Bound for Vietnam (17 page)
A young man near me at the café sipped a can of Carlsberg beer elegantly through a straw and a strong smell of petrol wafted over from the gutter where the cook and his assistant – identified by their high chef ’s hats and white aprons – laboured away trying to start the generator with a pull rope. They both wore knee-high gum boots which gave me pause to wonder how mucky it got in their kitchen.
After lunch I walked across the bridge to the local market. It covered a lot of ground, flowing up and down covered alleys so narrow that there was only enough space to squeeze between the stalls. I struggled quickly through the reeking meat section at the entrance. Thankfully this soon gave way to the wonderful smell of herbs. They were sold dried or naturally fresh in strands or bundles. I had no idea what most of them were, but I recognised camomile. Woven into round fragrant mats, it was ready to make into tea or to blonde your hair.
I stepped back repulsed when a vendor held out two bear paws with great claws attached. Bear paws are considered a gastronomic delicacy. Not for me, though. The medicines included dried lizards flattened into the shape of the emperor’s fan and dried, coiled snakes, repulsive and real-looking. And anything that resembled a phallus was sold as a ‘tonic’ – a euphemism for an aphrodisiac.
In the fresh food department, I saw cages of live birds of all kinds as well as dogs, turtles, lizards and snakes. Remembering how Saint Patrick had needed to perform a miracle to clear the snakes out of Ireland, I thought that the job should have been given to the Chinese. They’d have done it quicker – they would have eaten them out. Moving on, I bought a string of fresh water pearls for a ridiculously low price and had a new strap fitted to my watch at a watchmaker’s tiny stand. Once again I unwittingly examined the contraceptives. The packets always look so inviting that they get me in every time. Then I saw numerous stalls lined with row after row of bras. Something about them seemed weird so I administered the prod test. My finger encountered a rock solid substance. Now I knew why the girls in China did not look flat chested. But wearing a bra like that must feel as though a couple of saucepan lids have been strapped to your chest.
After twisting and turning through the market streets, I found myself in the kind of small back lanes that I enjoy. This was where the Chinese people lived, shopped and worked. I especially liked the roof-tops of the crowded and narrow houses. Some were pretty and decorated with gardens and fancy balustrades; others looked as though they were about to fall off, or crumble at any minute. On many balconies piles of junk, makeshift lean-tos and the odd tree in a pot were pushed together, surrounded by any kind of fencing that could be called into use as a barricade to stop it all falling down.
Through the hostel’s resident travel agent I learned that the nearest big town to the border into Vietnam was Nanning. I could travel to Wuzhou, which was part of the way there on the Pearl River by boat and from there boats left for Nanning. A riverboat departed from Guangzhou on the evening of the day my Vietnamese visa had been promised, so I bought a ticket. I half-expected not to be granted the visa, but it was duly handed over to me by a young Vietnamese lady in a beautiful embroidered blouse. Once again I was told that I was only permitted to cross the border at the Mon Cai Pass and only on the date set down on my visa. I was still unsure of the location, which I could not find on my map, but I thought that it was in the mountains.
The day of the boat’s departure was again lovely, birds were singing and the sun shone brightly. I filled in the time until boarding by sitting in the park, then I did the rounds of the posh hotel lobbies in the vicinity. Some of them were tourist attractions themselves and in them I could indulge in one of my hobbies – people watching. It surprised me that hotel staff never threw me out of these places. It must have been because of my white face. It came in handy sometimes.
Boarding the boat was easy. A helpful member of the wharf staff pointed the way and I went relatively placidly onto the vessel. There was not a big crowd of passengers and there were smooth ramps I could roll my wheeled luggage down. But the boat was so small that at first I thought it was a day-tripper. It had only two decks and a cargo hold below. Immediately I stepped over the gang-plank and onto the deck, however, I was hit by the stench of the toilets. It was not a happy welcome.
