Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (25 page)

I could not believe my ears.
Stallone
?

But then I realised that Stallone was mumbling something to Harvey Keitel in the movie ‘Copland’. The volume was pumped right up, and even though the door was closed, it sounded like the television was next to the bed. The old man indulged in this for an hour before yawning loudly and shuffling off to bed for good.

I tried to sleep but I was edgy by now and didn’t know what he was going to do next. When I did fall asleep, I was woken up again, this time by the sound of knives being sharpened.

Oh, fuck! He’s going to cut me up like some victim in a Roald Dahl novel. Or is it the Public Security Bureau coming to take me away?

‘HAAANGG YOUUUU!’

What?! He’s going to hang me? Huh? International Rescue, where are you?!

I looked outside and sighed with relief to see it was the local butcher. Knives hung from his belt and a pig lay in a wheelbarrow, its body cut in half, legs indecently spread. People were already coming up and taking portions home.

I got dressed.

The old man was up, smoking a short, rolled cigarette and feeding muffled quacks in a trough. He tried to get me to stay for breakfast and I could only think what would he expect after that!

‘No, no. It’s okay!’

Eyes full of red no-sleep, I thanked him, then left, cycling into the mist of the jagged green hills above the village. 

I woke up bouncing up and down on a bed, which in itself is not a bad way to wake up. It only became a problem when I hit my head on the bunk above me with a loud thud.

Disturbingly, a small Chinese man next to me jerked and convulsed.

What the hell is he –?

Then I noticed in other beds, bodies shaking, heads rolling and limbs falling out the side of their metal railings.

Oh my God! The old man has put something in that rice wine and now I’m in some kind of group exorcism! Or worse … they’re gonna take my kidneys!

And then, I realised where I was: I was on a ‘sleeper bus’.

Instead of seats, the bus had bunks, and when I first boarded it in Guilin I thought that I would have a comfortable, sleep-filled 24-hour journey to Kunming.

As I was to find ‘sleep’ and ‘bus’ were mutually exclusive terms. They were not compound nouns rubbing up against each other all nice and snug. No, sir. This was some kind of Orwellian oxymoronic double-speak.

For three days loud, ultra-violent Hong Kong films blared through the bus. For three days, we were ‘gassed’ by the constant thick haze of cigarette smoke and I was forced to spend most of the time like a Labrador with my nose jammed out of a small sliding window. For three days we lay, crammed up against each other’s bunks just above us like we were on a slave ship. For three days we were bounced and bashed by the bad roads. For three days, I was left with the memory of the smell and revulsion of eating dog-meat-soup at a bus stop restaurant.

It felt like I was on a bus full of political dissidents bound for a labour camp and this journey was part of the ‘softening up’ process.

To my surprise, on the last day, and out of sheer exhaustion, I did sleep. When I awoke the next morning my handle bar bag had a big hole cut along the side of the zip.

My camera was gone.

When I told my neighbour, or rather ‘communicated’ this, he gave me the oddest of reactions – he laughed! I could only rationalise that this was how Chinese people cope with bad news (well, when it happens to other people) for I remembered a time when I lived in Taiwan something similar happened. When a photo-lab ruined all of my Cambodian travel pictures of Angkor Wat, rather than apologise, they giggled. Bizarrely, the more I got angry, the more they laughed.

I told the bus driver of the theft and in the next town several short, plain-clothed policemen in badly-made Miami Vice-like dinner jackets turned up and searched all the passengers. But I wasn’t the only one to get nabbed by thieves. An amorous Israeli couple (who hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other for the entire trip!) had $US200 stolen from their bags. Alas, our thieves had slipped off in the night at one of the many stops.

Eventually we arrived in Kunming in the middle of the night and I took a room at the very comfortable Camellia Hotel. When I told the receptionist of my theft she said and did the kindest of things.

‘Oh, I am sorry for you. I hope you do not have bad feeling about China.’

‘No, no. It could happen anywhere.’

She said something to her manager who nodded. ‘You can have one night for free,’ she smiled.

