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.

Broken Chinglish

The Iron Pagoda Park was kissed with sunshine and held static by clear blue sky. A short bus journey out of the fortified walls takes you to this wide, green expanse of trees and grass. A mellow atmosphere and warm weather re-charged our motors and burned our faces. The Iron Pagoda isn't really iron, but stone. It gets its name because, from a distance on a sunny day, you can see it glow a deep burnished russet iron-red. Its decorative carved edges end in a sharp point which points to the heavens. It dominates the landscape as you walk through the park appearing in different forms, from different perspectives, towering angularly every which way you look.

What struck me most about the park, however, were the signs, translated into such amusingly bad English that sometimes you had no idea what they meant. The signs, be they rules, advice, instructions or warnings, were obviously transliterated directly from the Chinese into English by a person with a flowery imagination and terrible spelling and grammar. For example: Gutteral Relics; Meet and Guid Temp; Off Ice; Girth Aid; Tourist Complaining; and, my personal favourite, Big Sod. Here are the park rules, verbatim:

Sight Seeing Notice

• Tourists should obide the order Consciously while you are visiting the Iron Tower park.
• Peace buy tickets to go in park by line. Peace don't block the way.
• Peace keep the sanitation of the park. Peace don't spit, relive the bowels or throw rubbish as is your way in the park.
• Peace take care of cultura relic and pubic property. Don't doodle on the trees place of interest or pubic properties in the park.
• Peace take care of the flowers and grass. Peace keep off lawn and don't break flower or fruit.
• Peace take care of the order in the park. Don't senc out throwaway your dog shoot birds or catch them in the park. Don't lie on chair on bothsides of the park.
• Don't fight or bust up in the park. Don't gamble, do anything superstitious or anything that transgresses the law either.
• Peace don't throw anything that is easy to burn or explode in the park.
• Peace leave the park consciously on time. Don't cemo lish the walls of the park or be bivouacked in the park.

Kaifeng

Kaifeng, one of the seven ancient capitals of China, sits precariously on the flood plains of the Yellow River. It has a difficult relationship with the river, which is simultaneously the city's benefactor, the waterways connecting Kaifeng with north, south and east, and its destroyer, repeated floods having razed the city to the ground on numerous occasions.

Like Xi'an, the old part of the city is situated within four fortified walls, and there are some lovely old streets. Shudian Jie is the main drag, a pretty old street lined with wonderful two-storied Qing Dynasty balconied houses, which are crafted with intricate wooden carvings and topped off with old-style pagoda roofs. The street plays host to a vibrant night market, full of clothes, jewellery and, especially, food stalls. The people of Kaifeng like to walk up and down, up and down Shudian Jie every night; it's the street to see and be seen on.

We walked through the market that night like zombies, barely taking any of it in. My memory is held firm at the edges by wooden Qing buildings, then in the middle is a complete blur: smoke and cooking smells; good-looking couples promenading; myriads of ancient bicycles heaped together; chairs upon chairs around low wooden tables; people eating, drinking, chatting; us somewhere in there too, wandering vacuously, silently. We decided to have a quiet few days and regroup, before heading to the busier metropolises of Qingdao and Dalian.

The Train to Kaifeng

Luoyang train station was brutal. Guards strutted up and down, barking orders at us through loud-halers from a distance of two feet. We were herded into long, straight queues, shouted at if we so much as put one foot out of line, then marched onto the platform like captured animals.

Then all hell broke loose.

The train only stopped at the platform for six minutes. Although the three of us were near the front of our queue, it became a battle of life or death to get on the train. The guards with the loud-halers had disappeared, leaving everyone to fight it out. The line-ups disintegrated into a jostling mob, pushing and shoving around the doors of the carriages. As I pulled myself up the ladder I had to stick my elbows into two people who were scrambling up the side-rails to get on before me. Another guy was hanging on to my big backpack, wrenching at it, trying to pull me off the ladder, my shoulder blades burning with the weight. I turned and punched him. There seemed nothing else I could do.

I managed to get on the train but didn't make it to a carriage. Around twenty people, including Tam, Danuka and I, were crushed into the small space between the two carriages, unable to move, sweating and groaning and wriggling painfully. In Harbin I had seen pigs on the caged back of a truck, squashed in so tight the poor animals around the edges had been crushed to death. That's what it felt like. I couldn't, and tried not to, imagine staying like this all the way to Kaifeng.

A little boy was pinned against the wall, crying shrilly. His father was talking to him frantically, but couldn't get to him. The heat became intense. The guard, a pretty, petite young woman with full ruby lips, was fighting at the doorway with people still trying to get on, although there wasn't an inch of space for them. The crowd brandished their tickets angrily and tried to pull her out of the carriage. She was screaming, screaming at them to get off, get back, crying her eyes out. as they grabbed at her arms. I began to fear she'd lose her fight and bedlam would ensue in this asphyxiating space. Luckily, the train then pulled away. However, that left us with a different problem: five hours of this.

Someone nudged me and I looked round, expecting another confrontation. A man said, in perfect English:

'Hello. Can I help you?'

I must have done a double take, as he repeated the question.

'Can I help you?'

Help. Yes. Sounded good. But I couldn't see for the life of me how. By that time a couple of people on either side of our sardine can had popped through the sides to the carriages left and right, not so much by design but because of the sheer pressure pushing them against and through the doors. We had a miniscule amount of elbowroom. Summoning the last of the air left in my constricted lungs, I explained to him that if he could help us upgrade our tickets to, well, anything better than this, we would be eternally grateful. He shouted something to the little guard in Chinese. She produced a calculator, and told us the price of available hard sleepers. We'd been told at the station there were no hard sleepers left, but seemingly there was. I shoved some money at the girl, and she pocketed it, gesturing at us to follow her. Suddenly, she got her second wind, a surge of confidence. She carved out a way for us to get out of that confined space, and dragged us into the long line of carriages. I asked the guy to come with us, we'd pay, as a thank you, but he shook his head, smiling in wry, fatalistic fashion, comfort isn't for the likes of me y'know, and told us he'd be all right where he was.

It was a long, long walk through all those carriages with our heavy backpacks. People everywhere: whole families on one seat, old men hunkering down under tables, people lying on the luggage racks, more people strewn across the floor like spilled trash, with what looked like all their belongings, in massive red and white striped plastic bags, clogging up the aisles. The girl finally showed us to our bunks, in a carriage only half-full! I felt terrible for the poor people, especially our helpful friend, still stuck in that horrible sardine-can, when we now had this spacious carriage. I pushed the feelings of guilt down, deep down; I was becoming a survivor, a train warrior, a backpacking example of will to power. The girl smiled at our beleaguered but relieved expressions, and I quelled an urge to propose marriage.

We needed a drink. We left our rucksacks in the quiet carriage to look for the buffet car. We found it, near deserted, the only people in it policemen, guards and a crew of cooks dressed in dirty whites, playing cards. We sat down and ordered three cold beers. They looked at us contemptuously, said something in Chinese that we presumed to mean we shouldn't be there. We played our trump - the ignorant foreigner card - shrugged, looked confused, then one of the cooks got up, laughing, to bring us three bottles of cold beer. From being amongst the unluckiest passengers on the train, we were now by far the luckiest. We'd won the last hand, even if it had been rigged for us, as foreigners, in our favour. An image of the squashed little boy invaded my relief. Again, I squashed it down, squashed him down, as if it were me squashing him against the hot carriage wall, and still I sighed with relief. We had a bunk, a cold beer, and a buffet car. We'd survived.