Bound for Vietnam (2 page)

I said, ‘CITS.’

He pointed upstairs, but when I took a step in that direction he said, ‘No no!’ He dialled a number and then handed me the phone through the aperture.

A woman asked, ‘Who do you want to see?’

‘No one in particular,’ I said, ‘I just want some help.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want a ticket on a boat to Qingdoa.’

No boat went anywhere from Tianjin, she said, except for the international ferries that sailed to Korea and Japan. After this outrageous lie, Madam CITS was utterly unhelpful. She refused to admit me to the office, saying that she was not seeing anybody that day. Thinking, Funny behaviour for a firm that was in the business of helping and advising foreign visitors, I left. But the guard waved me next door to China Airlines where a beautiful young woman listened to my story and wrote down the address of the coastal boat ticket office for me.

At the shipping office the ticket-seller and I, with the aid of the phrasebook and a lot of effort, worked out where I wanted to go and how much it would cost. I went off to change some money and arrived back just before midday to discover that all the ticket windows were covered with wooden shutters. I banged on one behind which I could hear voices and was told that the office did not re-open until half past one. I sat down on the hard wooden bench to wait. An old man shuffled up and, smiling broadly at me, practised his only two words of English – both ‘H’ words, ‘Hello and Whore’.

At a quarter to one I was joined by the first English-speaking traveller I had encountered in a long time, a Chinese named Liang. He was a friendly young man who was on holiday from his job as an electronics engineer with a French nuclear firm in Guangzhou. He decided to wait with me, and I asked him if he would help me buy my ticket. Liang was going to Dalian, and he convinced me that I should too, saying that it would be easier to get a ship to Shanghai from there than from Qingdoa.

Having eventually acquired the boat ticket, I got into a taxi intending to go to the antique market, but the driver told me that I would be wasting my money because the market closed after lunch. All the taxi drivers I encountered in this town were honest. This one took me on a much shorter trip to a local tourist attraction, the Ancient Culture Street, an area where old buildings have been restored or reproduced to recreate a traditional old town. It is centred around the Temple of the Queen of Heaven, the goddess of the sea, which dates back to 1326 AD. The buildings were impressive but the shops all sold similar souvenirs and copies of antiques that I found tedious after a while. The few genuine old pieces were either very expensive or not very good. I did buy a silk kite however, another product for which Tianjin is famous.

At the end of the Ancient Culture Street, I came to the River Hai and started walking along its bank in the direction of the city centre. It was an agreeable ramble. The river wound through the town and passed under many bridges, one of which was shaped and curved to follow the large decorative dragons that ran along each of its sides. The path by the riverside meandered under shady spreading trees and every now and then I passed small cafés that served coffee and drinks at tables and chairs in the open air.

The feeling that I was walking along the River Seine in Paris was reinforced by the ornate wrought-iron railings that edged the riverbank and which I read had been brought from France. People fished from the railings using hand lines or rods and itinerant bicycle repair, accessories and spare parts salesmen set up business beside the path. You could lean on the balustrade and watch the river while your bike was mended. Or you could perch on a tiny, three-legged stool and get your hair cut by the nomadic barber who wandered along looking for trade. Other vendors produced an instant shop by stringing a rope between two trees and hanging some goods, such as scarves, on it. One woman pedalled by on a bike that had an emporium of plastic wares and clothing dangling from its sides. At one spot I came upon a large piece of plastic sheeting that had been strung between two trees. A crowd of men behind it seemed to be gambling. It looked like a floating crap game.

The riverside railings were also used to suspend big circular fishing nets. They were attached to poles that extended outwards from a central post like the arms of an umbrella, and were hauled up and down by a winch. I watched many nets brought up but didn’t see any fish in them. This caused me no grief. The river was marred by flotsam, and the town’s sewerage emptied into it. I would not have wanted to eat anything that came out of it.