How lovely was that? It’s moments like these that can make your heart sing with gratitude.

‘
Xie xie ni
(Thank you very much).’

‘The Bicycle Porter will take your bicycle. The Key Porter will show you to your room.’

A squat woman with a face so old it was probably listed as a UNESCO site burst out of her cubbyhole and marched me to my room, keys and locks jingling off her belt like a prison guard.

The next morning, I went looking for a new camera and walked into a shop and found myself staring at a vagina.

How was I supposed to take pictures with that – and, what’s more, where was the flash?

There it sat – shrink-wrapped and lonely in its white box, the words ‘VAGINA’ emblazoned across it just so you knew what it was and not some kind of mechanical calamari. Next to it an enormous red vibrator stood to attention like a ballistic missile about to launch.

This is what happens when your camera is stolen in China – you end up in a sex shop, face to face with rubber sex toys.

It didn’t look like your regular sex shop. No red walls, lacy underwear or plastic-wrapped magazines littering shelves. It was somewhat innocuous – full of plain white boxes stacked in a great wall on top of each other. They could’ve been selling shoes for all I knew. The sex toys were just a bonus! Adding to this clinical affair were the staff who walked around in white laboratory coats with the seriousness of scientists. They glared at me when I walked in as if I’d just interrupted an important experiment.

I ducked out of the sex shop and bumped into breasts: large breasts, small breasts, saggy ones and perky ones, before and after. It was a breast-enlargement clinic.

Obviously I’d been given bum directions and hoped not to come eye-to-eye with the pneumatic one.

It was a big surprise to me to see sex shops in China at all, but then again it was another sign that the social mores were loosening up.

After the communists took power in 1949, the People’s Republic had suppressed overt sexuality, reviling it as a plaything of the idle rich. Sex education went only as far as hygiene, or cloaked in political rhetoric. Masturbation, for instance, was condemned as ‘sapping the revolutionary will’ (and perhaps why Australia has never had much of a rebellion!). Homosexuality, until recently, was denied as even existing by many Chinese, though literature in the Ming and Qing dynasties showed that it was quite prevalent, describing sodomy as ‘playing with the flower in the back chamber’; its common name translated as
jijian
– ‘chicken depravity’. (Obviously using more than just the feather there.)

As China continues to modernise, increasing numbers of unmarried couples are living together, talk shows are openly discussing sex, and there are now telephone hotlines for gay and lesbian people. Permissiveness, once the fashion in the 20s but unthinkable under communist China, was making a comeback.

In some ways it was perhaps no mistake I ended up in the sex shop district. You see, the Chinese were seemingly obsessed with my sex life. Or lack thereof.

Some locals thought it in my best interests that any time I happened to sit near the opposite gender I should consummate the seating arrangements. On the sleeper bus, a man on the bunk above mine, while smiling and spitting pumpkin seeds, made lewd gestures with his finger and thumb then pointed to the woman on the next bunk. When I nodded, understanding what he meant, he laughed.

Or, as I would find later, cycling up in the Tibetan Plateau, truck drivers would shout out, ‘I LOVE YOU!’ as they nearly ran me down with their 40-ton cargo.

It wasn’t just the men doing the classy Benny Hill act. While I sat in a noodle shop waiting for the bus in Guilin, a woman pointed to another woman on the table I was sitting at, made funny eyes and enacted the same routine with her finger and thumb.

What the hell was going on? Did I simply look too eager about everything?

Also, the recent departure of my camera seemed to fit a new pattern I had developed of late – losing things. In the past two weeks I had lost luggage, my glasses, shirts, my camera and, worst of all, a journal. Gone, it seemed, were my travel survival skills – I was paying too much for hotel rooms and bus tickets, and getting on wrong buses.

I eventually did buy another camera. I walked about the city and unlike the hell I had been told about Chinese cities (namely that they were very polluted), Kunming was clean, organised, with tree-lined boulevards and markets and set amongst the green rolling hills of Yunnan.

