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.