Strolling along under the lovely trees watching local life going by was great, but every now and then I came to a bridge, and I had to negotiate the terrifying traffic on the road that crossed it. There were lots of cars, a few carts drawn by horses or donkeys and millions of bicycles. I had learned by now that I would never get across a street if I did not just step out bravely into the bicycle brigade. I had watched how the Chinese navigated their way. The locals simply walked among the bicycles like a bunch of chooks. So, taking a deep breath I would march into the melee and rely on them to miss. They were pretty good at it too. Bikes peeled off me all around.

In Tianjin’s city centre, I marvelled at a veritable architectural museum of turn-of-the-century buildings – remnants of the Europeans who had occupied segments of the town in its trading heyday. Tianjin was developed as a port and grain storage point in the fourteenth-century Yuan Dynasty following the establishment of Beijing as the Mongol capital. In 1858, the British and French invaded Tianjin, established trading posts and opened it to other countries, and the Japanese, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Belgians and Italians also moved in. Now Tianjin has a population of five-and-a-half million people and, with two universities and numerous institutes and colleges, it is an important education centre.

The next morning I arrived at the shipping office intending to board the bus to Tanggu, fifty kilometres away, which is Tianjin’s port. My friend Liang was waiting for me at the office. He persuaded me to share a taxi, saying that the bus would be overcrowded, which it was. The taxi was much more comfortable. Liang sat in the front seat with the female driver, while I reclined in the back of the van, lounging on a chintz-covered seat with my feet up like Cleopatra swanning down the Nile.

The road we travelled to Tanggu was a tangle of bikes. They were everywhere and I was constantly surprised at how the taxi managed to miss them. We drove over many of the canals and waterways that crisscross Tianjin and on their landscaped edges, as well as in the frequent leafy parks, I saw people doing tai chi and grandparents minding children; one elderly man was teaching a small boy to ride a tricycle along a canal path.

Once outside the city, however, we were in a dreary industrial landscape that was only relieved by an occasional, unintentionally humorous sign. I saw one that proclaimed a building to be ‘The Long Smooth Perfect Article Factory’. I am still wondering what exactly they made. They certainly weren’t giving away any such information before you got in the door, but any time I want a long smooth perfect article, I shall know where to go.

The only other interesting sight on the highway was a mule train; a team of ten heavily loaded mules plodded along amid the zooming traffic.

Tanggu seemed to consist mainly of low sailors’ dives. There were whole streets of them, presumably catering to the droves of Chinese tourists who land here by ship from Macau and Hong Kong. I remembered my friends, the seamen of the Good Ship
Pandora
, with whom I had once hitched a ride across the Indian Ocean and who had promised to show me a low sailors’ dive in Bombay. This had never eventuated, and I am still waiting for this elevating experience to enrich my life.

Liang and I lunched in a wharf-side café that had poor food at inflated prices. Our ship, the
Tiansin
, carried 500 passengers, but it was not overcrowded. The toilets, however, were the communal trough and trench variety, but without running water, and so they came complete with piles of other people’s doings.

As the
Tiansin
pulled out of port, I made for the bow of the ship where I could see a sole occupant. On closer inspection I heard loud retchings and heavings, which explained his solitude. I left him to it.

I had only been able to buy a second-class ticket on the
Tiansin
, and I found myself in a four-bunk cabin with three young men for company. What a good conversation opener that would make. ‘I spent the night between Tianjin and Dalian with three young men!’ The cabin was large and functional, but it had no privacy. The door even contained an eye-level, uncurtained window through which anyone who had a mind to could peer in at you from the passageway. It reminded me of the windows in the doors of prison cells that are used for checking on the inmates.

That evening Liang and I ate together in the ship’s huge cafeteria. We had a cheap meal of chicken that was a minefield of small bones which my dinner companion spat directly onto the tablecloth. A big brown bottle of beer cost me three yuan – twenty-four cents – but came without anything in the line of a drinking vessel. At intervals during dinner I clutched this huge bottle by the neck and swigged out of it, imagining how such niceties would go down in polite society.

Later I wandered around the deck. The sea was like dark-green glass and the ship made hardly any movement as it slid over it. In the cabin I lay on my upper bunk and watched the ocean through the port-hole. My room-mates had all fallen on their beds the minute they had come aboard ship and slept until dinner time, after which they had prepared for bed and slept again, snoring, until morning. Except for two of them, who had woken at about ten in the evening and begun smoking and talking. Then one had started to sing softly. It must have been a lullaby, because I went to sleep.

