Bound for Vietnam (13 page)

I crept home to my room defeated by this day. There wasn’t much else I could do. I had no money, a sore leg and I was thoroughly cheesed off. On the way back to the hostel I asked the owner of the café the location of the police station. He told me it did not open until three o’clock. Too bad if murder, pillage and rapine were going on down in the town during siesta time.

Khai was very upset when I told him about the theft and gave me a long lecture about keeping my money around my neck. My American cash dollars and travellers cheques were safely hidden in my room however, so I was able to change some money with him.

But wait! There’s more! The day was not over yet. After a morning of bike accidents and purse pinching I had the ordeal of the police. I took a motorbike taxi to the police station where I found an office occupied by a nice young man who, with his limited English and a phrase-book, did his best to help me. We got through the preliminaries and past the obstacle of his thinking that I was left destitute after my loss and had no other money. ‘Do you have friends who can help you?’ Finally convincing him that the sixty dollars I had lost was not my life savings and only means of support, we went on to fill out many forms. Then I had to write a report and copy it by hand three times. There was no carbon paper.

Now the real problem surfaced. It seemed that the stamp and the certificates to prove that I had made the report I needed for an insurance claim were in the cupboard and like everything else in China the cupboard was securely padlocked. And the key to the cupboard was missing. ‘Have you notified the police?’ I quipped. ‘Ho ho. You should fill out a report.’ The policeman laughed, genuinely amused.

It turned out that the key was with the boss who might or might not return that day. My friend tried to phone this man and then we waited. I knitted and helped the policeman polish his English. Time passed. There were more phone calls. I was asked to come back in a couple of days when the investigations would be over. ‘What investigations?’ I asked. ‘I just want a claim form for the insurance and I am leaving for Guangzhou soon.’

Another western traveller drifted in. He was also asked to wait. He had been told to return on this day for his visa extension. A skinny Frenchman who was pedalling a bike around the world, he informed me that he had been eight months getting this far across China. I said, ‘How do you manage when you get to whacking big mountains like the ones around the Great Wall?’ He replied, ‘Eet eez just ze same as you ‘ave ze car. You just change ze gears and up ze mountain you go.’ I did not let on that I could not change ze gears. I could not even get around ze first corner without coming ze cropper. He eventually left saying he would get his extension in the next town.

Then, in a storm of discord, the Holder of the Key arrived. He roared around the room wafting an overpowering trail of booze behind him. His face was very red as he shouted, boy how he shouted, and yelled. He staggered to the table and read, or pretended to read, my report. Then he slurred questions at me, ‘When did you come here? How long have you been here? Where are you going?’ I was getting the third degree and I was the victim! Then things got nasty. I was not registered as an alien in town. He shoved a form that listed the names of the law-abiding foreigners who had done so under my nose and demanded to know why I had failed to let the police know that I was staying at the youth hostel. Unfortunately Khai, the hostel manager, had omitted to pass on this information.

Eyeing me all the time with deep suspicion, he continued to ask me irrelevant questions. Then came the final crunch that convinced him I was indeed a dangerous type and up to no good in China. ‘Where is your customs form?’ I didn’t have one. As I had arrived in China by ship, it had somehow been overlooked. He said, ‘If you had one you could prove you had this money you
say
you lost. How do we know you had it at all.’ His puffy face, already suffused with grog and rage, got even redder. His eyes narrowed to slits as he pushed his face close to mine. It was not a pretty sight. As he tried to speak he slavered, slurring so badly that he was actually chewing his words and spitting them out complete with flecks of saliva, some of which fell on my face.

I tried to explain the illogic of his question; that the money I lost would not have been the same money that I brought into the country and therefore would not have been identifiable, as I had been exchanging traveller’s cheques all along the way. He seized the phone, dialled the hostel and screamed at Khai, who, thank heavens, must have vouched for me and done his best to convince this drunk tyrant that I was not evil.

After much more bluster from Nasty Pants, the young man unlocked the cupboard and laboriously filled out the loss form, stamped it with an impressive red seal, made millions of copies by hand and attempted to give one to me. But Nasty Bugger stopped him, demanding ten yuan.

I said, ‘I have no money. I just had it all stolen!’ Adding under my breath, ‘By another thief.’ I did actually have money. I just wasn’t going to give it to this creep. He refused to let me have the form without paying. I got stubborn and said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’ Meanwhile, while Nasty was busy ranting, the nice policeman caught my eye and slowly and unobtrusively slid the form across the desk in my direction. I inched it off the desk behind Nasty’s back and slipped it into my bag. The Nice Person nodded to me to take off. I sidled out and bolted down the road, half expecting to be pursued, apprehended and locked up at any minute. Halfway along the road the Nice Person – I’d heard about the good cop and the bad cop routine, but this was ridiculous – pedalled up on his bike. He dismounted and walking beside me escorted me to the main street, charmingly making tentative apologies for his odious mate.

