Take Me to the River, Take Me to the Sea

When I woke up, the walls were undulating and the ceiling was spinning round in circles above my head. I had no idea where I was, and not just for a split second, but for whole minutes. I coughed, and a bright yellow gobbet flew from my mouth with bullet velocity.

Then I remembered the black beer and red peonies. Last night Tam and I had drunk the local brew in a strange dimly-lit basement bar. Henan's finest, it said on the label. Wouldn't like to drink the worst, if that's the finest. Picture of a sad-faced dog on the bottle (perhaps because that's how you look the day after), with the name May in large print. I smoked cigarettes from a bright red packet (the same colour as my throat this morning), on it a picture of peony flowers. These flowers have a special significance in China, something to do with an Empress who, jealous of their beauty, ordered them all destroyed. A good idea, and I wish she'd finished what she'd started.

Talk about starting badly and then going downhill from there. We actually went down-river. Today had weirdness written all over it. We were doomed from the moment we woke up. I blame the double-palindrome. Today's date is: 20.02.2002. Spooky times afoot. Which would explain why Danuka suddenly said:

'Let's go and see the Yellow River.'

Let me explain. This whole holiday Tam and I have done all the donkey work, the booking of train tickets, checking into hotels, route-planning, bus-finding hum-drum that takes up a lot of time when you're travelling on a budget. Danuka happily leaves all this to us, attesting that our Chinese is better than hers which, considering our Chinese is a few hackneyed sentences buttressed by The Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook, is a tenuous claim at best. We figure she's just lazy. Why jostle, push and fight for train tickets when you can get two guys to do it for you? However, if she doesn't like something, she's quick enough to complain about it. Anyway, she'd taken more initiative in those few seconds than she'd taken the whole holiday. And that worried us.

Being way too hung-over to object, however, it was to the Yellow River we went. To be fair, Danuka took the lead in the travel arrangements. She identified the number six bus as the one to take us to the viewing point outside Kaifeng but, after waiting at the stop for some time, we eventually found out that the route had been discontinued. At least, that's what we took the guy, waving his arms about, and saying 'No no no!' to mean. No bus? To a famous viewing point? Seemed strange, at the time. Danuka flagged down a taxi and eventually settled on the sum of fifty Yuan, there and back, with the driver. We got in, and found the vehicle bedecked in black leather, black curtains over the windows, and fake plastic flowers on the parcel shelf behind us. It was a funeral taxi, a hearse-chaser for hire. Alarm bells began to ring. From the gap in the black curtains, I watched black clouds gather in the sky, which suited my mood. I coughed and emitted more yellow stuff. Note to self: do not, on any account, let Danuka take the initiative, ever again.

After only ten minutes, the driver turns right off the main road, drives along a tree-lined path for a few hundred yards then stops. He shoos us out, promising to wait. Of course he'll wait: we haven't given him any of the extortionate fifty Yuan yet. We walk along the narrow road, flanked by statues, pagodas, trees, but for the life of us can't see any river. Are we really at the viewpoint? We're not sure, as a viewpoint generally necessitates a view, and there's absolutely nothing to see here. The taxi suddenly skids to a halt alongside us. The driver beckons us to get in. He lifts up a bottle of mineral water with just a drop left in it, shakes it, says:

'Mei you shui.'

Then bawls with laughter as if this is the funniest thing he's ever seen in his life. No water. Our Chinese was good enough to understand that. We didn't believe him. Surely this was some kind of practical joke. Kaifeng has an infamous history of being destroyed repeatedly by floods from the Yellow River. There must be some water somewhere. We made him take us back to the viewing point, which we'd already passed without knowing it. When we got out the cab and walked to the edge, it was just as he'd said. Mei you fucking shui. No water whatsoever, just a dry bed of silt. And that bastard had known all along.

We couldn't believe it: a viewing point to see a dry bed of silt. Right enough, there were no Chinese tour groups bouncing around with their two-fingered V-for-Victory signs, taking photos. Because who wants to take a photo of silt? Apart from us, who'd paid fifty Yuan for the pleasure. Tam and I looked at each other then burst out laughing. We didn't stop for maybe five minutes. In fact, this really was one of the funniest things we'd seen so far. This was the wrong, or maybe the right, thing to do, as Danuka didn't speak to us again all day.

One final ignominy remained. We asked the driver to take us back to our hotel, but instead he took us on a tour of Kaifeng housing estates, saying something like 'Don't worry, I know what I'm doing', before stopping outside a block of residential apartments down a narrow side-street. He pointed to himself to say that this was his house. He went in, then came back five minutes later, dragging what turned out to be his sister, a small, shy girl who he claimed was an English teacher. With her translating, badly, he then made us a proposition: he would take us to see some real water, at another viewpoint on the river, and it would cost us only another fifty Yuan! Pride in tatters, it was all we could do not to strangle him. But we couldn't strangle him, as we had no idea where we were, or how to get back to hotel.

The curse of the palindrome didn't end there. The train journey from Kaifeng to Qingdao that night proved to be just as nasty as the one from Luoyang, but one nightmare train journey in a travelogue is enough, I think. Strangely, just after midnight, palindrome mercifully over, we managed to upgrade our tickets from hard seats to hard sleepers (the term 'hard sleeper' does not sound too auspicious, but believe me when I say that these hard bunks had become some sort of holy grail to us by that time) and, after a mad dash along the length of the train, rucksacks bouncing painfully, when it had stopped at some hick station in some hick town, we got into our hard sleeper carriage and breathed a sigh of relief. Then couldn't sleep. Is it possible to be too tired to sleep? We were. As the train trundled slowly across the border of Henan and Shandong provinces, the promise of Qingdao, a seaside city, beaches, mountains, and our favourite beer beckoning, we sat up saucer-eyed, playing cards.