town who are actually involved in the tourist trade, every other person just goes about their daily business, cooking, hanging out washing, fixing bicycles, as crowds of mad tour groups fall over each other to take pictures of them. Tourists creep down narrow alleyways for a quick peek, stare into doorways and windows, explore private courtyards, and even go into people’s houses, thinking them exhibits when they're really just homes. At one stage, trying to escape the madding crowd, Clive and I found ourselves in the middle of a wedding party in a secluded courtyard, feeling like skeletons at the feast. Instead of inviting us to join them, the people quite rightly looked daggers at us until we slunk away. It must be strange to live, work, love and die in this place, under the careless scrutiny of absolute strangers. It reminded me of Luss, the small village where they shoot the popular soap opera Take the High Road, in Scotland. When filming is not in progress, tour groups from America, Canada, England, everywhere, are shown round this quaint little Scottish village while the residents, not actors but real people who happen to live there, just carry on regardless as if it's perfectly normal to be ogled at by a bus-load of Australian grannies while you're chopping carrots.
Perhaps because each tour group has only a limited amount of time, allotted to them by their commander-in-chief, the guide, not many of them had managed to scale the fortified walls, so that’s where Nick and I headed. We met an old man up top who hired out bicycles and we cycled round the perimeter of the ancient town. It took us only about an hour, but the tranquility, the fresher air, and most of all the stunning views of Pingyao below us, huddled ancient rooftops like sheep clustered in a pen during a storm, set against the immense dusty yellow flatlands, with mountains looming to all sides in the distance like protective shepherds, proved to be the best part of the day. The wall itself is ten metres high and constructed in the shape of a rough square. It has 72 watchtowers (to represent the 72 sages of China), and 3,000 parapets (standing for the disciples of Confucius). Below you the town lies in higgledy-piggledy criss-cross fashion, and you can see people on the flat rooftop gardens feeding livestock, washing vegetables, throwing sticks to dogs, cleaning machinery. When they look up and catch your eye, you’re left with a choice: hang your head in shame and shuffle off, or brazenly take a photo like a true, unabashed voyeur.
We arrived back at the Railway Hotel in Tai Yuan to find it taken over by a convention of maroon-cassocked monks, each looking identical with their shaven heads, shiny fake Rolex watches and white sports shoes, some of them Reebok, Mizuno or Nike. A monk with a Rolex watch? Weren't they meant to reject materialism and devote their time to inner contemplation? And wasn't a watch pointless anyway, as the monk should surely believe time immeasurable, as he would be reincarnated again and again into eternity, thus time becomes negated, their very idea of it infinite and circular? Maybe he needed a watch so he didn't miss his train when going on holiday. But, aren't holidays in themselves just a materialist construct, and a deviation from the contemplation of... whatever.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Train to Tai Yuan
30/05/02
We staggered onto the 6.30 am train to find that the standing room only carriage actually did have seats, but that they were all taken, with a mass of passengers standing all around them. The train had begun in Shanghai, and was packed with people going home for the holiday to visit family. The deal was that you paid for a standing ticket, but if someone got off and vacated their seat, you could sit down on it. This meant that the carriage was full of folk literally standing for a seat, politicking, deal making, cajoling those lucky enough to be sitting, but who were getting off before the train reached Tai Yuan. There were far too many people to each get a seat, however, and we were faced with a potential eleven-hour stand. Gina gulped and gasped like a fish caught on the hook then thrown onto the dock. She began to talk about how nice Qingdao sounded, couldn't we jump off at the next station and go there instead? Clive and I told her we were going to stick to our original plan. The plan we'd worked out months ago. The plan she'd insisted upon gatecrashing, after finding that her other travel arrangements had fallen through. She pulled a face and muttered under her breath.
At the next stop, Jinan, Gina suddenly put on her authoritative voice and said:
'RIGHT!'
We watched her fumble with her suitcase and push her way to the train doors. She turned to look at us.
'Are you coming?'
Clive and I looked at each other, faced with the choice of enjoying the holiday which we'd planned, and Gina had parachuted herself in upon, and leaving her on her own in a strange city in the middle of China, or going with her. Clive slowly shook his head. I nodded. We were staying. To our astonishment, Gina stepped down from the carriage and stomped off into the busy train station. Unaware of our domestic chagrin, the train pulled away on its inexorable route, and took Clive and I with it, Gina-less. She didn't even say goodbye. We're a bit worried about her. She's never been on her own in China before, and I think she's suffering from one of the longest culture shocks in the history of travel. But it was her choice, in the end.
After seven hours of standing with a little guy's elbow nestled into the base of my spine, it was announced that there were some hard sleeper bunks now available. I fought my way to the booth, upgraded our tickets and, at the next stop, Clive and I lugged our rucksacks along the platform, along the length of the train, and made it to carriage number 15 (from carriage number 5) just in time. The next four hours passed much more pleasantly. We talked to some Tai Yuan locals, including an intelligent graduate who was studying English and American literature in Shanghai, and a kind female English teacher who recommended to us the hotel we're staying in, the Railway Hotel, which is adequate, fairly cheap, although dingy in its brown, green and beige colours and a little mouldy-smelling.