At eleven the next morning, the
Tiansin
slid slowly past a long breakwater and tied up at the wharf of Dalian. We had been a good while coming into this massive and busy harbour. Crowded with ships, its docks lined by imposing warehouses, it reminded me of Bombay. Overshadowing the warehouses were huge cranes that worked away, picking things up and putting them down frantically like giant, stick-insect robots gone mad. And over everything hung a heavy grey pall of pollution.

I went ashore, disappointed that I had not seen Liang this morning. I feared his desertion might have been brought on by my questions. I had noticed that he did not ask me anything personal. Was this because he was too polite? Perhaps he had thought I was a spy. Perhaps he was the spy! He had told me that his job as an electronics engineer at the French company’s nuclear station in South China involved the disposal of toxic waste materials. I had been shocked at his reply to my question, ‘What do you do with it?’ In a matter of fact manner, he simply said, ‘We put it in the sea.’

I had also asked him how he felt about the new path that China was taking. He said that he did not like to see the old culture destroyed, but he liked some things. ‘Like discos?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he answered, smiling. ‘You mean you want to keep some of the old ways, but the freedom is good.’ I said, and he agreed. Maybe it had been the word ‘freedom’ that had scared him off. It is a new concept in China. Or it could have been that he was deterred by the thought of a re-encounter with the clunky luggage that he had had to help me carry on board.

A hike along the wharf brought me to the place where buses waited to ferry passengers to the terminal exit. I stood back, confounded, while two buses were stampeded until they were full and left. Eventually the sheer number of Chinese behind me propelled me onto a bus. I rode standing in a solid press of bodies and hanging on to the back of a seat for grim death.

Disgorged into the street, I found myself in front of a great flight of steps which I thought led to the shipping terminal offices where I might buy a ticket to Shanghai. I struggled up this monumental obstacle course to discover that it wasn’t so. I lumped my bags further down the road. It was lined by offices that could possibly have been travel agents, so I stepped into one to enquire. An obliging man went to find someone who spoke English and shortly charming Miss Fong materialised. She made a phonecall for me and informed me that the boat would leave the next day. Miss Fong directed me to the ticket office, a cavernous affair a few doors down. Here I waited patiently while a woman meticulously stamped and sorted thirty thousand tickets under the enthralled gaze of the cluster of people who pressed about her. Although it was obvious that nothing was happening up front, the woman behind me wouldn’t stand quietly and kept pushing me closer and closer until she eventually wormed her way up alongside me in the starting gates. But I got shunted up to the desk before she managed to pass me.

The ticket lady made it known to me that Miss Fong had been wrong – there were no tickets to Shanghai. All the people behind me joined in the effort of deciphering the phrasebook. ‘No ticket to Shanghai,’ they chorused.

I returned to Miss Fong and said that perhaps the ticket seller had not understood me. She very kindly dropped what she was doing, locked her desk and went to see for herself. Fifteen minutes later she returned and said, ‘Sorry, no tickets today. You try tomorrow.’

She dialled a number and let me speak to a man who explained that it was not possible to buy a ticket in advance.

You had to get to the ticket office when it opened at eight o’clock in the morning and fight for a ticket for that day.

My guidebook claimed that there was a baggage storage office in the vicinity, but it proved elusive. I suspect that it was secreted in the International Terminal Building, but a large policeman barred the entrance and sent me packing. I wasn’t allowed in there without a ticket to prove I was going somewhere.

A taxi driver with a little English accosted me. I explained that I wanted a hotel that wasn’t too dear and we set off on the big search for this rare animal. Dalian was reputed to run a close second to Tianjin in the Most Expensive race. At the first hotel the driver and I discussed the price I would pay and he went in to negotiate for me – to no avail. Three hotels and a similar amount of rejections later, he finally established me in the Fortune Hotel at a cost of 220 yuan a night.