Bound for Vietnam (14 page)
The stalls overflowed the market place and ran along the lanes on either side of it. Bright cheery cheeps from day old chicks and ducklings that were only tiny balls of golden fluff led me to the live goods area, where big ducks quacked under wicker baskets. Someone squeezed past me holding a brace of squawking brown hens upside down by the feet – dinner on the hoof. A man pulled a small hand cart through the crowd, on which six large, pink and white pigs encased in woven bamboo cocoons were stacked in two layers. They were surprisingly quiet for pigs in this undignified position. If you have ever heard a pig venting his displeasure at being interfered with, you will know what I mean.
A watch mender sat on a stool in front of a microscopic stand that contained his accoutrements of trade and performed emergency surgery on a timepiece while its owner breathed down his neck. A boot mender also did on the spot re-furbishings. I bought a replacement for the purse I had lost and a comb from an old lady who squatted on the ground with a small rattan tray on her lap. Whenever possible, I bought from street vendors. I decided that they needed the money more than the government who owned all the big shops. Walking on, I left the market behind and followed the winding lane through the village until the houses thinned out and I came to a cross road. On the outskirts of the village, where vegetable gardens and patches of crop were being hand watered with buckets, a motorbike taxi waited.
I negotiated a return ride to Yanshu in this smart conveyance. It had bright red paint and a green frilled canvas canopy that covered both passenger and driver. I climbed in the side-car. The driver’s girlfriend hopped on the pillion and we rode slowly along the tree-fringed road through countryside that was dotted with stooks of hay and planted with vegetables, bamboo and rice. The side-car had enough room for two small bottoms and halfway along the road we picked up two girls. One got in with me to practise her English; the other took the place of the driver’s girlfriend on the pillion. The girlfriend then sat on the mudguard of the side-car and braced her feet on the step. The RTA would have had a fit, but it was very cosy and we all parted friends.
In Fuli I had seen a couple of families who appeared to have two children. Out here in the country it must be easier to get away with having more than the one child allowed – if you could escape the notice of the dreaded Baby Police. These uniformed characters, who rank on a level with the Gestapo in the popularity polls, prowl the villages in motorcycle side-cars, hunting out families who have more than their ration of children. The male partner found guilty of this heinous offence is immediately taken to the nearest hospital for a vasectomy, as well as being heavily fined and penalised. I was told the story of one man who was found to have produced three children. After being apprehended and put in the side-car for the hospital trip, he jumped from the vehicle and, hitting his head on the concrete gutter, was left there unconscious on the side of the road. He died. Some birth control!
After two weeks of rest and recuperation in Yanshu, it was time to move on to Guangzhou. By this time I had won a heart – Khai, the hostel manager, who told me I walked like a mannequin. Me! Whom my dad used to call Tanglefoot and say I’d trip over the pattern on the carpet. I couldn’t wait to tell my relatives, who say I walk like a ruptured duck. This near-sighted gent asked if I had formerly been a model. A model of what? And formerly? In a former life? Love is surely blind! Khai was unusual for a Chinese. He was a chubby, cuddly type with a round happy face, round glasses and receding hair that added to his cuddly look. He described himself as, ‘the fat man with glasses, half bald’. He was a cheerful friendly man who, despite his westernisation, still had a spit now and then. At least he walked over to the gutter to do it.
The sleeper bus was a great disappointment. I had seen them standing empty in the bus station where they looked quite civilised, but that was before the Chinese got stuck into them. I had been warned. At the hostel I met three Englishmen who had just arrived from Guangzhou on a sleeper bus. They said the trip had been a nightmare. The stereo blasted full bore in their ears the entire journey, the driver had blown the horn every three seconds and almost all of the road was under construction.