The landscape of Shanxi province is fascinating and ancient in a dry, bleached-out way. It's called 'The Yellow Land' as, the further inland you get, the more parched the earth becomes, rivers drying up, mountains yellow and dusty, the newly-arrived sun beating down from a clear blue sky on a sickly, barren, desert opus of huge flat plateaus skirted by shimmering yellow-brown peaks. As the journey progressed, the narrow river that snaked desperately through the dirt gradually became narrower, shallower, until it eventually ended up a dry creek. The thin strips of paddy fields and cypress trees, built on irrigated banks with thin rivulets of water diverted towards them, wither and disappear. All that's left is stone and dust and sun. The train goes through numerous dark tunnels, blasted straight through the yellow mountains, with a huge honk of its horn. Thirty-odd black entrances into the unknown on our eleven hour trip.
Shanxi's economy is driven by coal. Every place glimpsed from the mucky window of our train- crumbling little towns and cities that looked like they needed a refreshing drink of cold water and then a good wash- were mining towns. I was told that the city of Datong is home to China's biggest coal mine, some 300,000 men working there, and that the town is so singularly reliant on its coal, the people's faces have taken on the colour of their money: black. This may have been middle-class snobbery from my travelling companions, most Chinese believing dark skin signifies rural backwardness. This stereotype is exacerbated by the fact that, as rural poverty (the farmers prohibited from owning the land they farm, which belongs to the government) increases in China, so does the population of migrant workers.
Tai Yuan is witnessing a huge influx of peasant farmers looking for jobs in the city, searching for that imagined yellow-brick road in 'The Yellow Land' that will take them away from their rural poverty and make them rich city-dwellers. Many parents work all the hours of the day in the city, to send money home to fund their children's education, the children being brought up by their grandparents. This migration is inter-provincial, many of the immigrants being from the northwest province of Xin Jiang, which is home to a large ethnic minority population, the people looking more like Uzbekistanis or Afghans than Han Chinese. These people are blamed by the Han Chinese for any crime from theft to murder. The graduate student with whom I was happily talking literature, shocked me with a sudden outburst of narrow-mindedness.
'You must be careful in Tai Yuan. There are many Xin Jiang people, and they are dangerous. They will take a knife and kill you for your shoes.'
'That happens in the UK and America too, you know, ' I countered. 'Especially if you're wearing the new Adidas or Nike. And don't you think some Han Chinese commit crimes too?'
This wasn't a very smart remark. It just made him angry.
'No! You do not understand. These people are poor and have no morals. They are low-quality people.'
He actually said that. Low-quality people. So, you take over your neighbour's land, exploit their resources, force them to toe the Party line, then brand them second-class citizens for their trouble. And all in the name of 'The People'. Old Karl Marx'll be turning in his grave. The literature student was talking of the Xin Jiang ethnic minority like some kind of untouchable caste. I mumbled some argument that in every country, every people, there were good and bad, and we mustn't generalise, but he was adamant, prefered to talk rather than listen, and never let up on the subject until eventually giving me some respite by going to the toilet. Clive had been listening to our conversation with some amusement and said, with an ironic twinkle in his eye:
'I bet he's a government spy. You know, the government has spies everywhere, and for some of them, their mission is to talk to foreigners and weed out the bad seeds. Watch what you say.'
The literature graduate came back from the toilet, and we eyed him suspiciously.
Instead of a seedy and dangerous Sodom or Gomorrah, however, we found in Tai Yuan a busy, rough-and-ready vibe, a mixture of well-dressed young people walking arm-in-arm from KFC to the nearest nightclub, and crowds of swarthy workers playing cards, Chinese chess, or just gossiping vehemently on the street corners. Scores of children were skipping and playing tag. The trees were in leaf, the night almost balmy, the city a work unfinished, beaten old dirt-encrusted buildings, like has-been boxers, going toe-to-toe with spanking new skyscrapers and department stores; like any other middle-sized city in this country, in fact.
We staggered onto the 6.30 am train to find that the standing room only carriage actually did have seats, but that they were all taken, with a mass of passengers standing all around them. The train had begun in Shanghai, and was packed with people going home for the holiday to visit family. The deal was that you paid for a standing ticket, but if someone got off and vacated their seat, you could sit down on it. This meant that the carriage was full of folk literally standing for a seat, politicking, deal making, cajoling those lucky enough to be sitting, but who were getting off before the train reached Tai Yuan. There were far too many people to each get a seat, however, and we were faced with a potential eleven-hour stand. Gina gulped and gasped like a fish caught on the hook then thrown onto the dock. She began to talk about how nice Qingdao sounded, couldn't we jump off at the next station and go there instead? Clive and I told her we were going to stick to our original plan. The plan we'd worked out months ago. The plan she'd insisted upon gatecrashing, after finding that her other travel arrangements had fallen through. She pulled a face and muttered under her breath.
At the next stop, Jinan, Gina suddenly put on her authoritative voice and said:
'RIGHT!'
We watched her fumble with her suitcase and push her way to the train doors. She turned to look at us.
