Bound for Vietnam (6 page)

Susan was leaving by train for Beijing that evening and I had to buy a ticket on a boat going the rest of the way to Chongqing. We entered the enormous boat terminal complex, which resembled a cross between a massive riverboat and the Sydney Opera House. After many false starts, I was taken in hand by a kind woman who led me through the offices, until we were behind a counter where a row of ladies sat dispensing tickets. This was a new angle for me – it felt like being backstage, behind the scenery. Wherever it was, I was promptly supplied with a ticket.

Susan and I then attempted to find a phone, so that she could contact the agent who held her train ticket. But in the entire terminal there was not one public phone. Once again we were taken in hand by helpful local people. This time a delightful young couple found the left luggage room for me and a public phone for Susan. The phone was in a booth on the street and was guarded by an attendant.

We crossed the road and entered an upmarket Chinese restaurant where we had a very poor meal of what was alleged to be pork and eggs. My plate came covered with something that looked like runny baked custard. Some of the prices on the restaurant’s menu were astronomical, especially for exotic items like snake. Susan read to me, ‘Steak and eggs, 480 yuan. That’s a bit hot!’ I replied, ‘Put your glasses on, that’s snake and egg’. And it was.

When we left it was still cold and raining. In the street we sloshed past some great Victorian buildings and entered the marvellous Bank of China. It had massive chandeliers, carved wooden Corinthian columns, wonderful leather couches and a polished dance floor between the tellers and the customers. Outside the bank, in stark contrast, a destitute old man in rags huddled under a pedestrian overpass trying to elude the rain.

Still hungry, we came upon a McMuck. At least there were no surprises on your plate there. Later we stood on a street corner looking lost. A Chinese man with good intentions, but no English, offered us help and so did a westerner, the first we had seen since Shanghai, who had lots of English, but turned out to be even more lost than we were.

Susan and I parted at the train station and I returned to the boat terminal over the long suspension bridge that crosses the river at Wuhan and joins the two halves of the city. Except for this great bridge and the elegant old buildings, Wuhan seemed a cheerless town. The gate of the gangway that led to the riverboat was defended by an ogress who demanded six yuan to unlock it. I thought this was an extortion racket, but it turned out to be an official fee. I was given a ticket that entitled me to enter the first-class waiting room where you could avoid the rabble in the comfort of deep lounge chairs. There were fees for everything you did in China, especially if you were a foreigner. I had even been charged five yuan to cross the bridge in the taxi.

My next ship, the
Jade Vessel
, was almost identical to the
Yangtze Star
. Once again I had an outside cabin, but this time the deck area beside my cabin was enclosed by glass windows. The attendant brought me five cakes of soap. I must have looked like I needed a good wash.

We glided away downriver in the silvery gloom of dusk. As we passed under the looming suspension bridge, it was almost dark and the town lights and those of nearby ships twinkled cheerily. My cabin companion this time was a diminutive Chinese girl of about twenty, who put her pyjamas on ready for bed at seven and still had them on at lunch the next day. I drew my bed curtains and read while she snored.

I slept snug and warm in my bed after I had shut up another lot of rowdies next door by elbow bangs on the wall. But I discovered that it was freezing cold and pitch dark out on the river when, in the middle of the night, I had to go down the deck to find the loo. Coming back I had a fearful time finding my door again and, palpitating and expecting to find myself in someone else’s cabin, I opened what I hoped was the right one.

I was again woken at dawn by The Voice harassing me from the loudspeaker on the wall but, praise be! I found that this machine had a knob with which it could be turned off. To no avail, it turned out. The speakers in the cabins on either side were so loud that I could still hear it anyway. The Voice went on and on in a maddening shriek, probably exhorting me to be a good little worker and grow more rice. Then the cabin attendant barged in. There was no stopping her. She was programmed to sweep the floor at eight and that was what she did.