At three in the afternoon Khai carried my bags to the bus station. There it stood, the oldest sleeper bus on the market. Tatty and careworn, it looked like a zoo cage from the outside. Through its tinted windows all you could see were bars – the supports for the upper berths and the rungs for climbing up to them. Double decker sleepers were fixed along each side of the bus as well as down the middle where they were flanked by two very narrow aisles. Across the back were crammed two layers of five berths in which the customers lay like rows of sardines.
We started off with the bus only half full of passengers, six of whom were foreigners. As we drove through the pretty country outside Yanshu the conductor issued us with a doona each. I rolled mine into a bolster to prop myself up and knitted. You couldn’t sit, so I travelled sprawled back like the Queen of Sheba rolling through her domain.
We passed more of the mountains peculiar to this locality that stuck up like fingers growing straight out of the ground. Everywhere I looked I saw people in the fields bringing in the harvest, while children played under the watchful eyes of their grandparents. In the villages fruit was laid out on racks and tables to dry, and rice was spread on the ground or being winnowed. Now and then we passed a large pig going home on a bicycle – not riding it, but hanging over both sides in an open-weave, wicker basket. And most definitely alive, as evidenced by the stream of fluid that emitted outwards from the business end of one to hit the side of our bus. One bicycle even had two pigs on it. Another bore an army of chooks in two tiers of wire cages. A regular bus passed us with a ludicrous looking load tied on its roof; a three-seater sofa atop an awkward and unstable pile of motley baggage. I reflected that this was the ultimate way to travel; taking your own seat with you. In one village the bus swerved to miss a puppy, not a pet, but someone’s dinner. It was the only dog I had seen alive in China so far.
We had only driven a short distance from the bus station when we were hailed by a group of people who were waiting by the side of the road, all packed and ready to travel. After they had spent fifteen minutes arguing and shouting with the driver and the conductor, I wondered testily why they couldn’t have booked a ticket. The crew finally decided to take them on board. The main concern seemed to have been the establishment of the fare. From then on this performance was repeated every few kilometres until midnight when, after much squeezing, shouting and shoe-horning, we had been finally jam-packed to our maximum capacity. By then the aisles were a climb-over job and the front of the bus was stacked high with cargo. It took an incredible amount of fuss to get people allocated places. Wondering what they could possibly be going on about for so long and in such a convoluted manner, I decided that they all must be a bit thick.
One group’s luggage included many large fodder bags tied at the neck, one of which was moving suspiciously. Some of this baggage went up on the roof, but most came inside the bus. The female of the group negotiated with the driver’s mate and the conductor, who prodded all the bags to suss out their contents. But when the conductor turned away for a moment, two more huge bags were manoeuvred on to the bus from behind a wall. One of the men got in the bus and opened my window so that the woman could pass the stuff up to him. He then hauled these grotty old bags over me, my bedding, and my bags. Towards evening we passed another sleeper bus. It was lying on its side in the rice paddy.
Just on twilight we pulled into a wayside stop for dinner. It was a rough sort of shed that was open to the road at the front and contained low wooden tables and Lilliputian, kindy chairs. I ate chicken and green chilli peppers, hot and tasty, while watching a mauve, pink and purple sunset streak the sky. Then it was dark – and how! There had been a power failure. Candles were produced, but they were obviously cooking with coal as food still continued to be supplied. Tripping downstairs to the loo, I found a damp wet dungeon, and then it was back on the road.
The bus was now mostly full of Chinese men, all of whom chain-smoked, spat and blew their noses – I didn’t want to know where – they had no hankies and they did not open a window. My berth was the last one in front of the double row of bunks across the rear where the occupants lay smoking and shouting to each other. I began to feel the effects of inhaling so much nicotine, but the fresh air fiends of day time buses, who put all the windows down and blew your head off, converted after dark to wimps who were convinced that the night air kills. The bus remained shut tight as a drum and the air inside became progressively foggier and foggier. Cigarette butts and ash were dropped inside the bus rather than out the window. When I opened my window, the man behind me pushed it shut. The man directly above me hung the hand that held his cigarette down level with my eye until I took his wrist and gently pushed it up. He took the hint, but still flicked ash down onto the people and the boxes and bags below. Finally his still lighted butt descended, he cared not where.
