Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (31 page)

There I was on the Huánghuā Wall, one of the many derelict sections of the Great Wall of China, hiking up the crumbling steps past small bushes, plants, gravel and broken rock, sometimes stooping, sometimes clambering with my hands, when I turned around to Maria and announced, ‘You know, I will take my gear off.’

For some time, there has been a myth that the Great Wall of China could be seen from the moon. I think what the initiator of the myth really meant to say was that on the Great Wall of China you could be seen to be mooning and right now, I was about to demonstrate this point.

‘Oh, I know you’ll get your gear off,’ Maria said confidently. ‘And I don’t want to be anywhere near you when you do!’

I had met Maria at the Jinghua Hotel in Beijing. Born in Australia to parents from Hong Kong, she worked in the UK as an occupational therapist. Though she may have looked Chinese and spoke much more Mandarin than me, she could not make herself understood by the locals. Surprisingly, my tiny grasp of the language had brought better results.

Sexual tension had been brewing between us since a brief kiss in a taxi the night before, and now we listened to each other’s heaving breaths, which was slowly driving us – and I hate to say it – up the wall.

Mooning the Great Wall of China had seemed a good idea at the time, a streak across the peak, a funny photo to send to friends, a bizarre way of flirting with Maria (‘Look! I’ve got nads! Catch me, Maria, Catch me!’). But maybe I was stepping over the line.

I had cycled alone to the wall, some 60 kilometres north of Beijing’s metropolis, which had abruptly vanished into rolling hills and farmland after I crossed the last of the four ring roads that encircled the city. Maria took the bus and met me later in the day.

When I first arrived in Beijing some days earlier, I was relieved to find that it was not the polluted hellhole I had envisaged. Instead, a clear blue winter sky stretched across the city, perhaps an early sign of the government’s commitment to cleaning up the city in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Factories had been closed and moved out of town and most buses and taxis were being converted to natural gas.

Beijing appeared prosperous, rich and, as I dodged other cyclists in my cycle lane, crammed with traffic. In the past 20 years, vehicle traffic in the capital had grown from virtually nothing to a staggering 1.5 million
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.

In simpler days, bicycles were the prime mode of transportation in Beijing, as in most places in Asia. I remembered seeing documentaries of blue-pyjama-clad Chinese workers braving the cold on their single-speed Flying Pigeon bicycles en masse, overtaken by the odd solitary truck. It was hard to imagine that now.

Having said that, during my time in Beijing, I found that it was one of the easiest and safest places for a cyclist. The roads were good, well-sealed and flat, and a fenced lane kept wayward cars at bay. Like Kunming, Beijing was being completely rebuilt and modernised. Bars and nightclubs were hiccupping up along spruced-up boulevards while old Chinese markets were being pulled down to make way for concrete shopping centres, taking the enticing aroma of Peking duck and the steam of coriander noodle soups with them.

As I rode out of Beijing, new high-rises were sprouting up and generations of tenants were being ordered to vacate their homes in the
hútòng
(narrow laneways) in less than 30 days or spend time in the city’s oldest estates, the gulags.
Hútòngs
were old-style housing originally built by the Mongol
Yuan
dynasty in the 13th century after Genghis Khan had destroyed much of Beijing. Some hútòngs have been given protected status but most seemed doomed for development. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Beijing, new living areas were mushrooming – grass lawns, sculptured ponds, three-bedroom bungalows – in a Chinese version of the ’burbs.

I carried on up into the craggy brown mountains, following an undulating road past a quarry until I stopped at a frozen reservoir. Being from a place where a bit of light frost on your lawn was enough to draw comment from the neighbours (‘Wow! Look how your footprints leave holes!’), I had never seen a frozen lake. I began to think about slipping around on it.

To test the ice’s thickness, I picked up a rock and threw it. It bounced, making a loud dull sound like a bird flying into a window. I grabbed a bigger rock and this time it broke through, leaving a large, horrible hole.

There goes that idea.

I got back on the bike and didn’t stop cycling until I reached Huanghuacheng, a town made up of a small collection of bungalows below the Great Wall.

