Indeed, if heaven is a stygian cave, then what must hell be like? As so often with Chinese tourist attractions, they had attempted to improve on nature and in doing so, ruined it. The caves had been lit up in a kalidescopic array of colours to make them look more spooky and surreal, but it also had the effect of making them look like something out of Disneyland. However, I seemed to be alone in this opinion, and the Chinese tourists in the flock of sheep we were being shepherded in ‘oohed’ and ‘ahed’ right on cue. There were an awful lot of named rocks, like the ‘1000 Buddha’s Rock,’ the ‘Chicken Rock,’ or the ‘Golden Key Rock’. In the ‘Rocks that Look Like Something Else’ competition, there was some prize specimens here.
It was just after the ‘Golden Key Rock,’ that Sandra started rummaging in my bag, gasping something about a plastic bad. Even though we were at the back of the flock, I didn’t think it was a good idea to try to steal the ‘Golden Key’. For one thing, it was technically theft, and for another, the rock was about a metre long, and wouldn’t fit in the plastic bag. However, she wanted the bag for a different purpose. Just after getting the plastic bag out of my backpack, she projected some multicoloured vomit into it, and if there hadn’t been a bag, she would have had to add some more colours of her own on a nearby green stalactite, which might have become a tourist attraction in its own right to future flocks of tour groups-‘the Lumpy Psychedelic Stalactite of 2005,’ perhaps. We hung back from the rest of our group for the remainder of the tour, and thankfully the tour guides megaphone dampened the occasional retching cries of Sandra and her bag of fried vegetable delights.
Fortunately, Sandra made a full recovery, and that night we went to see another attraction beloved of Chinese tour groups in Guilin, the ‘Light Show.’ It has a cast of hundreds and takes place on a man made lake. The actors use pontoons to move around the lake, but it looks like they’re floating on water. The choreography, lighting and timing are truly amazing, and I made a mental note not to miss the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. When it comes to choreographed spectacles, the Chinese are unbeatable.
A Bus Ride in Haedes
Long bus journeys are always unpleasant. 27-hour bus rides are worse than unpleasant! You join me in hour 22. My backside feels like concrete, and I wouldn’t be surprised if gangrene has set in. My neck is killing me from trying to fall asleep in a series of uncomfortable positions, each one more uncomfortable that the last. The age of the bus and the appalling roads make me feel as if the bus is using my head in the same way a pinball machine uses the speedball. I’m tired, hungry and I want nothing more than to be off this infernal bus. I’d give my right arm to be off it-I may have already permanently most all feeling in my *** and the ability to move my neck.
Let me describe the bus to you, in case you’re ever fooled by a Chinese travel agent into believing that a ‘Super VIP Bus’ is something that might pass its MOT without substantial bribery. Firstly, the bus is very old. In human years, it must be about 15-20 years old, and as with dogs, each bus year is the equivalent of seven human years, so the bus is really well over 100 years old. Many of the windows are cracked and held together with copious amounts of sticky tape. The seats were probably never comfortable, but age has not been kind to them. Everything on the bus is grotty and dirty-it’s the kind of place where you don’t want to touch anything because you’d have to wash your hands afterwards with medical disinfectant. As we went to sit down, we saw a small orange cockroach was on our seat waiting to welcome us to his ancestral home. Sandra deftly crushed him and buried him in a plastic bag, which we kept beside us as a warning to his family and friends. Unperturbed, a few hours later, a roach colleague turned out to bid us welcome, and he was quickly dispatched and buried with his friend. I dread to think how many were crawling over us once it got dark. The darkness, however, could not hide the odour from the passenger beind me, who had feet only a doggy could love.
The VCD player on the bus treated us to an 24 hour-long episodes of a costume drama period piece. I’ve no idea what it was called-something like ‘Kung-Fu Monks and the Magic Mirror,’ I suppose. Each episode was the same-really poor kung-fu fights, cheap costumes and sets that looked like they had been knocked up in a hurry using only egg cartons by a bunch of Blue Peter rejects.
The dialogue was periodically drowned out by the sound of a passenger hawking phlegm at a decibel level loud enough to provoke landslides, and then spitting a disappointingly small amount of phlegm into a bag, or onto the floor if the driver wasn’t looking. With all the noise produced by the hawking, I imagined some kind of mutant alien creature was going to emerge from a gaping mouth and devour all the passengers. By hour 10 of the journey, I would have volunteered to be gobbled first. Anything to end the bus journey.
I changed my mind about that when, at Hour 8, we stopped at a ‘roadside café’, for want of a better term, for a dining experience I’ll never forget. The café-cum-shack looked more like a bright garage than anything else, and it had a post-Armaggedon Mad max kind of bareness to it. There was one wok, a gas cylinder beneath it, and a large bamboo drum of pre-cooked rice. If civilization does collapse, this is where we’ll all be eating… Pass me the handgun-I don’t want to live in such a world. The Chinese, of course, saw nothing strange in the place, and happily munched away, stopping only occasionally to spit out bones they’d sucked dry and engage in copious amounts of hawking phlegm, which they could now spit on the floor, unperturbed by our kill-joy driver.