My first glimpse of the ship was not appealing. It was old, tatty and worn and a row of fire buckets were once again the sum total of the emergency equipment. There were only a few cabins and they were grouped around an open central area, forward on the first deck. All one end of the deck above was taken up by a single large communal cabin that contained two tiers of boards with rush mats spread on them edge to edge, on which people were laid out in two long rows like peas in a pod.
I stood on deck in the prow to watch our departure. Suddenly a bellowing, ‘Hellooooo’ came from somewhere above. I jumped a foot in the air and, turning, saw the captain above me on the bridge with a megaphone in his hand and his face split in a watermelon sized grin that displayed lots of teeth. ‘Hello,’ I shouted back. ‘How are you?’ he roared and laughing loudly blew a tremendous blast on the horn. I almost fell overboard. ‘I was fine before that!’ I bawled back. He roared with laughter again and we left.
The boat edged away from the dockside, swung out into midstream and turning downriver, set off at a good pace into the setting sun with the flow of the stream. A peasant in a faded blue cotton jacket and rope sandals crept up to watch me silently, open mouthed with awe. I tried not to do anything too interesting, shocking or entertaining, but I still held him in thrall. ‘
Dabidaze
’ – ‘big nose’ he finally whispered.
When dark fell half an hour later, we were still plying through Guangzhou. We passed many barges loaded with building materials that were so low in the water it amazed me that they didn’t sink. Some actually had water washing over their freeboard. We sailed past the White Swan Hotel, festooned with lights like a fantastic Christmas tree, and on the outskirts of the city, row after row of factories.
My cabin was very small. It contained two wooden bunks covered with rush mats. There were no mattresses or sheets, but there was a doona and a tiny pillow. The ever-present thermos and cups sat in a plastic holder on a small wooden desk.
I located the dining room on the top deck. It was a wonder and beat the eating establishment of any other boat I had been on in China. Comfortable and well equipped with real tables and chairs, it also had windows with curtains and wall and ceiling lights, almost all of which had most bulbs working – a major achievement. There had even been a cheery attempt to brighten it up with decorations. The staff were helpful and I managed to get some food by the Look and Point method. Even the food was great. I ate the best mushrooms I have tasted since I collected them myself in farm paddocks, along with great big clumps of a green vegetable that looked like celery. I had no implements to cut the greens, so I had to shove what I could in my mouth, bite off what was left hanging out, and chomp. Very elegant. A man who spoke a few words of English and his girlfriend shared my table. They were friendly, but he smoked non-stop.
The boat did not run to a sitting room, but after dinner a television was set up in the open space between the cabins and I was invited to watch a film. A micro-sized shop near the dining room sold life-sustaining necessities such as cigarettes, noodles, biscuits and booze, and Chinese music invaded my ears wherever I went.
Some time after dark we stopped in mid-stream, hooted three times and a big sampan pulled out from the shore to land a dozen or so people on board our boat. From then on we stopped and hooted at intervals and each time we did passengers or goods came out to us. This operation woke me at about two in the morning and I looked out of my porthole. By the silvery light of an almost full moon I saw the river, its surface dotted here and there with the soft lights of small boats, unfolding gently between the outline of low hills.
In the morning I could see that the riverside was terraced with rice paddies and that the hills were separated by veils of mist that lay low between their folds. Soon mist also started to roll off the river until everything was obscured and we were creeping along through a world of dense fog.
When the fog lifted later, I saw an occasional village or town. Clusters of wooden boats nuzzled the shore at their feet; their lives were obviously dominated by the river. The Pearl River was calm and nowhere near as wide as the Yangtze, but the villages were all perched halfway up hillsides – an indication that flooding was common. And landslides must have been too. I saw a place where an entire cliff of red earth had plunged into the river. Further on, the hills became heavily wooded and barges with big loads of logs went past downstream.