It was still very cold. As I watched the dismal grey rain drizzling down, I wondered why I had thought I was leaving this weather behind in Beijing. It was actually colder here. More doleful towns lined the riverbank and more grim chimneys belched smoke from dark forbidding factories. In one town a ferry, with a truck leaning precariously sideways on its slanting deck, was being pushed across the river by a tug. We gave it a couple of blasts on the hooter to get it out of the way. Just past the town a large solitary farmhouse owned a quiet stretch of riverbank. Steps led down from the house to its dunny, a box on stilts conveniently positioned over the water.

Although the traffic on the river had been lighter since Wuhan, a slow, steady procession of sampans and barges with loads of logs, sand, building materials and coal passed us. Sometimes three or four barges were joined together side by side and pushed upriver by a tug that was secured between them. The barges had two double-storeyed edifices roosting on their bows. One was the engine room, the other the cookhouse and bedroom. A particularly decrepit, unpainted and rusty old barge went by. The housewife (or bargewife) sat on deck on a wooden stool peeling vegetables. The husband came to the door of the cookhouse and threw his washing water overboard from a white enamel basin.

The river here was still at least two kilometres wide – I could see only one bank, which had greenery on it that looked like bamboo – but the water was flatter, there were no white caps, and it was the colour of dark milky tea. It did not agree with my hair and I sincerely hoped I was not drinking it. But I probably was: I had to use the hot water provided by the boat’s urns for tea and noodles, and all our boat’s refuse, like everyone else’s, went straight into the river.

Later our boat tied up at a pontoon on the riverbank of Yeoyang. I ventured onto the shore to buy supplies of nuts, seeds, fruit and noodles. I thought the nuts and seeds were awful, until I saw someone else eating them and realised that you don’t eat the outer husks. You spat them out in true Chinese fashion, preferably on the floor. This improved the taste considerably!

The next day was still cold and the sky was leaden and misty. The river was now the colour of dishwater – a pale ash-brown– the washing up after a mud pie party. When I woke, we were anchored at Shashi, another sombre industrial town. Shortly after Shashi the banks of the river came close enough for me to be able to see rice growing on them. In places the banks had been cut and reinforced with stones to form dykes. Another bank further up protected neat and pleasantly green villages that were surrounded by pine trees. Grazing cows dotted grassy banks where now and then I saw the odd peasant digging. These were the first real villages I had seen, as opposed to small ugly towns.

Although the
Jade Vessel
was very similar to the
Yangtze
Star
, much to my sorrow there were no plastic grapes in the sitting room. But it did have two classes of dining room, the posher of which I fronted to sample the fare. In the long wait for my food to be sent up to the ritzy dining room, I watched a man drink a bottle of Chinese whisky and down a large bottle of beer as a chaser. When the food did arrive it turned out to be the same food that was available downstairs; not very good, just colder after its travels. I had chicken that had been machettied into clumps, splintery bones and all, but it was a change from the fruit and noodles I had been existing on.

Out on deck, nailed to the front of the wheel-house, I noticed the boat’s emergency equipment – a big axe and a crowbar. The fire-fighting apparatus consisted of a row of red buckets that served only to decorate the prow; they held at most half a pail of old rusty water. There were no life boats or jackets –we swam or sank.

Gliding under a long bridge, we began passing between slight hills that rose on both sides of the now narrowing river. Gradually the hills increased in number and size until they were rounded mountain bosoms that rose straight up from a rocky base at the water’s edge. The mountains were interspersed wherever possible with tiny rice terraces and here and there harboured a house. It was now freezing. Heaters and reverse cycle airconditioners abounded, but not one worked.

In the sitting room of the boat, I had company; four young men who played cards, a popular pastime, and smoked heavily, as did most Chinese men. Later the men played checkers, another favourite Chinese game.

Arriving at the large town of Zhicheng, we found an enterprising row of vendors had lined up on the edge of the pontoon and were conveying noodles, rice and drinks to customers on the boat by means of a basket on a long pole. The money came back down, with any luck, the same way. Other sellers paddled up on the river side of the boat in sampans and also sent goods aboard by the pole method.