If I had been starving and on the very cusp of death, I might have been persuaded to nibble some of the rice, but I figured there was more than enough body fat on me to see me through the trip. Have you ever noticed that you never get food poisoning from eating your own body fat? Perhaps that’s why it evolved-to protect you on long Chinese bus journeys.
The toilet was an adjoining shed with four cubicles separated by walls of concrete bricks. The wall, however, was only a couple of bricks high, so when I entered I was met by the grimacing supine figures of other passengers crouching to make deposits. They all smoked cheap Chinese cigarettes to speed up the process, and to add to an already overpowering smell. As I peed into one of the cubicles, or cubiclettes, I noticed that there weren’t any holes to swallow my pee, just a drain, so my small fragrant stream of pee would have to wash away the turds of my neighbours. This wasn’t the meeting of cultures I had hoped from this holiday.
I tried to rise above the discomfort and concentrate on the Sichwan countryside. Western Sichwan is one of the most fertile areas of China, 80 per cent of which is barren and only suitable for light grazing, at best. To be more precise, the soil in Sichwan is fertile, but the hilly landscape makes mechanical farming impossible, and the average irish famer would simply plonk a few sheep there and wait for the EU subsidies to roll in.
The Chinese, however, have altered the landscape to suit their needs. They’ve terraced the hills to allow rice production, using only mud, sweat and an occasional buffalo. I’ve haven’t seen a single tractor yet, and I don’t think they could stop themselves from toppling over in this hilly terrain. There are also innumerable green rivers and streams, and on the higher hills, where even the Chinese can’t farm, trees cling on perilously, wondering what has happened to what was once their sole domain. Every now and then, market gardens appear, as much of China’s fruit is cultivated here, and lest you forget that China is now the industrial workshop of the world, overloaded giant coal trucks clog up the roads. We pass through village after village, whose shops look like garages and are full of old men whose main business seems to be sitting around.
All in all, the trip was the most wretched and uncomfortable in my life, but I suppose I’m glad I did it, in a masochistic way, as it showed me how most people actually travel in China. The mobile phone wielding businessmen you see in the airports are a tiny minority. Even my passengers on the Haedes Express are by no means poor, and they all had mobile phones too, come to think of it. The average Chinese peasant, on a dollar a day, could only dream of holidaying in a different province, and might regard the bus journey I’ve been vilifying as an interesting experience.
Sandra and I, however, spend a large part of the trip in witty banter about whose fault it was that we were on a 27-hour bus journey rather than a 1-hour fight. I remembered it as being a mutual decision, brought about by our desire to see the countryside, a gross misunderstanding of the term ‘Super VIP bus’, and an attempt to stop us hemorrhaging money. Sandra, however, had a very different memory of events, and claimed she had wanted to take the plane and I had insisted, Scrooge-like, on the bus. It’s often like that with us. Reality is subjective, I guess.
Chengdu
The first thing you notice on arriving in Chengdu is a sudden deterioration in air quality. China boasts nine out of ten of the world’s most polluted cities. Chengdu is by no means the worst of them, and there are few cars here, as China’s economic miracle has not really reached this far inland. Nevertheless, after a few days in the country, you do notice that something is very wrong with the air you’re breathing. The pollution must be industrial, but after a few hours, you stop noticing it. It is this adaptability of mankind that may prove our undoing. We can put up with almost any level of pollution, and won’t start to really do something about it until we’re a few hours from choking to death on it, and by then it will be too late. With this happy though in my head, I left the bags in my musty hotel room, guarded by some 1950’s furniture, old world charm, and peeling wallpaper, and set off into Chengdu.
Chengdu, in central China, has a population of about 5 million and a history that spans over a thousand years. As with most Cinese cities, history has been destroyed by war, progress and indifference, and little or nothing of its history survives. The city contains wide boulevards, some faceless communist architecture even Stalin wouldn’t be proud of, and an enormous number of bicycles, which by some perpetual miracle, manage not to collide into one another.
We went to the People’s Park which was full of pensioners doting over chubby grandchildren. We sat in a teahouse, fought off the touts, desperate as always to clean my boots and loath to take ‘no’ for an answer, and watched them play. Sociologists tell us that the extended family has been replaced by the nuclear family, but no-one told China, and people continue to live three generations to a flat in relative harmony. Both parents usually work, and upon retirement, the grandparents settle down to a life of bringing up infants. As they themselves probably had full-time jobs when their own children were growing up, it is often their first experience of full-time parenting, and judging by the happy scenes in the park, they seem to enjoy it. I imagine the one-child policy makes things easier for them.
Indeed, Chinese pensioners seem to be a great deal happier tan their western counterparts, who are left to rot away in old-folks home or die in freezing flats; unwanted, frightened and considered a burden by a society that has moved on. Their Chinese counterparts, on the other hand, are respected and seen to play a vital role.
In the park, it was mainly grandmothers who watched over the toddling ‘little emperors’ while the old men gathered in groups and played cards, mahjong or held impromptu discussions. Some of them still wore blue Mao suits and eyed me suspiciously, and I wondered if things got nasty whether I could outrun them or not. They had the numbers, but I still had my own teeth.
What they were discussing, I have no idea, but they seemed quite animated. |
