Bound for Vietnam (5 page)
Feeling the need to pig out on something uncomplicated, I walked to Nanning Street to disgrace myself at McMaggot’s with two Big Macs and a Coke. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this at home. Sometimes in China, though, it was a welcome relief to eat something so utterly, familiarly western.
At the river-boat office, just off the Bund, I managed to buy a ticket on the boat leaving that night for Wuhan. I would be able to change vessels there and go on to Chungking, which was almost as far as river passenger transport went. I walked back along the Bund, past the harbour and across Huangpu Creek, to the Pujiang. Styrofoam containers choked the creek and the edges of the river. On the bridge an old woman, who looked about the same age as her wares, sold hundred-year eggs from a wicker push cart.
At five in the evening I went to the riverboat terminal on the Bund. Boarding the steamer presented no problems, except that in this huge place there was no sign to tell me which ship left from where. I showed my ticket to several people stationed at gateways and sat in a waiting area I hoped was the right place. I allowed a porter to carry my bags aboard, more as an act of charity than from necessity.
The big riverboats were better than the coastal ships. They carried about 700 passengers who were mostly accommodated in cabins that housed ten to twenty people. The entire bottom deck of the boat held cargo, and only a few people travelled deck class or slept in the corridors. Officially there was no first class – the top-ranking category was called ‘second’ as a concession to communist sensitivity. But in the isolation of the prow and away from the smelly, crowded areas, it was still exclusive. Third class was on the other end of the same deck and the hoi polloi were on the two lower decks. A guard, stationed on a chair at the entrance to the second-class section, repelled invaders from the lesser ranks. A big notice like a stop sign stood beside him. I supposed it said, ‘Peasants keep out!’
I found myself sharing a two-bed cabin on the outside deck with a back-packing British female with no hair. The cabin beds had curtains that could be pulled around them for privacy. On one wall was a vinyl bench seat and, on the other, a small mirror-fronted cupboard hung above a wash basin whose taps produced brown river water.
This ship, the
Yangtze Star
, was the cleanest conveyance I had travelled on so far in China. But there was the usual hawking and spitting all around. I always put my head out over the deck railing very warily. You could cop more than a face full of fresh air out there. The well-bred spat over the side, the ill-mannered, on the deck. But the decks and cabin floors were washed down frequently and the Western toilets in second class were swabbed out now and then. I was to find that other riverboats were also reasonably clean, which was a wonder after the filthy coastal ships, but their toilets usually suffered due to the inability of the locals to use them or flush them in the western way. Some Chinese relieved themselves how and when they liked. Through the door of a toilet which he had, with a singular lack of modesty, left wide open, I saw one man peeing on the floor. Another I caught unconcernedly spraying overboard.
The
Yangtze Star
set off down the Huangpu River in the dark. The lights that strung out along the Bund looked sensational. It was fairyland. Shanghai’s pride and joy, the garish TV tower, with its iridescent pink and green lights, resembled something out of a Disney movie – lurid, sensational, and unbelievable. The shore lights gradually became further apart as we moved downriver making for the place where the Huangpu joins the mouth of the Yangtze, China’s longest river, at the sea. A dark junk slid past, outlined between us and the shore. Lit only by a dim lantern, it was an Oriental vignette. Many big boats towing barges on long chains also passed us, as well as small craft of all kinds – sampans, fishing boats and dugouts. Nothing was smart or new, and I saw no pleasure craft. The boats that were mostly used as work-horses on the river were long and narrow and had a wheel-house perched on their rear ends and open decks in front where cargo was carried.
There were a few lights on the riverbanks far away as we passed around the island in the middle of the confluence of the two rivers and turned into the wide Yangtze channel.
My room-mate, Susan, was going home to England via Beijing after working for a year in Japan. We investigated the boat and found no one on the staff who spoke a word of English and few facilities. There was a dining room of sorts, but most passengers bought meals that were dispensed in plastic boxes, all of which went overboard when they had finished. On one side of the ship a vendor sold fruit from boxes and, of all the curious things to find on a boat like this, a clothing stall had been set up on one of the companionways between decks. Here, amid much hilarity, I allowed Susan and the shop lady to convince me that I could not live without a pair of gold, yellow and black striped silk pants. I put the pants on and modelled them, much to their delight. It was the only time I ever wore them. Once off the boat I thought they were dreadful. I also bought a pair of knickers with a zippered pocket in front. For money? But how did you get to it when it was wanted?
It soon became cold outside on the river, but it was warm and cosy in our cabin. Next-door we had noisy neighbours who shouted at the top of their voices, bumped the walls and slammed their door with absolute abandon. At times during the night we stopped at towns. The engines would shut down and the racket next door would start up again to mingle with the noise from the wharf and the stamping of heavy feet overhead where the bridge and crew quarters were.
At dawn I looked out to see the immense, muddy brown waters of the Yangtze on which, partly shrouded by a grey mist, the river traffic meandered. A cold wind blew onto the deck and occasional whitecaps broke on the water. We stopped at a dreary riverside town where I watched a dredge working and a man on the deck of a pontoon below wash his longjohns and shirt in a tin basin and hang them on a conveniently strung rope.
After half an hour the boat’s hooter gave a loud blast and we were off again. The
Yangtze Star
, for all its size and appearance of being top heavy, took off smartly from landings and rapidly gathered speed.
The Yangtze River is known as Chang Jiang, the long river. And so it is. It is the third longest river in the world, and is beaten only by the Nile and the Amazon. Arising in the snow-covered Tanggulashan mountains in Qinghai, it flows through Tibet and cuts across the middle of China through seven provinces, before emptying into the East China Sea near Shanghai. The voyage from Shanghai to Chongqing takes at least eight days.