At a small restaurant-cum-hotel, I took a bed in a dorm room occupied by a band of Irish lads. Well, I was sharing it with their stuff, anyway. They were heading off to sleep on the wall for the night and teased me when I refused to go with them

‘Come on! You’ll love it. We’ll have a few beers, fawkin’ brilliant!’

‘Yes, a few very
cold
beers.’ He persisted, until I told him my windswept adventures. And so into the night the three of them went, sleeping bags and beer under their arms. I curled up under the blankets and went to sleep, warm as toast.

The following day, I saw it. The Great Wall trailed over the mountains, looking like a dragon’s back across each ridge, bumped and curved. The hills had a brown-grey hue, and already snow sat quietly in the shadows in scattered patches. Maria pointed to the edge of the wall.

‘What about here?’ she said, looking for a perfect spot for my nude run. We were in a corner. I looked behind us to see if there was anyone around.

‘I can do this on my own; I have a tripod in my bag,’ I said. I didn’t want to seem like a complete pervert. I mean, sure, I was, but I didn’t want to advertise the fact. ‘You don’t have to stay.’

‘Oh, no. It’s fine. I don’t mind.’

I gave the camera to her.

I looked around nervously, then whipped off my clothes and … stood there.

‘Do something,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Jump, move around … I dunno.’

So I did. I jumped up and down, my bum to the camera, and skipped down the wall.

‘Right!’ I quickly put my clothes back on. As we climbed a turret, a Chinese man jumped out at me. He was there with his ladder, charging tourists the pleasure of using it.

He pointed to where I had stripped off then grabbed me on the crotch, laughing. It was winter, you see.

‘He was friendly,’ said Maria.

‘Too friendly!’

We continued on our way, until Maria stopped and said, ‘Hey, how about another shot from over here?’

For someone who had been shocked by my request to streak across the Great Wall, Maria was now a happy convert to this ‘artistic and creative element of photography’.

A bit further down the wall, I repeated the performance. But this time as I ran to camera, slipping over snow, I found myself face-to-face with a young English woman. Her partner soon turned up.

‘I see why you wanted to go ahead,’ he said stiffly to her.

‘Don’t mind me,’ I said, pulling on my underwear. ‘Do this all the time, you know, in Oz. When on the Great Wall …’

They scurried down the broken steps without looking back. Maria handed me my clothes.

‘So, Maria. What about you?’

On a flight of crumbling steps stood Maria, in her topless beauty, flaunting it to the ancient bricks.

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. “Move around”.’

‘No. I feel stupid! Pass me my shirt!’

Soon, the novelty of streaking had worn off and we went back to the normal tourist activity of half-falling down the steep path; much of it had crumbled away under centuries of wind, snow and rain, and parts had been removed to build the rambling houses below. The wall, depending on which history book you read, was either 2400 or 6000 kilometres. It started from the Yellow Sea and went as far west as the Gobi Desert. It took a staggering 2500 years to build, and apparently during one ten-day period during the construction, over 500 000 men perished. Despite the voracity of various dynasties to complete the project, the Great Wall was only partially successful in keeping Mongolian invaders at bay. Genghis Khan was temporarily stopped but managed to break through after two months. Guards were apparently easily bribed. As recently as World War II, the wall was used to ferry troops to fight the encroaching Japanese.

Below us, the wall fell away into pieces. It was difficult to believe that this section, the Huánghuā, was, in its heyday, supposed to be one of the better-constructed parts of the wall.

We stopped at the top of a turret.

‘So … what is it going to take to get me in your book?’ Maria smiled. ‘I mean, what would I have to say or do to be in it?’

‘Hmm … let me see,’ I said, looking at the edge of the wall and trying to think of something acrobatic for her to do. But she surprised me completely.

‘Do I have to shag you or something? Well? Do I? Tell me! TELL ME!’

A strange thing happened to Maria and me on the way to the Forbidden City. Or, rather, I saw a strange thing in the Forbidden City. But let’s face it: the Forbidden City is a strange place. For one thing, there is its name.