'Are you coming?'
Clive and I looked at each other, faced with the choice of enjoying the holiday which we'd planned, and Gina had parachuted herself in upon, and leaving her on her own in a strange city in the middle of China, or going with her. Clive slowly shook his head. I nodded. We were staying. To our astonishment, Gina stepped down from the carriage and stomped off into the busy train station. Unaware of our domestic chagrin, the train pulled away on its inexorable route, and took Clive and I with it, Gina-less. She didn't even say goodbye. We're a bit worried about her. She's never been on her own in China before, and I think she's suffering from one of the longest culture shocks in the history of travel. But it was her choice, in the end.
After seven hours of standing with a little guy's elbow nestled into the base of my spine, it was announced that there were some hard sleeper bunks now available. I fought my way to the booth, upgraded our tickets and, at the next stop, Clive and I lugged our rucksacks along the platform, along the length of the train, and made it to carriage number 15 (from carriage number 5) just in time. The next four hours passed much more pleasantly. We talked to some Tai Yuan locals, including an intelligent graduate who was studying English and American literature in Shanghai, and a kind female English teacher who recommended to us the hotel we're staying in, the Railway Hotel, which is adequate, fairly cheap, although dingy in its brown, green and beige colours and a little mouldy-smelling.
The landscape of Shanxi province is fascinating and ancient in a dry, bleached-out way. It's called 'The Yellow Land' as, the further inland you get, the more parched the earth becomes, rivers drying up, mountains yellow and dusty, the newly-arrived sun beating down from a clear blue sky on a sickly, barren, desert opus of huge flat plateaus skirted by shimmering yellow-brown peaks. As the journey progressed, the narrow river that snaked desperately through the dirt gradually became narrower, shallower, until it eventually ended up a dry creek. The thin strips of paddy fields and cypress trees, built on irrigated banks with thin rivulets of water diverted towards them, wither and disappear. All that's left is stone and dust and sun. The train goes through numerous dark tunnels, blasted straight through the yellow mountains, with a huge honk of its horn. Thirty-odd black entrances into the unknown on our eleven hour trip.
Shanxi's economy is driven by coal. Every place glimpsed from the mucky window of our train- crumbling little towns and cities that looked like they needed a refreshing drink of cold water and then a good wash- were mining towns. I was told that the city of Datong is home to China's biggest coal mine, some 300,000 men working there, and that the town is so singularly reliant on its coal, the people's faces have taken on the colour of their money: black. This may have been middle-class snobbery from my travelling companions, most Chinese believing dark skin signifies rural backwardness. This stereotype is exacerbated by the fact that, as rural poverty (the farmers prohibited from owning the land they farm, which belongs to the government) increases in China, so does the population of migrant workers.
Tai Yuan is witnessing a huge influx of peasant farmers looking for jobs in the city, searching for that imagined yellow-brick road in 'The Yellow Land' that will take them away from their rural poverty and make them rich city-dwellers. Many parents work all the hours of the day in the city, to send money home to fund their children's education, the children being brought up by their grandparents. This migration is inter-provincial, many of the immigrants being from the northwest province of Xin Jiang, which is home to a large ethnic minority population, the people looking more like Uzbekistanis or Afghans than Han Chinese. These people are blamed by the Han Chinese for any crime from theft to murder. The graduate student with whom I was happily talking literature, shocked me with a sudden outburst of narrow-mindedness.
'You must be careful in Tai Yuan. There are many Xin Jiang people, and they are dangerous. They will take a knife and kill you for your shoes.'
'That happens in the UK and America too, you know, ' I countered. 'Especially if you're wearing the new Adidas or Nike. And don't you think some Han Chinese commit crimes too?'
This wasn't a very smart remark. It just made him angry.
'No! You do not understand. These people are poor and have no morals. They are low-quality people.'
He actually said that. Low-quality people. So, you take over your neighbour's land, exploit their resources, force them to toe the Party line, then brand them second-class citizens for their trouble. And all in the name of 'The People'. Old Karl Marx'll be turning in his grave. The literature student was talking of the Xin Jiang ethnic minority like some kind of untouchable caste. I mumbled some argument that in every country, every people, there were good and bad, and we mustn't generalise, but he was adamant, prefered to talk rather than listen, and never let up on the subject until eventually giving me some respite by going to the toilet. Clive had been listening to our conversation with some amusement and said, with an ironic twinkle in his eye:
'I bet he's a government spy. You know, the government has spies everywhere, and for some of them, their mission is to talk to foreigners and weed out the bad seeds. Watch what you say.'
The literature graduate came back from the toilet, and we eyed him suspiciously.
Instead of a seedy and dangerous Sodom or Gomorrah, however, we found in Tai Yuan a busy, rough-and-ready vibe, a mixture of well-dressed young people walking arm-in-arm from KFC to the nearest nightclub, and crowds of swarthy workers playing cards, Chinese chess, or just gossiping vehemently on the street corners. Scores of children were skipping and playing tag. The trees were in leaf, the night almost balmy, the city a work unfinished, beaten old dirt-encrusted buildings, like has-been boxers, going toe-to-toe with spanking new skyscrapers and department stores; like any other middle-sized city in this country, in fact.
