Bound for Vietnam (8 page)

The Hotel Huixianlou was in the process of being remodelled, which meant that its prices would go up. In my room, half the light bulbs were blown, cold air poured in through big gaps where the windows didn’t fit adequately, the wall paper was peeling off in strips, the cases of the airconditioners– which of course didn’t work – were missing and two of the wall lights hung from their fittings by a thread. The room had a television with no sound and one cupboard, padlocked shut! The beds had no mattresses. You slept on one blanket spread on a flat wooden base. A tiny pillow and one more blanket (they were rationed one to a bed) made up the sleeping apparatus. I pillaged more blankets from the spare beds. It was still fairly cold. I had hoped that this far south the weather might be warmer – but Chongqing is high in the mountains.

Wondering why I could hear the guests in the adjoining room so clearly, and smell their cigarette smoke, I discovered that the walls at both ends of my room were only thin partitions. My bed was against one of these and a gap gave me, if I had been so inclined, direct access to my neighbours. Lovely people, they came home at two or three in the morning, shouting and screaming and blew cigarette smoke in my face as I lay in bed.

As soon as I had staked my claim to a piece of the dormitory, I went for a walk. The Hotel Huixianlou is in one of Chongqing’s main streets that are lined with shops. They were mostly small places that sold clothing, but there were a couple of big department stores. In all the shops the merchandise – even torch batteries and chewing gum –was safely locked away under glass. Then, as an added safeguard, a sentinel was stationed at the exit. Even a posh furniture shop came complete with a guard at the door – to stop you walking in, picking up a sofa and making off with it under your jacket.

Near the hotel I found a very lively night market. Although it was quite dark by then, I felt safe wandering around it, until I became aware that two young blokes were following me and eyeing my handbag. I slowed up and meandered along, stopping now and then until they had to pass me. Then I followed them. They kept looking around to see where I was, but it’s hard to mug someone who is in the crowd behind you.

I went into a restaurant and with the help of the phrase-book asked what their specialty was. The waitress pointed to an item at the top of the Chinese only menu. I said, ‘Okay.’ A big heap of chunky chopped meat, cauliflower, eggs and gravy was conjured up. I had no idea what it was, but later I read that the specialty of this area was dog. And when I saw skinned dog carcases, all red and bloody, but identifiable because the heads had been left on, hanging in the market, I knew that what I had enjoyed was man’s best friend, Fido. A restaurant I frequented later sported a glass-fronted charcoal grill in which three dogs complete with heads and crisp brown barbecued skin rotated.

I did not get much sleep that night. The building construction continued, under floodlights, beneath and all around me. Bulldozers, cranes, jack-hammers and pile drivers roared, thumped and bumped, accompanied by whistle blasts and yells until after one a.m. Then very early in the morning the clamour started again. When the building noise stopped my rowdy neighbours took over, rested briefly, then started up again at five to compete with the construction teams. This went on every night I spent in Chongqing, but I survived by using ear-plugs.

For all that, I decided that I liked Chongqing. Its streets were narrow, bent and twisty and went up and down crazily, but there were no bicycles. This was not bicycle country; men did all the packwork. Everywhere I looked I saw coolies in ragged blue Mao jackets walking about with their poles and ropes hoping for some chance employment, or bearing the most incredible loads on their shoulders.

In the morning the bathroom taps produced no hot water, so I set off largely unwashed to find the Public Security Bureau (the police). My visa was about to expire and the PSB were reputed to supply extensions, albeit for a substantial fee. I asked the hotel receptionist to write down the address of PSB and astounded myself by finding it easily. After walking a little way, I had gone into a shop to ask directions. A young girl took me by the hand, led me next door to the PSB office and sat me down. The visa was accomplished reasonably painlessly in about an hour at a cost of ninety-five yuan and was presented to me by a beautiful young lady dressed in police uniform, plain navy slacks, jumper and shoes. With no embellishments or a single drop of make up, she was still stunning.

Another young woman sat on the bench beside me and helped me fill out my form. She told me that she was getting an exit visa for her boss who needed to travel on business. An attractive young man took my application then sat at his desk reading the paper and extensively and diligently picking his nose. What an excavation job he did, first with one hand, then the other, to make sure he got it all. He rolled up what he found and dropped the end product on the floor. When he had completed this routine to his satisfaction, he started on his ears. Unfortunately I had to leave before I could see what came next.

Much elated at achieving an extension of stay without the problems I had heard could be attached to it, I started my next mission – to buy a ticket onwards. Having read that it was possible to travel further on the river by smaller boat and that the Chongqing Hotel had a travel department, I went there and tried to extract some information. But the travel agent was only programmed to sell tickets on a tourist boat that did short river trips. She knew of nothing that was available elsewhere, not even in the next town. But the young man at reception produced a map and showed me that it was possible to go to Wuhan.

I said, ‘I have just come from there. I want to go the other way, to Leshan, or another place further along the Yangtze.’

‘Not possible,’ he replied.

I argued that it was and showed him my guidebook. Beaten into submission he said, ‘Okay. Yes you can go to Leshan.’ Suddenly, he knew all about it. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it’s no good boat. You not like it. Why not fly?’

End of story. There was no way I would fly in China. I also decided against Leshan. The boat’s timetable was unreliable and irregular. Going to Leshan also meant heading north again, and I was sick of being cold. I wanted to go south, so I decided on a train to Guangzhou.

It was now lunchtime and, as the guidebook said that good food was to be had at the Chongqing Hotel, I tried their restaurant. The menu had an English translation and attempts at western dishes, but the specialty listed was dog. I ordered rabbit, hoping that wasn’t an euphemism for rat, which were plentiful in Chongqing. Apart from the battalion that shared my room with me, I saw several well-fed rats lying dead in the gutters. The meat I ate was hot and spicy and, whatever it was, it tasted good, despite its having been chopped up brutally with a cleaver. Deciding to be utterly, decadently European, I ordered a banana split, but it was made from frozen milk with a couple of bits of banana thrown in. That’s it, I concluded. I am done with Chinese versions of western food.

I took a taxi to the Remnin Hotel. A replica of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, a stupendous round edifice with a domed roof, in its former life it had been a palace. I went inside for a sticky-beak and while there I decided to look up CITS which the book said was at this address. Despite a huge sign on the outside wall of an adjoining building that declared CITS to be lurking within, this involved much difficulty. I could not locate an entrance. I walked all around the wall and back again, but still found no doorway. Finally, I went up some stairs on one side and found some doors – all with indecipherable Chinese signs. One of the doors was open, so I knocked and entered. A young man was stretched out asleep on a couch. In due time he made me very welcome and did not seem upset that I had disturbed his nap. But the young man couldn’t understand me, and he had to send for re-enforcements. Eventually five men were in the room, smoking, reading the paper, or interrogating me. They could tell me nothing about onward travel. One young man spoke fairly good English. He said he listened to Radio Australia every morning. He tried to help me, but right or wrong he wanted to put me on a plane. I said. ‘I don’t want to go on a plane.’ He was amazed. ‘You don’t like to fly with CAAC!’

‘Listen, mate’, I said. ‘I like to live, that is why I don’t like to fly with CAAC.’

He thought that was hilarious, but he still wanted to put me on a plane. I said, ‘I want to go down to Guangzhou by train.’ At first he denied that there was any such creature, but when I insisted there was, he gave in and admitted it. ‘Yes, yes, yes. There is a train, but very awful and impossible to get a soft sleeper without waiting a very long time.’

‘I don’t mind’, I said, ‘I’ll wait.’

He repeated that it was impossible.

I asked if he would phone the station to ask. That seemed terribly hard.

Finally he said, ‘You wait. You wait.’

Fifteen minutes later another man was produced to make the phone call. After a long conversation, the first young man turned to me, ‘You give me your passport and 1000 yuan for the train ticket.’

‘A thousand!’

‘Only yuan, not dollars.’

But a thousand was a bit hot. It cost only 600 yuan from Shanghai to Beijing and that was much further. I began to think that there was something peculiar going on here, so I tried to exit gracefully and make a fast getaway. This was not easy. And later, when I found out how much money these gents had lost because I would not cough up my cash, I understood why.