It was called thus because, like the name suggests, it was forbidden for almost 500 hundred years. No one was permitted to enter the city walls. Which would have been hard to do anyway thanks to the 22-foot high and 30-foot thick walls, not to mention the moats, and the guards brandishing swords and arrows, which would have been enough to make you think that pretending to be a lost tourist (if they were called such things in those days) might not be such a good idea.

To enter these days, visitors go through Tiananmen Gate, otherwise known as the Gate of Heavenly Peace. This didn’t quite work for me: Gates of Peace leading into the Forbidden City then instant death?

Completed in the 15th century by the emperor of the day, the Forbidden City was the residence of the Ming and then Qing dynasties, until 1911 when Sun Yat-sen’s Xinhai Revolution forced the last emperor, Pu Yi, to abdicate. Prior to this, the emperor and his family were housed behind numerous high walls, and then again in an inner palace complex known as the Imperial City. The design was based on the human body – the Forbidden City represents the viscera and intestines; the outer walls serve as the head, shoulders, hands and feet; and Tiananmen Gate is the protective tissue to the heart.

Maria and I walked through the cobblestoned squares, feeling engulfed by the enormity of the palace, the imposing walls, the sheer ‘forbidden-ness’. It was cold. A stiff, icy wind whipped up. Tourists with their camcorders shrank into their winter jackets while others hid behind statues. We took shelter past the Emperor’s quarters and, to our surprise, found ourselves warming our hands on a Brazilian. I don’t mean a Portuguese-speaking, hip-swinging South American. I mean a Brazilian
latte
.

It was no pale imitation here, no Chinese hokey going on. Oh, no. We were getting the real thing. We were in Starbucks.

Obviously those British and French Imperialists had got it all wrong when they gunned their way in here with cannons in 1861. Clearly they should have sent in an army of pushy baristas. ‘Latte anyone?’

The café had been set up in what at one time might have been a ruling eunuch’s government office – eunuchs had held high government office during the Ming Dynasty, and ran the Empire – and, considering the cold, I could relate to their surgical fate. But I found this so odd, so bizarre. Where once intruders had been beheaded before the Grand Emperor, now camera-clicking tourists drank Grand Lattes. To have not just a coffee shop here but an American ‘Imperialist’ franchise in the heart of royal Chinese ancestry was incongruous, a carbuncle on the face of Chinese history.

‘And isn’t it interesting,’ said Maria as she slurped froth from her upper lip, ‘that no matter where you find a Starbucks, no matter what exotic location they put them in, the coffee still tastes like shit?’

‘Then why did you drink it?’

‘I was cold!’ She punched me and then kissed me. ‘Let’s get some dumplings.’

As we walked outside the Forbidden City and through Tiananmen Gate, the paradox continued. North of Tiananmen Square hung the dominating visage of the blank-faced and wart-chinned Mao Tse Tung. During the 1989 protests, students managed to smear the old tyrant’s portrait with red paint, giving it an odd Dorian Gray hue. The picture was replaced soon after the Tiananmen Square massacre, though it may not have been what Mao wanted in the end, for now his image was condemned to a communist purgatory, left to stare at one of the most gratuitous symbols of Western Imperialism: the golden arches of McDonald’s. The restaurant was at the other end of the square, and a plastic statue of Ronald McDonald stood outside the store, grinning and waving back at Mao.

It was hard to believe that only a little over ten years ago, hundreds of students were mowed down by soldiers’ bullets and tanks here, forgotten now in the slurp of a thick shake and the slap of a Big Mac. The ‘Capitalist Pig Dogs’ had beaten the Communists, it seemed, and to let it be known to the people that they had sold out entirely, banners proudly hung across busy city intersections proclaiming China’s upcoming entry into the World Trade Organization.

I unlocked my bike and wheeled it out into the grey emptiness of the square (no one was allowed to ride across the square, and numerous police kept an eye on such attempts). Maria jumped on the back of the bike and we cycled off but were soon stopped at an intersection by a scruffy man who began shouting at us.

‘What does he want?’ I asked Maria.

‘How would I know? I speak Cantonese; my Mandarin is terrible!’