Tai Shan
28/05/02
The overnight train journey to Tai'An, the small town at the foot of Tai Shan mountain, was the first good night's sleep I've ever had on a hard sleeper bunk. On arrival, I jumped from the train full of beans, wearing yesterday's blue jeans, blue trainers, red T-shirt and short denim jacket, and found myself shivering in a cold, grey, drizzly day. We approached the mountain down a long road full of temples and souvenir stalls, the drizzle intensifying. I bought a green 'I've been to Tai Shan' pork-pie hat and perched it rakishly on my head like a true tourist, where it sat all the way up the mountain, getting steadily wetter, until I had to wring it out like a dishcloth.
I'm sure the walk up to Zhongtian Men (The Midway Gate to Heaven), the halfway point up the mountain, would have been spectacular, had we been able to see anything. We could just make out deep gorges, bamboo, big rocks, and thick forests with cool glades, to either side of the stone steps, but only to a distance of thirty or forty feet. As the day wore on, the rain got heavier, the mist thicker, and we could make out less and less. We decided to spend the night at the halfway point, as making for the summit would be pointless in this weather.
On the way up, unable to see much in the way of scenery, I contented myself with studying the many tour groups going up and down the mountain in huge lines like herded goats. At the bottom, a group of company-men, all wearing identical shapeless black suits, stopped at a stall and exchanged their identical slip-on black shoes for identical black and white plimsolls, this their only concession to the fact that they weren't actually going to the office today but, in fact, were walking up a very high mountain in the rain. Large groups of students messed around, slipping, laughing and flirting, as if there were no rain at all. Brawny bull-necked businessmen held on tightly to their trophy wives, who tottered and complained their way up the steep slippery steps in incongruous high-heels. Contrasted against these well-off holidaymakers, tiny, shirtless weather-beaten old men lugged heavy bamboo shoulder-poles, a crate of beer or net of watermelons, bags of washing powder or boxes of oranges, hanging from either side of the pole, weighing the men down into back-bending, leg-sapping postures. As the old men struggled slowly up the steps, their warped, disfigured shoulders bore testament to their daily toil.
Clive and I reached The Midway Gate to Heaven a full forty-five minutes before Gina. We found a tiny hostel down a narrow path and paid for the room, no questions asked, despite the stinky toilet. We waited for Gina outside the temple, chatting to the drookit monks and playing with the mucky indigenous children. A soggy wreath of incense merged with the thick mist. Buddhist chants, played on a battered old tape deck, mingled with the pitter-patter of the rain. Tour groups were led past us by dripping tour guides, almost every single tourist proudly sporting a long orange or yellow waterproof bin-liner with hood. It was like watching a strange sci-fi movie where the humans with little flags for weapons have captured the orange and yellow aliens and are taking them off in droves to be experimented upon. Eventually, Gina made it, we dried off, changed our clothes, had some food, and began to feel a little better. However, we were disappointed because it didn’t look like we’d be able to see the sun come up from behind China's holiest mountain the next morning; if anything, the rain was even heavier than before.
29/05/02
Ah, now that's good coffee! I'd stashed some instant coffee packets in my rucksack and, at 5.30 in the morning, I poured hot water from the flask into my stainless-steel travelling cup, and went out into the dawn mist for a look about. There was an impressively mystical view of shifting mountaintops in the windy mist, peaks and pagodas appearing and disappearing high above in grey silhouette. The light skitter of rain on temple roofs. The first smell of incense lit by an early-rising monk. A cat mewling for its breakfast. The aroma of fresh rain-soaked grass and fir trees steaming in the mist. No one stirred, no one talked, nothing else broke the pact of silence the monk and I had made with the encroaching dawn.
Suddenly, a scream. It sounded like Gina. I ran back to our room to find her sitting ashen-faced on her bed. She'd gone to the stinky toilet and had vomited at the stench.
We started for the summit around 8 am. As we progressed higher, the mist and rain again began to increase, and we knew we'd be able to see nothing at the top. It would be a complete whiteout, or should I say, grey-out. Again, we felt a surge of disappointment; surely the view, in fair weather, from over 1,500 metres up, would be breathtaking. But we were never to see it. The stone steps increased in intensity and steepness, getting dangerously narrow and slippery, so that if you lost your footing, at some points you'd be in for a fifty-foot tumble down a steep stone-flagged slope. Treetops and misty gorges shifted and moved below us. Rocky creeks once home to rivers and waterfalls lapped up the rainfall and gurgled and spat. To either side, abandoned boulders sprouted ferns and weeds, and green walls of bamboo tickled the iron railings.
