Beijing

04/02/02.

Beijing

We took the night train from Harbin to Beijing, in a six-bed 'hard sleeper' compartment, across from which were two hard plastic seats and a formica-topped table. Tam and I, unable to sleep, sat at the table most of the night playing cards. One month to travel around China, on trains, with only the Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook and a vague plan of where to go!

I'm not sure if we were excited, or terrified, or both.

The next morning, we lugged our rucksacks out into warm, dry, sunlight-dappled Beijing streets and looked around in confusion: we were outdoors, and it was warm; what was going on? Getting carried away, we decided to walk to our Youth Hostel. Tam had a map, and it didn't look too far away. We found it easily enough; too easily, in fact. The girl at the desk told us we hadn't made a reservation. We showed her the receipt, and were told we were in the wrong hostel.

Back on the street, the taxi driver studied the name of the hostel then denied all knowledge of its existence. He asked his buddies. They conferred for a few minutes then corroborated his story: nah, this place doesn't exist... but don't worry, get in anyway! Forty-five minutes later, what looks like the same buildings are appearing then reappearing again and again. We were going round in circles. Clive, who is in Beijing with Tam, Danuka and I for just one day, before flying off to Dubai to visit his parents, swore at the taxi driver in Chinese for quite some time before he (the driver) suddenly cried, 'Oh! A-ha! That place!' and sped off in the direction he should have gone in the first place.

Not exactly an auspicious start to our tour. However, I had other portents on my mind.


The Watch

Before leaving Harbin, I'd made a promise to myself to put the ill feelings of the last few months behind me. I had missed her quite enough. It was time to start a new chapter.

As I went to chuck my bag under the X-ray machine at Harbin train station, it slipped from my shoulders, the strap tangling with the strap of my watch. The weight of the rucksack was too much for the watchstrap, which pinged and shattered, the watch falling from my wrist. The watch itself was undamaged, but the strap was knackered. The watch had been a birthday present from her, a memento of happier times. At first I felt upset and annoyed but, as I sat on the train mulling it over, I realised that it could easily be a good omen, that the last remnant of the chain, the chain of memory, the chain linking me to the past, to her, had been broken, and looked irreparable.

Philosophers, Fish, and Missing Persons

The hostel, which the taxi driver eventually found, was called the Far East International. I plug it shamelessly because it deserves it. Clean, bright, friendly, a nice blend of the old and the new. And cheap! You enter the place through a traditional courtyard to find cool tile-floored rooms with comfortable wooden furnishings and modern televisions and computers. A dorm room of four beds cost only forty Yuan per night. In the sitting room area there are round tables where you can write, and jasmine tea from which you can help yourself. It was so comfortable, we were afraid we would fall asleep and lose a whole afternoon. After some discussion, we decided not to waste any time, and headed straight for the Summer Palace.

The royal gardens of the Summer Palace have a chequered past. Favourite of the Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century, ransacked by the French and British in the nineteenth, to be rebuilt by the Dowager Cixi a few decades later, the area consists of connected parks, pagodas, temples and lakes and is magnificent and grand on a massive scale. Around every corner lies a garden, pagoda, river or ornate bridge, surrounded by forests, walkways, gnarled trees, statues, ancient pockmarked rocks and steps, steps and more steps. A long lake lies behind a colourful temple. A jade boat sits in frozen water. Paths of crazy paving lead you meanderingly through man-made waterways. In fact, water forms two-thirds of this royal retreat and lends the place a tranquil atmosphere.

My favourite place was the garden within a garden called 'The Harmonious Interest Garden'. Rather like The Mouse Trap, Hamlet's play within a play, the garden forms a microcosm of the Summer Palace as a whole, and is the crux of the imperial idea of harmony, philosophy, and a spiritual place of retreat. Small and compact, lacking the grand ostentation of other attractions in the park, it looks the kind of place where an emperor could hide away and lose himself in contemplation; equally, it would be perfect to steal away to with a concubine or two.

The garden consists of squat pagodas connected by stone pathways spanning inter-connecting channels of water, which were still more or less iced over at the time of our visit. Ornamental hump-backed bridges and leafless spindly trees completed the austere scene. Willows, bare and cold, let their thin bending branches fall and caress the icy water, as if weeping for splendorous bygone dynasties.

You could imagine the garden depicted in Chinese watercolour on rice paper, the droop of the willows accentuated, the curves of the bridges and angles of the paths intensified. I stood on a small bridge and let the afternoon sun bathe my forehead, willow branches brushing my cheeks. I felt calm in the sun. I remembered reading that, long ago here, two philosophers had stood in this very spot and talked, for some obscure reason, about fish. Perhaps they were wondering where the fish went when the water iced over in the winter.

The sun was beginning to melt the ice on the surface of the ponds. For the first time in months, sticks and branches, which must have been trapped the whole winter, were finding freedom. Light reflected from the tiny air bubbles in the thawing water around the edges of the branches, forming sparkling angled patterns on the surface.

I walked back towards our agreed-upon exit gate, warm and calm for the first time in months.

This feeling soon evaporated when, on meeting Tam and Clive at the gate, I found out Danuka was missing. We waited at the exit for over an hour, hoping she would turn up. The scene after the Tiger Park, where we three men had abandoned Gina, Anita and her mum in the freezing cold, immediately sprang to mind. I knew we couldn't leave without Danuka. Would she be able to find her way back alone? Did she even have the address of the hostel? (I didn't.) Would she be safe in this strange city at night?

The Summer Palace covers a huge area, and our chances of finding her in there were virtually zero. However, we couldn't just leave without her. We had to do something. Moreover, we were now being harassed by a woman who was talking about the size of western men's penises, making obscene gestures like elongated elephant trunks with her arms and fingers (she was also trying to sell postcards). I set off for the temple area, Tam went back to the lakes, and Clive volunteered to wait at the exit gate just in case Danuka arrived there later, wondering out loud if he shouldn't actually just wait for her in the MacDonald's across the road.

After three hours of fruitless searching, and countless descriptions in bad Chinese of a six-foot red-haired western girl wearing a long green coat, it got dark and cold and we decided to return to the hostel and consider what to do next from there. The park had closed, so there was no way, unless she was sleeping or unconscious, that Danuka was still in it. We caught a taxi back, entered the hostel with heads hung low, to find Danuka sitting with Gina, Anita, and her mum, who had arrived in Beijing the day before, all of them drinking jasmine tea with knowing looks on their faces. Natasha had somehow got back via a bus, a taxi and a police car. Meanwhile, our karma, in the physical manifestation of four righteous, angry women, had somehow followed us all the way to Beijing.