He flashed a small plastic badge at us and pointed to Maria to get off the bike. Apparently he was some kind of civilian traffic officer, and dinking
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was not allowed in Beijing. We walked the bike for a while and as soon as the officer was out of sprinting distance Maria got back on. We headed to the hútòngs behind the Forbidden City and found a small dumpling restaurant down a narrow, tree-lined street. We warmed up on a bowl of pork dumpling soup.

‘Ah, that’s better,’ Maria said, obviously relieved. She shovelled another dumpling into her mouth then stopped. ‘What are you staring at?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, averting my gaze to my own bowl.

‘Go on. What is it?’

‘No, it’s nothing. Really.’

‘Tell me!’ Maria could be quite forceful when she wanted to be.

‘Well … do you always eat … with your mouth open?’

‘Oh, that,’ she relaxed, stabbing another dumpling. ‘Yeah, friends have told me about that before. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”, and they said, “Oh, we thought it was a cultural thing.” I couldn’t believe it! I’d been eating like this for years in front of them. Does it bother you?’

‘No, it
fascinates
me.’

‘Shut up!’ After that, I did notice she tried to keep her mouth shut while she ate … for a day or two.

We headed back out into the cold to the Xiùshui Silk Market. You could get practically any kind of copied brand name here: Gore-tex jackets, North Face fleeces, Gucci belts, Gap caps and your usual fare of famous-brand watches. I picked out a red satin dress for Bec.

‘Do you feel weird doing this when you’re with me?’ Maria asked while I held her hand.

‘Yeah.’

‘But you’ve broken up with her.’

‘Yeah, but—’ I said, then, trying to make sense of it, ‘I just want to give her something. It’s Christmas soon and I think she’d look good in this.’

‘You still love her!’ She poked me in the ribs, laughing. It was true. I still did.

I haggled a bit with the shopkeeper and bought the dress. After an hour or so of bartering and fighting through the crowds of other foreigners, we left. At our hotel we collapsed in our room, exhausted from a day of cold December winds, noisy traffic and foreign coffee in forbidden spaces.

In the morning we had breakfast at the Waley Bar. The bar was in the hotel, just down the hallway from our room, and it was open all night, every night. In the late evenings the bar was frequented by the hotel manager, a bolshie Chinese woman, Amanda, who would loudly exclaim in the company of her foreign male companions, ‘Noooo! FUCK YOU!’ ever so frequently, before laughing the smoke out of her face. By the look of things, she had been up all night and was now slumped at the bar, a tiny cigarette in one upright hand trailing smoke above her – a signal; no, perhaps a warning, to keep well away.

A waiter delivered our poached eggs amid the mess around us – our luggage. It was our last day in Beijing. We were to take the overnight train together to Hong Kong that afternoon; Maria was meeting up with her mother there and I had to organise a flight to Taipei.

On a table opposite I noticed another traveller reading a map, and I was pleased to see that he was festooned with panniers.

‘Cycling China?’ I asked. He looked up.

‘Yes. I have just cycled Mongolia.’ He had a slight Israeli accent. ‘Now I go to Chengdu. What about you?’

‘Just done it,’ I said pointing to my bags. His name was Athalia and when I told him my name he said, ‘Is your email “russellbike”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah!’ his face lit up. ‘I emailed you!’

I had posted a notice on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree page offering advice on cycling in southwest China, and Athalia had responded.

He seemed quite nervous about heading into the Tibetan highlands, though I don’t know why. In Mongolia he had pushed his mountain bike through rivers, lowered it down cliffs on a rope, camped out in the middle of the desert. He had even made his own panniers, thrown together from scraps of old fabric.

Suddenly our conversation ended when somebody crashed down at our table with a pint of lager and a small glass of whisky. It was a middle-aged man wearing a jacket as worn and battered as his face. He collected himself and just sat there staring at us through his big glasses, stroking his grey goatee and fiddling with a yin-and-yang ring on his finger.

I soon recognised him as the lump in the bed next to mine when I had stayed in the dorm room some nights ago. He slept most of each day. I was told by another traveller that this drunk creature had been here two weeks already and that he was ‘recovering from jetlag’, which of course had nothing to do with the all-night benders he had been on; waking us up, staggering in as if lost in a storm, colliding through the room collecting coat hangers, bags and odd shoes in his wake.