Despite starting early, the higher we ascended, the thicker the misty mass of tourists became. I spent half an hour at the top with a lively bunch of medical students from Jinan, waiting for Clive. I was in all of their photos, none of which I'll ever see. Clive arrived, and we spent some time exploring the summit's various temples and viewing points, which might have looked impressive set against a backdrop of towering green mountain peaks and wooded descents, but now looked forlorn, sad and grey in the foggy drizzle. We studied the rock formations, which Clive identified as quartzite and serpentine. The huge stones jutted out at weird angles, some pointing straight up to the sky like thick bulbous fingers, some rounded and flat like giants' gravestones. Formed in some Neolithic storm, a clashing together of huge glaciers, they sat foreboding and intransigent in the mist. Most striking was the Boulder Bridge, a humpbacked formation of connected rocks that had somehow lodged themselves between two sides of a deep crevasse to form a bridge of improbable natural design.
It was, however, cold and wet so, once we'd found Gina, we decided to head back down. I was more prepared for the conditions today, having bought a bright orange plastic poncho and red 'I've been to Tai Shan' headscarf from a stall at the Midway Gate to Heaven. I must have looked mighty strange, but that still didn’t excuse the comments Clive and I received on our descent. As we walked, we were subjected not just to the usual stares, but to continual insults as well. Clive's Chinese is quite good now, and he can understand much of what is said to him, or should I say, about him. We were called ugly, stupid, strange, hairy, and big-nosed, the last of which I do take offence to.
'What can you do?' Clive says, ever the pragmatist. 'Cindy taught me a phrase to say: ni zai kan shen me? Which directly translated means: You looking at what?'
'Cool. Have you tried it out yet?'
'Yeah, first time I tried it, the guy just stared at me even more!'
'D'you think he understood you?'
'He understood my words, of course, but not my meaning. He looked at me as if to say: 'What d'you think I'm staring at? I'm staring at a strange-looking foreigner! Any self-respecting Chinese would do the same thing and, if I could, I'd sell tickets.''
We reached the bottom late afternoon, walked out the main gate, and down the long street full of temples and trinket shops, Gina lagging behind. It's not that we were walking fast, it's just whenever we walked slower, she somehow managed to outdo us and find an even lower gear than we were already in, stopping every five minutes to catch her breath or complain about her sore feet. We'd stop, wait for her to catch up then have to wait for her to rest. Impatient, we'd walk away even more slowly than before but then, just moments later, turn back to see her motionless, standing like a distant shadowy obelisk in the rain. It was frustrating for us, and unbearable for her.
Deciding to take the mountain to Mohammed, we got into a taxi and found a clean two-star hotel in the centre of the small city of Tai'An. The city is gearing itself up for a busy week of tourists; we're gearing ourselves up for a standing-room only train journey back west along the Yellow River (which surely must have some water in it now, after all this rain) to Tai Yuan, which leaves at 6.30 am tomorrow morning. When Clive and I returned from the train station, Gina was decidedly unhappy to find out that the train was standing room only, and furious when she heard the departure time. We told her to get the tickets herself next time, rather than sleeping in her hotel bed whilst we did the pushing and shoving at the station. There's a vibe like a bad smell in our room tonight, but I've a feeling it won't stop me sleeping.
The overnight train journey to Tai'An, the small town at the foot of Tai Shan mountain, was the first good night's sleep I've ever had on a hard sleeper bunk. On arrival, I jumped from the train full of beans, wearing yesterday's blue jeans, blue trainers, red T-shirt and short denim jacket, and found myself shivering in a cold, grey, drizzly day. We approached the mountain down a long road full of temples and souvenir stalls, the drizzle intensifying. I bought a green 'I've been to Tai Shan' pork-pie hat and perched it rakishly on my head like a true tourist, where it sat all the way up the mountain, getting steadily wetter, until I had to wring it out like a dishcloth.
I'm sure the walk up to Zhongtian Men (The Midway Gate to Heaven), the halfway point up the mountain, would have been spectacular, had we been able to see anything. We could just make out deep gorges, bamboo, big rocks, and thick forests with cool glades, to either side of the stone steps, but only to a distance of thirty or forty feet. As the day wore on, the rain got heavier, the mist thicker, and we could make out less and less. We decided to spend the night at the halfway point, as making for the summit would be pointless in this weather.
On the way up, unable to see much in the way of scenery, I contented myself with studying the many tour groups going up and down the mountain in huge lines like herded goats. At the bottom, a group of company-men, all wearing identical shapeless black suits, stopped at a stall and exchanged their identical slip-on black shoes for identical black and white plimsolls, this their only concession to the fact that they weren't actually going to the office today but, in fact, were walking up a very high mountain in the rain. Large groups of students messed around, slipping, laughing and flirting, as if there were no rain at all. Brawny bull-necked businessmen held on tightly to their trophy wives, who tottered and complained their way up the steep slippery steps in incongruous high-heels. Contrasted against these well-off holidaymakers, tiny, shirtless weather-beaten old men lugged heavy bamboo shoulder-poles, a crate of beer or net of watermelons, bags of washing powder or boxes of oranges, hanging from either side of the pole, weighing the men down into back-bending, leg-sapping postures. As the old men struggled slowly up the steps, their warped, disfigured shoulders bore testament to their daily toil.
Clive and I reached The Midway Gate to Heaven a full forty-five minutes before Gina. We found a tiny hostel down a narrow path and paid for the room, no questions asked, despite the stinky toilet. We waited for Gina outside the temple, chatting to the drookit monks and playing with the mucky indigenous children. A soggy wreath of incense merged with the thick mist. Buddhist chants, played on a battered old tape deck, mingled with the pitter-patter of the rain. Tour groups were led past us by dripping tour guides, almost every single tourist proudly sporting a long orange or yellow waterproof bin-liner with hood. It was like watching a strange sci-fi movie where the humans with little flags for weapons have captured the orange and yellow aliens and are taking them off in droves to be experimented upon. Eventually, Gina made it, we dried off, changed our clothes, had some food, and began to feel a little better. However, we were disappointed because it didn’t look like we’d be able to see the sun come up from behind China's holiest mountain the next morning; if anything, the rain was even heavier than before.
29/05/02
Ah, now that's good coffee! I'd stashed some instant coffee packets in my rucksack and, at 5.30 in the morning, I poured hot water from the flask into my stainless-steel travelling cup, and went out into the dawn mist for a look about. There was an impressively mystical view of shifting mountaintops in the windy mist, peaks and pagodas appearing and disappearing high above in grey silhouette. The light skitter of rain on temple roofs. The first smell of incense lit by an early-rising monk. A cat mewling for its breakfast. The aroma of fresh rain-soaked grass and fir trees steaming in the mist. No one stirred, no one talked, nothing else broke the pact of silence the monk and I had made with the encroaching dawn.
Suddenly, a scream. It sounded like Gina. I ran back to our room to find her sitting ashen-faced on her bed. She'd gone to the stinky toilet and had vomited at the stench.
We started for the summit around 8 am. As we progressed higher, the mist and rain again began to increase, and we knew we'd be able to see nothing at the top. It would be a complete whiteout, or should I say, grey-out. Again, we felt a surge of disappointment; surely the view, in fair weather, from over 1,500 metres up, would be breathtaking. But we were never to see it. The stone steps increased in intensity and steepness, getting dangerously narrow and slippery, so that if you lost your footing, at some points you'd be in for a fifty-foot tumble down a steep stone-flagged slope. Treetops and misty gorges shifted and moved below us. Rocky creeks once home to rivers and waterfalls lapped up the rainfall and gurgled and spat. To either side, abandoned boulders sprouted ferns and weeds, and green walls of bamboo tickled the iron railings.
Despite starting early, the higher we ascended, the thicker the misty mass of tourists became. I spent half an hour at the top with a lively bunch of medical students from Jinan, waiting for Clive. I was in all of their photos, none of which I'll ever see. Clive arrived, and we spent some time exploring the summit's various temples and viewing points, which might have looked impressive set against a backdrop of towering green mountain peaks and wooded descents, but now looked forlorn, sad and grey in the foggy drizzle. We studied the rock formations, which Clive identified as quartzite and serpentine. The huge stones jutted out at weird angles, some pointing straight up to the sky like thick bulbous fingers, some rounded and flat like giants' gravestones. Formed in some Neolithic storm, a clashing together of huge glaciers, they sat foreboding and intransigent in the mist. Most striking was the Boulder Bridge, a humpbacked formation of connected rocks that had somehow lodged themselves between two sides of a deep crevasse to form a bridge of improbable natural design.
It was, however, cold and wet so, once we'd found Gina, we decided to head back down. I was more prepared for the conditions today, having bought a bright orange plastic poncho and red 'I've been to Tai Shan' headscarf from a stall at the Midway Gate to Heaven. I must have looked mighty strange, but that still didn’t excuse the comments Clive and I received on our descent. As we walked, we were subjected not just to the usual stares, but to continual insults as well. Clive's Chinese is quite good now, and he can understand much of what is said to him, or should I say, about him. We were called ugly, stupid, strange, hairy, and big-nosed, the last of which I do take offence to.
'What can you do?' Clive says, ever the pragmatist. 'Cindy taught me a phrase to say: ni zai kan shen me? Which directly translated means: You looking at what?'
'Cool. Have you tried it out yet?'
'Yeah, first time I tried it, the guy just stared at me even more!'
'D'you think he understood you?'
'He understood my words, of course, but not my meaning. He looked at me as if to say: 'What d'you think I'm staring at? I'm staring at a strange-looking foreigner! Any self-respecting Chinese would do the same thing and, if I could, I'd sell tickets.''
We reached the bottom late afternoon, walked out the main gate, and down the long street full of temples and trinket shops, Gina lagging behind. It's not that we were walking fast, it's just whenever we walked slower, she somehow managed to outdo us and find an even lower gear than we were already in, stopping every five minutes to catch her breath or complain about her sore feet. We'd stop, wait for her to catch up then have to wait for her to rest. Impatient, we'd walk away even more slowly than before but then, just moments later, turn back to see her motionless, standing like a distant shadowy obelisk in the rain. It was frustrating for us, and unbearable for her.
Deciding to take the mountain to Mohammed, we got into a taxi and found a clean two-star hotel in the centre of the small city of Tai'An. The city is gearing itself up for a busy week of tourists; we're gearing ourselves up for a standing-room only train journey back west along the Yellow River (which surely must have some water in it now, after all this rain) to Tai Yuan, which leaves at 6.30 am tomorrow morning. When Clive and I returned from the train station, Gina was decidedly unhappy to find out that the train was standing room only, and furious when she heard the departure time. We told her to get the tickets herself next time, rather than sleeping in her hotel bed whilst we did the pushing and shoving at the station. There's a vibe like a bad smell in our room tonight, but I've a feeling it won't stop me sleeping.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Pits
Class finished on the Friday, giving Clive, Gina and I plenty of time to get ready for our expedition to Tai Shan (one of the five holy mountains of China, climbed by both Confucius and Chairman Mao), and beyond. May 1st to 7th is a national holiday in China, and we've been told that Tai Shan will be packed, but we still can't wait to get going. Harbin is in the grip of a mini-heat wave; I'm wearing a T-shirt and jeans, outside, for god's sake!
And that's why I've shaved my pits. You see, in Harbin you can't find deodorant. No one seems to wear it. Actually, for near enough ten months of the year no one actually needs it, but when the hot weather does come around, the locals just tend to, well, smell. The city is still happily untouched by big western supermarkets, but this creates a problem in the hot weather. What do you do to avoid being smelly? I asked Alan.
'When I worked in Wuxi, south China,' he said, 'you couldn't buy deodorant there either, and it was really hot. Someone told me that it wasn't actually your armpits, but your armpit hair that held the smell. You see, the sweat dries and sticks to the hair. Then it begins to smell.'
'So you're saying that you actually shaved your pits?'
'Had to. You sweat like a bastard in south China, and by the end of the day you really stink.'
'But didn't it... feel... weird?'
'It did at first, but I didn't smell anymore.'
Alan's eyes glinted with a sarcastic humour I didn't quite trust, but what he said made sense. I decided to give it a try and went back to my room. I skooshed some shaving foam under my arms and began to drag the razor across them. The concave shape of the pits made it quite a tricky procedure, and the hair was long, jagging and ripping if I moved the razor too fast. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw the ridiculousness of the situation. It was then I realised Alan had been having me on. However, it was too late by then, so I decided to finish the job properly. Afterwards, my armpits looked a strange, alien, sickly shade of white, and they tingled and stung mercilessly.
I picked up my rucksack and went up to the fifth floor lounge to wait for the others, my pits crying out fiercely with displeasure. Alan was sprawled on the sofa, watching a DVD.
'You shaved your pits, then?'
'Umm...'
'You did, didn't you?'
'Yeah.'
He fell off the sofa laughing.
Clive, Gina and I are now sitting on the train, rattling across sun-kissed fields under a blue sky. The train is comfortable and quiet, as most people are not on holiday yet. We're taking it in turns to occupy the two plastic seats at the window while the other one sits on the bottom bunk. In these six-bunk compartments the bottom bunks are a free-for-all. Whole families take over the space to sit, eat, gossip and play cards. I guess if you actually told them that this was your bed and you wanted to sleep, they’d move, but I haven’t seen anyone try it so far. However, the shared space of the bunks engenders a communal, friendly atmosphere, where strangers can become fast friends during the length of a journey. Every now and again we get hot water from an ancient, coal-fuelled boiler to fill our flasks, the red coals somehow a tenuous surviving symbol of an earlier, receding time.
And that's why I've shaved my pits. You see, in Harbin you can't find deodorant. No one seems to wear it. Actually, for near enough ten months of the year no one actually needs it, but when the hot weather does come around, the locals just tend to, well, smell. The city is still happily untouched by big western supermarkets, but this creates a problem in the hot weather. What do you do to avoid being smelly? I asked Alan.
'When I worked in Wuxi, south China,' he said, 'you couldn't buy deodorant there either, and it was really hot. Someone told me that it wasn't actually your armpits, but your armpit hair that held the smell. You see, the sweat dries and sticks to the hair. Then it begins to smell.'
'So you're saying that you actually shaved your pits?'
'Had to. You sweat like a bastard in south China, and by the end of the day you really stink.'
'But didn't it... feel... weird?'
'It did at first, but I didn't smell anymore.'
Alan's eyes glinted with a sarcastic humour I didn't quite trust, but what he said made sense. I decided to give it a try and went back to my room. I skooshed some shaving foam under my arms and began to drag the razor across them. The concave shape of the pits made it quite a tricky procedure, and the hair was long, jagging and ripping if I moved the razor too fast. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw the ridiculousness of the situation. It was then I realised Alan had been having me on. However, it was too late by then, so I decided to finish the job properly. Afterwards, my armpits looked a strange, alien, sickly shade of white, and they tingled and stung mercilessly.
I picked up my rucksack and went up to the fifth floor lounge to wait for the others, my pits crying out fiercely with displeasure. Alan was sprawled on the sofa, watching a DVD.
'You shaved your pits, then?'
'Umm...'
'You did, didn't you?'
'Yeah.'
He fell off the sofa laughing.