The cook, wearing her red carpet slippers and still knitting – Chinese women knitted everywhere, even standing up –went down onto the landing and had a social gathering with her family who had been waiting there for the boat to arrive. I defied the spitting rain to go ashore in search of food. The word must have been broadcast that culinary delights on riverboats were few and flawed. Passengers were offered plenty of edible supplements at all the stops we made, and a profusion of buyers eagerly contested them. I bought hard-boiled eggs and bread sticks that were plaited in a pretty design, but rock hard, and on which I broke a large tooth filling.

One day I looked at the sludgey mud pie that remained in the base of my empty thermos and concluded that by this time I must have taken in a fair slab of the Yangtze’s bottom. But what a blessing those battered tin thermoses were. They provided water for instant noodles, tea, coffee, a wash, clean teeth and drinking water, as well as adding a bit of silt to the diet.

At each stop, crowds of passengers bustled on and off the boat. I noticed men holding pieces of bamboo loitering among the crowd. I wondered what this piece of equipment was for until I realised that it was the stock in trade of the porter coolie. This was the pole that he lay across his shoulders to carry burdens and bundles on each end.

Early the next day, we came to Yichang, a walled city that was new in the days of the Sui, about 1300 years ago, and which is regarded as the gateway to the upper Yangtze. The riverbank here was high and reinforced by a stone wall. On one corner of it there was a pagoda, and a promenade lined by trees ran along its top for kilometres.

We tied up at the town for an hour and then, moving into the middle of the river, dropped anchor with a rattle of chain. It was raining heavily and the boat’s red-painted decks were washed clean and shining. We stayed anchored in mid-stream all day, left at five in the evening, and arrived at the entrance of the massive Gezhouba Dam’s locks at night.

By the ship’s searchlight, in the driving rain, I saw sheer concrete walls that rose, glistening, a hundred metres above me on both sides. It was like being in a grave. The lock was just wide enough to accommodate our boat. Seven ships, big and small, were tied to brackets in the walls, one behind the other. Then the gates were opened, the water poured in, and we were lifted slowly to the level of the road alongside the lock. As the boat rose, I went from only being able to see concrete walls, to seeing the lights of the town. Leaving the lock I looked down on the floodlit muddy water to see the salvo of polystyrene containers that our boat had left behind.

We were now about to enter the beautiful, but treacherous, Yangtze gorges. The Sanxia (Three Gorges) run for two hundred kilometres through the mountain ranges that separate the provinces of Sichuan and Hubei. They were created by an inland sea that once flooded across the Asian continent to the Pacific Ocean. For centuries the reefs and whirlpools of the gorges claimed a thousand lives a year. The forces of nature on the Yangtze are so great that many myths have grown up to help make sense of them. It is said that junk-men used to cut off a rooster’s head and smear its blood on the prow of their boat to placate the river dragons. Fifty years ago boats were pulled through the gorges by thousands of straining coolies.

In our boat the helmsman’s assistant stood at the very front of the prow, his eyes fixed ahead, and gave the captain signals. I could feel the tension. There is no room for error between the Yangtze gorges. We crept forward, our way lit by the boat’s searchlight and the warning beacons that clung here and there on the dark rock edges between the wild water. It was magic.

At dawn I looked out to see that we had anchored in the second gorge to wait for enough light to navigate further. The river here was too deadly to take on at night. The narrow walls of the gorge looked as though they had been cut out with a giant knife. A torrent of water rushed between their sheer rock faces that rose straight up as high as nine hundred metres and enclosed us on either side. We pushed on laboriously. It seemed difficult to make headway against the current. Every now and then the white thread of a small waterfall cascaded down to join the river. Narrow and fast flowing, they zig-zagged through dark-green slots in the black rock. A lone brown falcon cruised past, rising and falling effortlessly on the eddies that formed in the narrow chasm.

The river channel became even narrower and the boat had to dodge rocks that stuck up out of the water. As we struggled through one dangerous part, the water boiled towards us and tossed the boat around like a cork. Then the river widened and the channel was marked by buoys on boat-shaped platforms. The walls changed to yellow and white limestone and were dotted with mysterious-looking caves. Coffins containing bronze swords and other artefacts have been discovered in these caves. They are said to have belonged to an ancient tribe of the Warring States period – 500 BC–whose custom was to place their dead in these high mountains.