The road was as appalling as I had been warned. Detours continued for hundreds of miles and at one of them we were held up for over an hour. The road was not being repaired in small sections; the whole lot was being done at once. Then our bus suffered a breakdown and we sat on the side of the road for another hour.
In the front of the bus next to the driver was a flat bench on which the co-driver slept. Despite the bumpiness of the road and the hours of detours I also had some sleep, but it was full of vivid and strange dreams. At one stage I woke and, looking up blearily, I saw a man I thought was the driver outlined in front of me. Then to my absolute horror I saw him lie down flat. I was in shock before I realised that the driver was on the other side.
Four hours after dinner we had a comfort stop by the side of a dark piece of road and I had to perform what is normally a private affair among hundreds of men. By this time I didn’t care. Even when I got caught with my pants down by a truck coming slowly up the hill with its lights on high beam I wasn’t phased. China is a great leveller.
Guangzhou straddles the Pearl River, the fifth longest river in China, which links the city to the South China Sea and is thronged with ferries, freighters, junks, sampans, small tankers and big gun boats. Foreigners have been coming to Guangzhou, as they called China’s first major seaport, for a couple of thousand years. Established around 200 BC and the capital of the Guangdong Province for over a thousand years, it is one of China’s largest cities. By the end of the Han Dynasty, in 200 AD, foreign trade linked the port with other areas of Asia, as well as India and the Roman Empire. By the ninth century a large colony of Arabs, Jews and Persians had settled here to trade in silk, tea and porcelain. In the sixteenth century, Europeans came to Guangzhou. First the Portuguese, then the Spanish, Dutch and English, who set up trading posts in the late eighteenth century. Now, although Guangzhou is primarily an industrial city, it is still involved in making money and hustling.
At six o’clock in the morning, our bus pulled into Guangzhou. It was still dark, and I had no idea where I was. Only the main bus station was marked on my map, and this was not it. A couple of English blokes, who had also been on the bus, and I lined up with a bunch of local workers in the station café for some breakfast noodles. Later I realised that the twelve yuan I had paid had been for all three of our breakfasts. The boys had paid as well. But a refund was out of the question. The cashier was programmed to take money, not give it back.
Mark, John and I decided to travel to the Guangzhou Youth Hostel together. Yanshu had been my first experience of hostels, and I had formed a good opinion of them. Three taxi drivers turned us down before we found one who could read the map we were using to indicate our destination. At the hostel, the boys paid to leave their luggage – they were going to Hong Kong that night by train – and I put my name on the waiting list for a room. I was told to come back at check out time. I went to a café across the road from where I could keep an eye on the hostel. When I saw the night receptionist leave, I returned to stake my claim with the day staff. You see how much I had learned! Then I moved to the hostel’s café. Adjacent to the foyer, it was closer for a speedy ambush if I saw guests departing.
At ten o’clock I spied people leaving, so I presented myself at the reception desk. Here I discovered that the staff were not keeping rooms for those they had written on the waiting list. I caught them in the act of admitting several middle-aged Chinese who had just trickled in. And this was supposed to be a youth hostel.
Other travellers had told me that Guangzhou was a ghastly place, but I was favourably impressed with it. Later I wondered if I had enjoyed Guangzhou because it was not totally Chinese! The youth hostel is situated on Shamian Island, a small residential area that was formerly the colonial foreign enclave, and is linked to the city by two bridges. The island retains the peaceful ambience of the nineteenth century and staying here was what helped me to appreciate Guangzhou. The streets are lined with beautiful old buildings that have been carefully restored. Lovely big banyan trees hang over the cobbled footpaths that are bordered by gardens edged with low concrete walls topped by white iron fences. The hostel is housed in one of the fine old buildings and looks nothing like I imagined a youth hostel should.