He smiled and pulled out what looked like a small electric shaver and pressed it to a dint in his throat.

‘Where are you from?’ buzzed a robotic voice.

‘Australia,’ I replied. ‘You?’

‘Can’t you tell from my accent?’

I wanted to say ‘Er … Dr Who?’ because he sounded just like a Dalek. I thought better of it. ‘Ireland?’

‘No. Guess again.’

‘Scotland?’

‘Correct. I’m Scottish. My name’s Gilly, short for “Killy” … Killy the English, you know. I hate the fawkin’ English.’

From his garbled squawks I could only piece together fragments of what he was ranting about: fighting in the Gulf War, being in prison, searching for the Holy Grail. God knows.

He took a swig from his whisky, then his lager.

‘Excuse me.’ Gilly unwrapped the cravat around his neck and tended to a small plastic pipe that stuck out from his throat. He pulled out a hanky and cleared sputum from the pipe, hissing and rasping as he did so.

‘How did …’ I asked awkwardly, unable to contain my curiosity. ‘I don’t want to be obvious about stating the obvious, but how did you … how did you lose your voice?’

‘Ah, that’s nothing for you to worry about,’ he said, shying away and taking another gulp from his drink.

‘I was asking because my father had a tracheotomy as well.’

‘Give him me number and we’ll have a chat!’ He laughed, then spluttered and coughed. He wiped his mouth then took another gulp from his drink before reaching inside his leather jacket and bringing out a small crystal attached to a gold chain. He dangled it.

‘It … never … lies.’

Maria, Athalia and I looked at each other.

‘This wee thing told me I had cancer. I tells the doctor but he didnae believe me, of course. Anyways, they did a biop. Had fawkin’ lymphatic cancer, now didnae? Took this huge lump out of my neck and shoulder.’

He passed the crystal over and put the gold chain between my index finger and thumb. ‘Think of somethin’. Somethin’ important.’

I tried. I thought of Rebecca. The crystal didn’t move.

‘Hmm. Now you,’ he said to Athalia. Nothing. Then it was Maria’s turn. The crystal moved.

‘She’s got it. She’s got it!’ Gilly said.

‘Got what?’

‘Got the ability. Yer see, I’ve got what’s called the second insight. I can see the future. And believe me. It’s ’orrible. Fawkin’ ’orrible.’

He passed the crystal back to me.

‘Ask it a different question.’

This time the crystal spun and swayed violently.

‘YES!’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, to your question. What was your question?’

‘I asked if my dead father was happy.’

Gilly’s eyes swirled madly behind his glasses as he tried to follow the crystal.

‘He’s happy.’ His Dalek voice crackled as he clasped my forearm and leant forward so I could smell his whisky breath. ‘Happy as a fawkin’ pig in shite!’

The bike, now sorely loaded up with Christmas presents, was heavy as I wheeled it one last time across Tiananmen Square on my way to meet Maria at the station.

I posed with the bike, trying to look adventurous, while two students took my picture. The last photo of my trip. I looked around the square; my last experience of what was once an idea, late one night in front of an old atlas. I stood there, trying to take it all in.

Travel, they say, changes you. I had been to different countries but was I returning as a different person?

I still felt the same. I had had no spiritual awakening, as people sometimes expect when you go to places such as India. I had not had an epiphany, nor any flashes of magnetic truth, no divine light. But, having said that, the trip had taught me a few things.

India was perhaps one of the friendliest places I’d been to and unfortunately I did not always appreciate that fact. She showed me my own shortcomings as a Western traveller: my pettiness, my lack of patience, empathy and understanding. (In fact, I ended up falling in love with the place, and have been back there twice since this trip).

China and Nepal I had adored; there was less hassle and less traffic, and the countryside was breathtaking. As for Pakistan, I wished I had had more time but I liked what I saw during my stay.

I had fun and met great people such as Uros, Dr Pushkar, the Doctors Chawla, Devendra and Fulong. Nothing had quite gone to plan, which I’d sort of expected, but really not. Malaria in the first two weeks? September 11? Breaking up with Bec?

You may remember my original plan: