Bound for Vietnam (9 page)
I wandered a long way up and down these fascinating narrow streets. When I decided to return, it was dark and I could not see anything familiar. Then I realised that I did not have the address of my hotel with me. I had no idea where I lived. I was lost, and I couldn’t speak a word of the language. I had used a monument at an intersection near my hotel as a landmark, but when I returned to it in the dark it looked different and I had gone off in the wrong direction. I walked for a very long time before I came to a big hotel and, in desperation, I decided to swallow my pride and ask for aid.
It did not help that I could neither pronounce nor write my hotel’s name and, although it turned out to be only three blocks away, the reception staff did not know the other hotels in their vicinity. Nevertheless the two male hotel staff were helpful. They pored over my map and eventually worked out that I had gone wrong at the monument. Thanking them profusely, I went back to it, found where I had made the mistake and was saved from a night on the streets.
The next morning I set off to get the filling I had lost on the boat replaced. I pantomimed ‘sore tooth’ to the hotel receptionist and she wrote the name of the hospital where I should seek help. It was not far and I walked, asking directions. I would not have known the building was a hospital if it had not been pointed out to me. There was an armed guard at the gate.
In the grounds I showed my paper to several people and was sent all over the place until a girl in a white uniform marched me to the dentistry department. My guide led me into the building, jumped the queue at the office where patients were waiting to register and, in exchange for the princely sum of eight cents, handed me a ticket that entitled me to treatment. The dental unit was, as usual for anything I wanted, up ten flights of stairs. I consoled myself with the thought that if there had been a lift, it would not have been working.
While I was hiking up all those steps I had plenty of time to think about chickening out. I had always dreaded the thought of being a patient in a Third World hospital and had sworn blind that no matter what happened to me I would never allow it. Before leaving home I’d had my teeth checked. The tooth that had lost its filling in the middle of a five-day jaunt on the Yangtze River had been the only one that had needed repairs. That dentist would be in a lot of trouble.
Before committing myself to the ministrations of a Chinese dentist, I carefully considered the pros and cons of the exercise. If I did not have the tooth treated, the worst thing that could happen was that I could lose it and suffer a lot of pain into the bargain. But if I had it filled I risked getting infected with HIV. The minute I set eyes on the building that housed the dental department I very nearly turned tail and bolted. Passing nurses and doctors in grubby white uniforms, I was led through alleys, grimy corridors and chilling waiting areas. Finally, I was put into a very large room that contained six dental chairs over which six dentists laboured.
Despite my fears, the dentists in their white coats looked reasonably clean. (The only really white coats I saw in China had been in a bank; for some obscure reason everyone in the place wore a coat of dazzling cleanliness.) A young dentist intimated that I should wait. There was not an enormous crowd of potential customers, the only place in China there wasn’t.
In the fullness of time I was seated in the operating chair. The dentist and I indulged in some mutual pantomime. She seemed to be telling me what grisly procedure was necessary. All the other patients had brought along a couple of their relatives for moral support, but the next of kin, fickle things, immediately left their family member to the mercies of the ministering dentist so that they could attend the much more interesting spectacle of the foreign devil’s exposed oral cavity. They flocked around the back of my chair, hustling for the best view. A few waiting patients joined the sideshow. They seemed to be telling the dentist to get on with it, ‘If you are not treating this bloody foreigner why don’t you let us in the chair? She’s just hanging about doing nothing.’ But we fought them off. One woman, whom I came to think of as the Inspector, took it upon herself to have a good look in my mouth every time the dentist did. Then she relayed what she’d seen to those behind, adding what was obviously either approval or disapprobation. I lay back in the chair under the spotlight, defeated.
Eventually a second opinion was brought in; an engaging young man, who spoke a few words of English, examined my mouth and said that he would have to repair the tooth and replace the filling. He had a wonderfully gentle touch that told me he knew what he was doing. I said, ‘Go for it, son.’ He produced a drill, something I regard as one of the more fiendish and macabre instruments of torture at the best of times, but this machine was decidedly elderly.
I think my dentist washed his hands, but he did not wear gloves and the same instruments and drill bits were used on everyone. They were only given a bit of a wipe with Metho. Enough to kill the AIDS and hepatitis viruses, I prayed.
Each dentist’s chair was accompanied by a stand that had the operator’s pieces laid out on it. My stand had a white top that was stained and far from clean. The torture implements lay in old chipped enamel bowls and the drill – Oooh the drill! And without an injection of local anaesthetic! Never in my worst nightmares had I ever imagined letting a dentist loose on me with a drill without an anaesthetic. I am a devout, card carrying, professed and practising coward. But there was no way I was going to have an injection in China. Among the emergency equipment I never travel without was a disposable syringe and needle, but the local anaesthetic sat on the shelf before me in multi-use quart bottles that were goodness knows how contaminated, so the syringe stayed in my bag. The fact that the drill might pierce my gum was enough to worry about. The dentist wiped the pointy bit with something on a swab which may have been disinfectant, but it could have been poison, for all I knew.
The performance began. Every cell in my body tensed, anticipating a slip of the instrument, as I dwelt on the knowledge that you only need a tiny unseen opening in your skin or mucosa to get infected. This gratifying thought did not make my stay in the chair a jolly or restful one, but it was certainly memorable. To take my mind off proceedings, I examined the window and the wall in front of me and concluded that the building had been hastily thrown together with a knife and fork. Everything was rough. The window ledge was crudely plastered, the window had been fitted crookedly and its wooden frame had had paint slopped over it haphazardly.