Clive, Gina and I are now sitting on the train, rattling across sun-kissed fields under a blue sky. The train is comfortable and quiet, as most people are not on holiday yet. We're taking it in turns to occupy the two plastic seats at the window while the other one sits on the bottom bunk. In these six-bunk compartments the bottom bunks are a free-for-all. Whole families take over the space to sit, eat, gossip and play cards. I guess if you actually told them that this was your bed and you wanted to sleep, they’d move, but I haven’t seen anyone try it so far. However, the shared space of the bunks engenders a communal, friendly atmosphere, where strangers can become fast friends during the length of a journey. Every now and again we get hot water from an ancient, coal-fuelled boiler to fill our flasks, the red coals somehow a tenuous surviving symbol of an earlier, receding time.
Stood Up
It should have been the perfect day. Went on another school trip to the Song Feng Shan mountain range, this time to an ex game reserve, an ancient deciduous forest with long thin pine trees sprouting from steep glacial ridges, which formed high, narrow natural paths to tightrope-walk along. In the afternoon, we got back in time to meet some friends we've made from the Commercial University, for our weekly kick-about. There's little or no grass in Harbin, so our football is played on a dustbowl, with ancient rusted goalposts, broken bottles and empty noodle cartons littering the pitch. Went home, showered, got spruced up, and I was in the perfect mood to finish the day on a perfect, happy hat trick.
We ate at the Shepherd's Pie Place, then on to Gong Da, and from there to the Banana Bar, in a retracing of our steps from Wednesday night only this time, I hoped, without the prostitutes. I was meeting Liu Yang at 10 pm; Tam and Clive, either to keep me company, or to get a closer look at Liu Yang, came with me. We had a drink at the bar as we waited for her. And waited. And waited. She never showed. I couldn't understand it. What was with the e-card, the phone calls, the enthusiasm, if she wasn't interested? How could she have lost interest so quickly? Had I done something wrong?
'Everything seemed to be going so well,' I told Nick and Matt, just in case they thought Liu Yang was a figment of my imagination. 'We went shopping this week and had a nice time. I don’t understand it.'
'Maybe you said something, did something, that she didn't like. You know, Chinese girls are different. It's impossible to tell what they think.' Clive said, with the benefit of experience.
'Well, she did say that she didn't like my hat. But, I mean, I thought she was joking.’
'What colour was it?'
'Huh?'
'What colour was the hat?'
'Green.'
'Oh. Oh dear...'
Nick made a face, the kind you make when a child does something wrong and doesn't realise it.
'You know, if someone wears a green hat in China, it means their partner is having an affair.'
'Really? But, how was I supposed to know that? And how could that have changed her feelings towards me?'
'Maybe she just thought there were too many cultural differences, too many difficulties dating a foreigner. Or maybe you just had BO, or a bit of spinach stuck in your teeth, and the hat had nothing to do with it.'
Perhaps she'd just taken offence to me wearing my stupid pork-pie hat on our first date, regardless of the colour. And if that was the case, I only had myself to blame. Girls are a mystery to me at the best of times, and Chinese girls were no different, were, in fact, more of a mystery to me, with the language and cultural differences taken into account. I didn't want to drink, or play Connect 4, and I certainly didn't want to dance. I was home before midnight. I tried to contact Liu Yang a number of times during the week, but she never answered her phone or replied to my emails.
We ate at the Shepherd's Pie Place, then on to Gong Da, and from there to the Banana Bar, in a retracing of our steps from Wednesday night only this time, I hoped, without the prostitutes. I was meeting Liu Yang at 10 pm; Tam and Clive, either to keep me company, or to get a closer look at Liu Yang, came with me. We had a drink at the bar as we waited for her. And waited. And waited. She never showed. I couldn't understand it. What was with the e-card, the phone calls, the enthusiasm, if she wasn't interested? How could she have lost interest so quickly? Had I done something wrong?
'Everything seemed to be going so well,' I told Nick and Matt, just in case they thought Liu Yang was a figment of my imagination. 'We went shopping this week and had a nice time. I don’t understand it.'
'Maybe you said something, did something, that she didn't like. You know, Chinese girls are different. It's impossible to tell what they think.' Clive said, with the benefit of experience.
'Well, she did say that she didn't like my hat. But, I mean, I thought she was joking.’
'What colour was it?'
'Huh?'
'What colour was the hat?'
'Green.'
'Oh. Oh dear...'
Nick made a face, the kind you make when a child does something wrong and doesn't realise it.
'You know, if someone wears a green hat in China, it means their partner is having an affair.'
'Really? But, how was I supposed to know that? And how could that have changed her feelings towards me?'
'Maybe she just thought there were too many cultural differences, too many difficulties dating a foreigner. Or maybe you just had BO, or a bit of spinach stuck in your teeth, and the hat had nothing to do with it.'
Perhaps she'd just taken offence to me wearing my stupid pork-pie hat on our first date, regardless of the colour. And if that was the case, I only had myself to blame. Girls are a mystery to me at the best of times, and Chinese girls were no different, were, in fact, more of a mystery to me, with the language and cultural differences taken into account. I didn't want to drink, or play Connect 4, and I certainly didn't want to dance. I was home before midnight. I tried to contact Liu Yang a number of times during the week, but she never answered her phone or replied to my emails.
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