The soft sleeper on the next day’s train to Guangzhou would have cost me 360 yuan! How curious! In the event, I changed my mind and went to Liuzhou and Yanshu instead. I walked around to view the Renmin Hotel from the front. It was spectacular. I attempted to climb a colossal flight of steps on one side of it but was stopped by a young woman who removed two yuan from me. I did not know why until I reached the top and discovered to my amazement that I had paid to watch a lecture on Chinese massage in a monstrous auditorium. The inside of the auditorium was as magnificent as the original Temple of Heaven. I gawked and came down again. A pleasant garden at the bottom of the steps led to the street from where I took a taxi to the railway station.

At the station I encountered massive problems just finding the ticket offices, let alone the one that sold tickets to Guangzhou. Pointing to ‘I want to buy a ticket’ in my book, I wandered around an immense area asking one person after another until I finally came to the right place. There I was confronted by row after row of counters with little windows that had Chinese writing above, and long queues in front of them. I continued asking and was directed to one. But after standing in line for ages, I decided that the prices listed above the window could not be enough to get me to Guangzhou. I moved in front of a window with large prices and the shortest waiting line and when I reached the counter I pointed to Guangzhou in my book. It did not surprise me when the ticket seller said that I was at the wrong window. She pointed to where I should be.

What did surprise me was to see people standing patiently in queues. They were better behaved than their northern cousins – possibly because they had to stand between two lines of strong iron bars that they could not get over. But they could go past on one side. I saw one man walk along this side of the queue, shove his money in the window in front of the first person in line and buy a ticket. No grumbles were heard. No one complained. They just let him get away with it.

I got my message across to the ticket seller, a helpful woman who indicated that a soft sleeper to Guangzhou was not available for tomorrow. I asked if there was one to Liuzhou, which is close. She replied that there was. Only later, when I asked the hotel desk staff to translate my ticket for me, did I discover to my utter disgust that the train left at five o’clock in the morning! I had to clutch the desk to sustain the shock when this horror was revealed to me. It meant I had to get up in the freezing cold at three a.m.

Outside the station, a line of taxi vultures lurked. One grabbed me and pushed, patted and propelled me into his taxi. Then he demanded fifty yuan. I yelped, ‘Not on your Nelly!’ It had only cost nine to come there. I got out, slammed the door and walked off. He ran after me saying, ‘Forty, thirty, twenty!’ To which I genteely replied, ‘Frogs!’ Across the road I flagged a passing taxi with a working meter, who returned me for the price I had paid to get there.

After Hiro left, I had no company in my room, well not human anyway. As I was drawing the curtains at the far end of the room, I saw a furry thing moving on the floor. On closer inspection it proved to be a large rat in the process of twitching its death throes. Death from over-eating, by the look of it. I summoned the room maid, who very casually and calmly swept the rat up with her feather duster and put it in the bin. It looked like she did it all the time. During the night one of the deceased’s brethren came looking for it. I was almost asleep when I felt a large animal jump on top of me and start walking down my hip. I gave a shriek and the rat went flying off. Next morning there was another very dead rat on the floor. I wondered if it was my nocturnal visitor who had died of a heart attack. I have been told that I have a scream like an air-raid siren.

At dusk that evening I went strolling along the streets looking at the shops. It was a good time to be out; many people were shopping and temporary stalls, pedlars and night markets were active. Small boy shoe-shine merchants and a street ironer worked away on the footpath close to where an old woman in charge of a pair of bathroom scales invited custom. I saw a youth trying to sell the same armful of neck ties that I had seen him with in the morning and again at noon. He stood in front of a haberdashery shop that also sold ties. The tolerance of the shop keepers amazed me. They allowed hawkers to sell the same goods as they did, probably cheaper, right outside their doors.

The shops did not diversify in the goods they stocked; one tiny shop was full of umbrellas and another of hats. Some things were so cheap that I wished I had the baggage space to bring them home, like several pretty hats that were only two or three dollars each.