Everything looked new. Flashy new buildings – five-star hotels and glass-marbled malls – blinked in the overcast sky, and designer labels spread across posters of European models with stern smiles, tight jeans and clean shirts. From billboards on nearly every street corner, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Neanderthal blockhead endorsed washing machines with a muscular thumbs-up. Couples hung off each other in Italian copy shirts, shoes and push-up bras while bored shop assistants folded and refolded clothes.

But despite the appearances of Western living, it all stopped at street level. While architects sweated over the latest eye-catching designs, public toilets had not yet been fashioned into anything more creative than a drain.

At one particular public toilet, four-foot high walls separated me from my neighbour, allowing enough privacy for us to pick the food out of each other’s teeth and listen attentively to each other’s bowels explode. An open drain passed under each mini-cubicle, and when the cistern was pulled at the other end a tidal wave pushed the output of other patrons towards me until something resembling the archipelago of Indonesia sailed past under my feet. It was a struggle not to fall into it while I retched.

This was positively lavish compared to another public toilet I’d suffered on the long bus journey. In the darkness and armed only with a roll of toilet paper all I could see was not a hole but a
giant slide
! It disappeared into the darkness and god knows what else. There were neither handles nor privacy to speak of and if you lost your grip, you weren’t going to get out in a hurry.

‘Things are changing so fast in China,’ said Alex, part owner of the Wei Pizzeria. Alex’s large Dutch frame dwarfed many of his customers and staff as he played with his two kids, giving them piggyback rides, chasing them around the restaurant, making them squeal and giggle.

He and his Chinese wife had owned a bar some years ago, but because of the frantic rush to develop Kunming for the International Horticultural Exposition in 1999, they were forced out despite a ten-year lease with the landlord.

‘“You come back after it is rebuilt”, they said. But when we wanted to return they put the rent up 250 per cent. Such a shame. We had a really good travellers’ bar there.’

Although Alex had lived here for the past six years, he was still on a tourist visa. ‘It is because I go at least every year or so out of the country, and I cannot stay here for the full two years,’ he said, smiling. His wife came up, said hello and collected the kids for bed.

‘My wife’s mother was not happy with our marriage, but once we had our first baby she had a 180-degree turnaround. She must have thought after that I was not just out to fuck her daughter. Here, I’m always on the outside.’

He turned to one of the waiters, a small, thin woman, and tendered her change out of his money belt. ‘Where do you go after here?’

‘Dali. I’m cycling.’

‘Ah! I also am I cyclist.’

Here we go. He probably cycled up to the shop for some fags. But he surprised me.

‘First I cycled from Holland to Greece in 1991, then I took the plane and cycled from Bombay to the south over to Hampi, up to Rajasthan then Delhi. Then, on another trip, I cycled from Islamabad –’

‘Did you have any problems in Pakistan?’

‘Yeah! They tried to kick me off my bike, put sticks in my spokes and threw stones. It’s like they have some kind of duty to do it. Maybe this has got do with it becoming more and more religious, more fanatical. I dunno. Anyway, where was I? From Islamabad we went to Kashgar along the Taklimakan Shamo Desert. I was with a girl, and a boy. We were lucky. We had a storm behind us, the wind on our arses, so we were in the top gear all the time. Then I cycled on my own back along the Taklimakan Shamo Desert.’

‘But there are no towns out there for hundreds of kilometres!’

‘I know. I ran out of water and was forced to drink from one of the aqueducts by the road. I mean, I shouldn’t have drunk it; it’s only for washing your feet and your clothes. And I got very sick! Fever, the shits. But it was only for two days. That’s the great thing about cycling: you sweat out the sickness. I was so fit then.’

He now had a generous spare tyre hanging around his waist.

‘If you’re going to Beijing, you should really take the train from Chengdu. There’s nothing to see except factories. And very polluted.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes. Even from here, it is bad. Too many cars.’ He picked up his son, who happily poked him in the face. ‘You should take the bus to Dali. Much nicer ride from there.’

‘Oh, no, no,’ I scoffed. ‘I’m a
cyclist
.’

And so, early the next day, bike shining in morning light, all oiled and tuned, I cycled a few metres from my hotel and … put it in the bus cargo hold and got on!

From the Dali bus station I cycled north along Erhai Lake, named thus because the local people of this area, the majority of the ethnic minority, the Bai, believed the lake resembled the shape of an ear. Though looking at it on my map, that was if that ear had belonged to Dr Spock and had been clawed by a Klingon.

It was the late afternoon and the sun had long disappeared behind the jagged Cangshan Mountains, casting a dark curtain over the National Highway I was cycling along. By the time (a good 16 kilometres) I passed through the arch of the imposing South Gate – a large wall supporting two very large distinctive Chinese-style roofs – a pinkish hue hung over the ancient city of Dali.

According to my guide book, the Wombles, sorry, Mongols trashed the city but it was rebuilt in 1382 by the Ming Dynasty which struck me as odd because
Flash Gordon
hadn’t been invented until 1934
xxvi
. In a lot of ways Dali was like Yangshuo – wide streets, markets, and it had the dubiously named Foreigner Street (let’s not make any hay about ‘not fitting in’!). It was here you could get a decent coffee, eat vegetarian food and, because you couldn’t get enough of it, the sounds of Bob-effing-Marley.

It was, to my great pleasure, car free. I was surprised what a difference to my peace of mind it made, that streets, unlike shopping centres, somehow were friendlier places to be in once vehicles were not in them.

Another thing that struck me was that many of the staff in restaurants and shops spoke, to my shameful relief, good English.

I hadn’t realised how isolating China had become (I could only speak the most basic and important of Chinese –
Wo zhi yao yi pin,
‘I again want one beer!’) until I hit these touristy areas. In India there was always someone, somewhere close by and conversations flowed easily. But in China, while I was enjoying it, it was often a lonely adventure. It didn’t help that I was somewhat over talking to other travellers and the inevitable responses: ‘Hello? Where are you from? Where are you going? You been travelling long? Etc, etc, etc.’ I longed for ‘normal conversation’ and I started to withdraw.

Having said that, that night after checking into my hotel room that looked like it had once been used for the pornographic film version of
Willy Wonka
(a large double bed with a gold coloured head board and purple velour bed cover … Oooh!) I bumped into some Swiss travellers at my hotel – Analiese, Serge and Margrit. I had first met them in Yangshuo and now chased the loneliness away with good conversation, good food and countless bottles of Tsingtao beer, a beer so high in the carcinogenic preservative formaldehyde that when you died your body would immediately be interred in Mao’s Mausoleum.

As an attractive waitress with a pigtail deposited another tray of beers, Analiese gave her a predatory look, then said to me as she left, ‘Wow. She’s so beautiful.’

‘Well, she is Bai.’

‘Really? How can you tell?’

‘Just by her face.’

‘Eh?’

‘More Tibetan looking.’

‘Oh, no, I mean –’

‘I know what you mean. But imagine if you were bisexual here. You’d be
Bai
-bisexual!’

Quite rightly, there was collective groan at my terrible joke. And it got worse. ‘Saying farewell to them would be difficult too. “Bye-bye, Bai bisexual!”’

The Bai were not known for going both ways but if Marco Polo is to be believed in his travelogue,
The Travels of Marco Polo,
their attitudes to sex were quite liberal for the 13th Century: ‘The natives do not consider it an injury done to them when others have connection with their wives, providing the act is voluntary on the woman’s part.’

When it wasn’t voluntary things could take a tragic turn. As legend has it, a woman jumped into a fire rather than have sex with the king. To honour such a tragic end, every year the Bai and other minorities in the Yunnan Province hold what is called the Torch Festival
xxvii
. People light torches in front of their houses and around the village square and go around making a ‘Splashing Fire for Blessing’. If you happen to bump into someone with a lit torch they’ll sparkle resin from the torch on you for good luck (and to perhaps remind you that if you don’t want to bonk some ugly aristocrat don’t go burning yourself up).

The next morning, all suffering the Tsingtao beer dry retches, my Swiss friends hired bikes and we cycled to the edge of the lake to see if we could take a boat to the Wase Market on the eastern side. Apparently it was supposed to be amazing but when we found out that it was 80
yuan
($US16) for the trip, its ‘amazingness’ immediately left us.

Instead, we watched fishermen in their canoes, surrounded by lily pads, tie snares around the necks of their cormorants, which quite rightly flapped and squawked in protest. Cormorant fishing, you may be surprised, is not unique to China. Indeed, it was used in England and France up until the 19th Century and was once a flourishing industry in Dali but now only serves the interests of tourists who like to see half-strangled birds cough up their lunch.

Seeing us, two small boys jumped down from the canoe, and demanded we pay two
yuan
even though we had not taken any photographs. When we refused they threw stones at us. 

With the clouds burping into giant white cauliflowers over the mountain range above me, I left Dali early the next morning and cycled northwards towards Lijiang, some 187 kilometres away and roughly 200 metres higher (2415 metres) than Dali (2200 metres) and apparently one of the most beautiful ancient cities in China.

Up a stiff climb, I realised that all this bus riding had taken its toll on me. I had become so unfit that I was forced to push the bike, and wheezed and panted as I did so. To rub in this fact, a bus bounced noisily around a bend and farted thick inky plumes into my face making me wheeze even harder. It didn’t help that I also had to fight a headwind.

Two hours later, my face a red puddle, legs shaking, I stopped at a roadside restaurant. Men in crumpled grey suits watched the simian expressions of George W Bush on television. One man shook his head, yelled something at me, and then left.

‘
Àodàlìyà
! (Australia!)’ I yelled back, desperately trying to clarify that I was not a warring imperialist, but he just waved me off.

I sat heavily down at the table. My skull felt like it’d been tattooed from the harsh UV rays and when I checked it in the mirror I saw that my bald head had a series of uniform red marks from the holes in the helmet. It made my scalp looked like it had been hot-pressed by a waffle-maker.

I ordered a stir-fry meal by pointing at my neighbour’s meal then to myself. Some minutes later, a big plate of broccoli and spinach and a huge bowl of tofu and snow pea soup arrived.

‘I didn’t order …’ but maybe my neighbour had ordered these before I arrived.

After lunch, I tore down the windy mountain road, whooshing past trucks, the drivers beeping and waving as I did so. At crossroads, I stopped and tried to decipher a map I’d bought in Dali of the Yunnan Province. While it was all in Chinese, some towns on the map were not here in the real world. I stopped by a house with a door open. No one was around.

‘
Nǐhǎo
? (Hello?)’

An old woman in a long black dress, splitting an ear of corn, came out jabbering at me with disturbed annoyance.

‘Lijiang?’ I pointed to the two roads. She muttered something, unlocked a steel door to her small shop and roughly handed me a packet of cream biscuits and bottle of apple cider.

‘Er … Lijiang?’ I pointed to the road again.

‘Lijiang?’

‘
Wěi
 (Yes)’.

She pointed to the right and walked off with the curtness of an air stewardess. I followed the road, covering valuable ground as it descended into rolling farmland. By four o’clock the mountains were a glorious green, the light crisp or ‘the magic hour’ as they say in the film industry. It was a bit chilly and I debated whether to stop and put my jacket on when I arrived at a small farming town, (I think it was Xiyizhen but I can’t be sure), some 85 kilometres from Dali.

In a restaurant, I got talking (well, with my English/Chinese dictionary) to a gentle old man in his late 50s, Svee Yin Khan. He was friendly and seemed pleased to see a foreigner out here in a place with no real touristic importance. With a name like ‘Khan’ I was surprised that he had a medallion around his neck that read ‘Souvenir from the Holy Land’ and on the back was an engraved picture of the Virgin Mary. I also learnt that he had three daughters and one son, unusual under China’s one child policy.

I liked the old man and as I ate a large bowl of eggplant, Chinese mushrooms (he assured me they were fresh, pointing to their garden) and a huge bowl of
mian
(noodles), a small white kitten meowed noisily up to my table and attempted to jump up on to it. Mr Khan knocked it down with a light flick of his hand and it scampered over to a hessian bag and began to tear at it mercilessly.

I asked him if there were any hotels in the area.

‘
Meiyou
.’ The nearest one was 42 kilometres away Mr Khan assured me. However, half a kilometre down the road I found a workers’ hostel and got a room for ten
yuan
($US2.50) all to myself. 

Everything was closed in town, the shutters drawn down like giant eyelids. No one stirred. Not even the chained up dogs that were curled up like giant hairy donuts.

The early morning greeted me with a chilly downhill ride through bluish tree-covered hills, and before long I was heading towards a structure which stretched across the road.

A road toll.

A policeman stepped out and held up his hand for me to stop (or, as I like to think, rehearsing a Village People routine). Officially, foreign cyclists weren’t exactly allowed to be travelling independently and I was suddenly filled with a sense of dread. I squeezed too hard on the brakes and they squealed noisily as if they too were scared of the policeman.

He continued to hold his hand up then, to my relief, waved me to the side, indicating that I should use the far right lane.

‘
Nǐhǎo
!’ I smiled.

‘
Nǐhǎo
!’ He smiled back as I brushed through.

At a small dumpling shop I sat around the pots of steaming bean buns, downed a few, and as the dumpling lady was particularly attractive, I’d thought I’d chat her up. I reached for my English/Chinese translation book in my handlebar bag but it wasn’t there. So I looked through the front panniers, rear panniers, loosened the strap to the backpack, took everything out. It wasn’t there either.

‘Mr Khan!’

I had left my book back at his restaurant – ten kilometres back up the hill!

‘Oh, no!’ I packed everything back up, got on the bike and up I went toward the road toll. I tried to think of way to communicate to the policeman why I was going back up, couldn’t, and instead gave him a cheesy ‘aren’t I stupid’ kind of look.

‘
Nǐhǎo
!’

He nodded, regarding me curiously. ‘
Nǐhǎo
.’

An hour and half later, I got to Mr Khan’s restaurant and there it was waiting patiently on the restaurant table where I had left it the night before. Before I left, Mr Khan made me have some dumplings; I tried to tell him I’d already had some, but he insisted and stuffed them in my face; I scalded myself on the tea, cursed myself again, and zoomed down the hill to see the policeman with his hands on his hips and staring at me with considered bewilderment. Surely I was testing fate to be arrested.

‘
Nǐhǎo
?’

He shook his head (and I must say, he did this a bit like my father, ‘What are you? Stupid or something?’), the novelty of a seeing a foreign cyclist for the third time wearing clean off his face.

By lunch time I’d clocked up 40 kilometres and swung into the large and pleasant town of Heqing that to me looked like it had gone all mock-Chinese style as everything looked clean and crisp as if this was a new suburban development.

At a roundabout next to a huge Chinese gate, I heard firecrackers down one end of the street. I cycled closer to see men walking with small white wraps around their heads playing Chinese violins, symbols and small percussion instruments and leading a funeral procession. Going on their Tibetan looks, I presumed I was still in the Bai prefecture.

Behind the men, women held hands, while at the rear and suspended on horizontal poles and carried by four men, was a large black woodened coffin, the size of an old Kelvinator refrigerator. The Bai were once Buddhists, and instead of a burial such as this, they used to cremate their dead until the Han Chinese conquered the area in 1956. In the middle of the three women, a woman wailed, I presumed a relative, and was held with ropes to the women accompanying her. As I watched, some in the crowd smiled at me and waved, breaking the solemn procession.

After a brief lunch I was back into the sun and within half an hour my energy was gone. I stopped by the side of the road and watched women bent over in their fields like Jean-François Millet’s
The Gleaners
. Where indeed did they get all that energy from, picking the fields like machines?