At first the riverbanks were out of sight, one or two kilometres away. Later the river became less immense. It was still very wide, but the trees and greenery on its banks could be seen occasionally. By mid-morning, passing kilometres of smoke stacks and grey buildings, we came to the large city of Nanjing. This was the ancient capital of China and has a recorded history that dates back to the Warring States Period in 476 BC. Here the sluggish brown river was crossed by a good-looking bridge, which our boat pulled to one side to pass under as though the captain knew the channel well. This impressive double-story bridge – road on top, rail below– is one of the world’s longest.
After Nanning, rice paddies and rushes lined the muddy shore from which now and then rows of green fishing nets protruded, while men in small boats fished close to the banks with nets that stuck out in semi-circles from their sides. Behind the paddy fields trees marched to the skyline. On the two or three stops we made during the day I took the opportunity to pound across the barges that were used as pontoons and landings and investigate the riverbank stalls that sold supplies to passengers. Here I obtained beer, Coke (or a reasonable imitation of it), the pickled eggs that I had developed a taste for when I had got past their appearance, and other essential provisions. Once I leaned over the boat’s side as it was pulling away from the landing and bought two cans of soft drink. My change was getting further away from me very fast and I thought I could kiss it goodbye, when the vendor rolled the money into a ball and threw it at me. All those evenings playing cricket with the boys had not been wasted. I could still field a catch.
Susan was good company once I got over staring at her bald head. She told me that she had shaved it in a moment of weakness, thinking it would be less trouble when travelling. It might have been, but she had forgotten that she was heading north into a bitter winter and she was already feeling the cold.
We passed several of the ocean-going ships that navigate this river, countless hefty coal barges, and other large passenger riverboats like ours. One riverboat had a top deck that was covered by a roof with turned up corners and looked like a monstrous, multi-storied pagoda. Another looked like a tiered wedding cake. Towards sunset we pulled past one more big town, and after that the river traffic lessened somewhat.
By this time I was fed up with the nagging voice that harangued us continuously with political propaganda from a loudspeaker on the wall of our cabin. It started at the crack of dawn, when all good communists should be up and about, but this bad capitalist had no intention of being so rudely aroused. Getting out my nail scissors I performed a highly successful laryngectomy on The Voice.
Stretched across the ship’s prow was a sitting/dining room that was reserved for the use of the second-class citizens. Meals were not served here, but it was a comfortable place to sit and look out at the river. In the sitting room I met a businessman from Taiwan, and Susan and I went to lunch with him. The food was stone cold and not very appetising and the dining room was a dingy dump. Functional and institutional, it had a metal floor and unpolished wooden tables and chairs.
In dramatic contrast, the second-class sitting room had no food but tables covered with white cloths and graced with plastic flowers, a sideboard full of cups and plates, lino tiles on the floor and an enamel po spittoon beside each armchair. I was fascinated by the overhead decorations. There was a large recessed square in the centre of the ceiling that contained white wooden panels embossed with dragons and two 1960s five-armed light pendants. And from all around the edges of the square purple plastic grapes dangled invitingly.
Not wanting to face the fare of the boat’s dining room again, Susan and I had instant noodles, fruit and beer for dinner, all of which we had bought very cheaply on our forays ashore. The fruit –mandarins, pears and bananas – was especially good. That night I subdued the neighbours by banging my elbow on the wall and roaring, ‘Quiet!’ and, though we stopped several times to load and unload cargo, I slept well.
Early in the morning, we pulled into a large town, and I dashed ashore to buy breakfast: more pickled eggs, sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, one of the popular, but obscenely red sausages and a big lidded enamel pannikin for hot drinks.
For quite a while now both riverbanks had been covered with trees and by midday kilometre after kilometre of bamboo waved in the wind. Behind it stood forests of poplar and pine and among the trees I glimpsed the odd red roof. Gradually a mountain range crept up, fold on fold, as a backdrop to the river. On a headland further on, I saw a pagoda on top of a towering rock at the river’s edge. The Precious Stone Castle can be seen for many kilometres coming or going on the river and has been poised on this peak for 1500 years.
That evening Susan and I braved the boat’s kitchen again. This time we tried the soup. Served in real soup-kitchen style – slopped with a bent tin ladle from a huge, battered aluminium can as big as an oil drum – it was a greyish conglomeration in which vegetables and dumplings floated. Despite its unalluring appeal, however, it tasted fine, and I was enjoying it until I came across a dead match. Susan laughed so much at this I told her I hoped she had the cigarette butt.
Various members of the boat staff had told me, in pantomime, that our ETA next morning was six, seven, eight, and nine o’clock. But we actually landed in Wuhan at ten. The day had dawned wet, cold, misty and drab. Visibility was nil and no town was in sight. The weather did not clear and we went ashore, up a long metal ramp, in a damp, steady drizzle. Later I saw that the river here was a mile wide, lined with hideous black factories and fronted by long, flat steps that looked like the ghats on the Ganges.
Wuhan, at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers, was established in about 600 BC. Now one of China’s largest cities, it is a key traffic junction as well as an industrial centre. The river here is vital but perilous; its banks are lined by high dykes that obscure it from the town, but which failed to save it from the last great flood in 1983. Foreign trading concessions were established in Wuhan in 1861 and it has many fine nineteenth-century buildings in the German municipal style. There is also a 400 year-old Gui Yuan temple that houses a white jade Burmese Buddha with a large diamond in its forehead. The tomb of the Marquis Yi, which was discovered in 1978, is close to Wuhan. The Marquis lived in the 5th century BC and died, greatly mourned, at the age of twenty-five. He was buried with his dog, twenty-one female sacrifices, enough treasure to stock several museums and a couple of orchestras worth of musical instruments.