The boat’s ablution block was unisex. To wash my face and clean my teeth I had to join a medley of men and women who were busy splashing in a row of wash-basins that lined the wall. The toilets were a hole in the tiled floor, but at least they were not communal. Each small cubby hole had a half-sized swing door.
We reached Wuzhou, a large town built high on the riverbank, at a quarter to twelve the next day. I was now back in Guangxi province. When I got off the boat I hired a quiet boy who picked up my bag and calmly took charge of me. At the top of the inevitable thousand steps, he took me to the ticket office and tried to help me to get a ticket to Nanning. It proved unavailable. The river level was too low at this time for passenger boats to navigate any further upriver, so he took me to the bus depot instead. Then he told me which hotel to go to and put me in a taxi, getting out my map and making sure the lady driver understood where I wanted to go. Despite all this extra attention, he did not ask me for more than the price we had agreed on to get up the steps, but I gave him a bonus. The people of Wuzhou seemed friendly. When I had consulted my phrasebook in the street I had drawn an instant audience and two female students emerged from the crowd and accompanied me and my helper to the bus ticket office. Here all my entourage and an obliging woman official joined forces to ensure that I got the best bus.
The hotel the taxi took me to was almost opposite the boat dock. An old four-storeyed building, it had terrazzo floors and a wide marble staircase. Some hotel receptionists hadn’t even looked at my visa, but this one took what seemed to be forever scrutinising and deciphering it. I was given a room on the top floor. There was no lift. But it was good for my legs! When I was told that the room cost only eight dollars, I expected a grubby slum. Amazingly I found a small, spotless single room with an alcove at one end that housed a tiny but clean bathroom. The hand basin even looked as though it had been introduced to the Ajax. A large galvanised-iron bucket that appeared to be the clothes washing facility reposed in one corner and a cumbersome wooden toilet seat hung from a nail on the wall. There was also the usual hand-shower with the usual broken wall bracket from which, I had been told, hot water only flowed after seven in the evening.
The floor of my room was covered with check-patterned tiles which gave away its secret past; it had formerly been part of an old verandah. The mosquito net coiled over the bed reminded me that I was in malaria country again, but I could not fathom why the ceiling fan over the bed had neat newspaper parcels wrapped around its blades.
From the barred window in the alcove I looked down on the flat roofs and tiny upstairs back porches of the surrounding houses. A couple of the roofs had veggies growing in mini plots of earth. I heard a cat crying and searched for it apprehensively, fearing that it might be tonight’s tea at the restaurant below. Instead I discovered a big white moggie rubbing the legs of a woman who was tending a plot of vegetables. He was telling her that it was time for his dinner. Meanwhile, on an adjacent balcony, a small boy kung-fued a cushion that had been tied on a washing line and a man performed his ablutions in a tin bowl.
In the restaurant attached to the hotel I was the only patron, but I was not alone. Eight staff gossiped loudly at a nearby table. After much reference to the phrasebook, one girl more enterprising than the rest brought forth a menu that had some English translations. I ordered what I thought was mixed vegetables but only received a huge plate of the green vegetable dish I had had on the boat. It looked like the weed I saw men dredging up from the river, but I seriously hoped it was not. Not after what could be seen floating in those waters.
My dinner contained masses of garlic. I ate at least a dozen cloves with never a thought for my poor fellow travellers who were about to be incarcerated for twelve hours in a bus with me the next day.
In the evening I went walking for a couple of hours. The riverside wharves contained extensive covered markets and a busy night market also spread through the small back streets close to the river. Everyone seemed to be out shopping or strolling. I bought some of the many varieties of fruit that were plentiful here and, as I had started to feel a bit squiffy since eating my dinner, I bought a big bottle of pickled chilli to take as a prophylactic. No bug can survive in your stomach if you drown it in chilli.
Returning to my room I had a wonderful hot shower and went to bed. The old iron bed springs creaked and the lumpy coils prodded me, but I slept soundly off and on despite the noise the staff made outside my door all night.