The operation on my tooth took a very long time. The dentist was elaborately painstaking and he did not have a nurse to help him. But even when he used the drill, this marvellous man was so gentle that he only gave me a couple of stabs of pain. Finally he took a piece of glass, swiped it clean with a swab, mixed the filling and very carefully packed it into my tooth.
By this time the dentist and I had become the best of friends. I was full of gratitude and admiration for his skill, and my tooth was feeling better than it had for a long time. Then, deserting his post, the dentist personally escorted me back downstairs. He led me into the registry office where I was hit a further fee, the special foreigner’s price of 300 yuan – fifty Australian dollars. When the four girls in the office saw the account that the dentist had made out they fell about laughing hysterically. I was sure that this was because it was for such an enormous amount of money. The Chinese only pay one yuan for everything.
The bad news was that I was told not to eat for the rest of the day and to add insult to injury, on reaching my hotel I had to walk up nine flights of stairs to get to my room to recover. The lift was not working because the electricity was off. The light, power and hot water went off regularly in Chongqing and it often stayed so for hours at a time. Sometimes when I was walking around the streets or the market at night, all the lights would suddenly go out. A loud, ‘Oooh!’ would go up from the crowd, but kerosene lanterns and torches would be quickly produced and, unperturbed, it would be business as usual.
Another companion moved in to share my room with me. Strangely, I knew him. It was Joe, the Englishman Susan and I had met in Wuhan. Joe had been travelling in China for several months, and he told me some of his interesting experiences as he bounced around the room trying all of the beds like a middle-aged, bearded Goldilocks. It beat me why – all the beds were identical. I worried that I would disturb Joe the next morning when I got up long before dawn to catch my train, but he was more concerned about the presence of rats.
I went looking for the thousand-year-old Luohan Temple – and found it!
Luohan
is a Buddhist term for the Sanskrit
arhat
– people who have released themselves from the bondage of greed, hate and delusion and obtained the status of saints or holy men. You entered the temple by turning off one of Chongqing’s main streets and climbing up a very steep, skinny alley to a narrow gate. From there you took the steps up a further incline, and marvelled at the rock carvings and shrines set into the natural rock face. Old ladies tended the shrines, bringing the idols offerings of incense and flowers.
The Luohan complex contained several temples, the dwellings of the resident monks and the monastery. At its peak the temple had seventy monks, but now there are only about eighteen. In the grounds much fragrant incense was burning and candles, some of them gigantic, were being sold. In one place, luckily outside and away from the buildings, a great row of enormous red candles, enough to start a grand conflagration, roared and blazed away.
In one temple a colossal gold Buddha enclosed in a glass case beamed down on me. The main temple was home to five hundred life-sized painted terracotta statues of
arhats
. Row after row of them gazed down on you from where they sat on platforms a metre off the ground. The route around the statues was cordoned off with string, so that once you started you had to keep going until you came to the end and not miss any – unless you hopped under the string and then you would be lost. The place was a maze. Without the string, you would never have got out again. Round and round I went in the temple’s dim recesses. Now and then I came across a big gold-plated Buddha or an attendant, old women or men murmuring low over their prayerbooks or reciting their beads. The statues were so uncannily life-like that it was spooky. I swore that at least one of them was alive. And every one was different. They were of all races and skin colours. The expressions on their faces all differed too; some were holy and saintly, some cheeky, some naughty, friendly or fun loving. Each
arhat
’s name was inscribed beneath his chair and each one held something, either a musical instrument, a child, an icon or an animal. Walking among them in the dark, gloomy atmosphere was a curious experience and when I came out of the temple it took a while to accustom myself to the light and the real world again.
My friend, Denise, an American Buddhist I had met on the Trans Siberian Express on my way to Mongolia, had told me that she thought the communists had only re-opened the monasteries in China as a source of loot from tourists, but I think some older people had kept their religion, albeit underground.
Chongqing also boasted other attractions. The United States and Chiang Kai-shek Criminal Acts Exhibition Hall was one. This offered such dubious enticements as a visit to the prison cells and torture chambers. No thanks. The dental department had been enough for me.
At four in the morning I found a driver asleep in his taxi in front of the hotel. I poked him awake – drivers here weren’t protected by the plastic shields that I had seen in taxis in Shanghai.
Off we drove through the pre-dawn mist. Suddenly I knew why a feeling of
de ja vu
had been haunting me since I had arrived in Chongqing. Seeing the city in the misty half light made the penny drop. It reminded me of Naples. It was nowhere near as beautiful, but the way the town ran clinging to the mountain-side along a cliff, and its narrow, crooked streets that went up and down all higgledy piggledy gave it a sense of familiarity. The memory of the two happy years I had spent in Naples will always remain with me.
Deposited at the train station entrance – I’d had to pay five yuan at the gate for the taxi to drive the extra hundred yards from the road to the building – I enquired after my platform and was shown five fingers twice, which I took to mean ten. Continuing on, I enquired twice more and got two more answers. One man pointed upstairs, but I could see there was no platform up there and another passenger told me that it was the one I was standing on, number five. I settled for that.
I stood waiting in the pool of harsh light that isolated the platform from the surrounding darkness, my breath steaming in the freezing air, and hoped I was in the right place. The train choofed in on time and to my relief it was the one I wanted. I settled into my soft sleeper compartment for a fourteen-hour ride; we were due to reach Liuzhou at seven the next morning. I had decided to go there and take a bus to Yanshu, where the country-side was said to be fascinating, and from where it was possible to travel to Guangzhou by road or river.