At the corner he left me and I walked on alone. Beneath my calm ‘face’ I was in a state of shock. I went to report a crime and
I
got investigated and interrogated! A display of local gut-rot booze on the street caught my attention. Just what I needed to sedate my nerves. For one dollar thirty cents I bought a litre of something that turned out to be remarkably like dry cleaning fluid, which I mixed with some of the delicious, fresh squeezed mandarin orange juice that the café provided. It was a sin to pollute such beautiful stuff with this poison and it tasted frightful. Now that
was
a crime I should have been arrested for. A glass of this concoction imbibed before and after my dinner was all I could manage. I still had nine hundred millilitres left to dispose of, but I could not face another of shot of petrol!

I reflected that I was in loss mode. Today I had also lost my sun glasses. I put them down on the counter of a shop and they disappeared, poof, like magic. Yesterday I had left my camera case on the top of a mountain and I certainly wasn’t climbing back up to retrieve it. My faith in the inherent goodness of man had taken a severe battering since I had come to China. It was in intensive care at the moment, still alive, but only just.

That night in bed when I closed my eyes I could still see the face of Nasty Pants. And in my sleep the revelation came to me that China was a place not to be enjoyed but endured.

Talking to other travellers, I had found that many did not think that China was a country they would want to visit again. The hostility, prejudice, discrimination and rip-off foreigner prices thoroughly bugged them. One German couple said that they had come for six months, but were leaving after six weeks. An American man had come for three months and left after ten days. And there were many other similar stories.

One night at a café I met the first Australian I had seen in a long time. He was the only person who said that he would like to return to China, but then he had only been in the south and to Dali, which is another hippie heaven. I would have liked to know what he thought after he had travelled in the north.

I agreed with the general opinion that Yanshu was Okay. Yanshu was a back-packer’s haunt and the local people had got used to weird western ways. The drawback to Yanshu, which was full of travellers, was the mob of touts who continually hassled you. The staff of the youth hostel were extremely cordial and helpful and actually knew something about the rest of their country. So did the small local office of CITS. I couldn’t believe my ears when I was told this. But Murphy’s law saw to it that this was the one place I did not need advice. I had arranged a berth on a sleeper bus to Guangzhou absolutely painlessly through Khai at the hostel.

I spent a morning in the park opposite the hostel. At the ornate gate, I was asked to pay one hundred and twenty times the price the locals paid. For this extortion I received a pretty postcard ticket. The park was one of the few peaceful places I found in China. Leafy trees shaded concrete paths flanked by stone-edged garden beds, while on the grass, small stone stools surrounded stone tables like a fairy ring of mushrooms. Some senior citizens played crochet; others minded tiny tots. That seemed to be a very good system – put the very old and the very young together to take care of each other. It beats child care centres. Under spreading trees, hopeful fishermen dangled their lines from the walled edges of a big, clear pond that was fed by the river. A group of old men sat in an open-sided pagoda soaking up the sun and playing cards. An old lady invited me to join her in some tai chi. Thank goodness tai chi is universal. I have had ten lessons in sum total, but I did my best to keep up with her. She was a champ.

I climbed three hundred or so steps to the top of the park’s skinny hill and reached the pagoda that was at eye level with my bathroom. The steps, which were overshadowed by trees and foliage, had been cut into the rock and, with their worn and crumbling edges, felt unsafe in places. The tiny pagoda had stone seats around its open walls for visitors to rest on and look out over the countryside. I flopped down to lower my pulse rate. Surveying the condoms and cigarette packets under my feet, I was surprised that anyone had had the energy to indulge in either of these pursuits after those coronary inducing stairs.

One day I came across the local dentist at work and I was grateful then that at least in Chungking I’d had an inside job. In Yanshu the dentist had a tiny office where the torture chair was strategically placed in the middle of a large window that fronted the main street. The victim had to face crowds of fascinated onlookers, who lined up outside, only millimetres away, to watch the fun. It was better entertainment than the pictures and much cheaper. What an audience I’d have drawn.

I visited another clinic to enquire about some anti-malarial tablets. In a grotty hole, an unqualified practitioner offered massage and other cures for ten yuan and prescribed and dispensed pills without a licence. He also did some dentistry and calmly interrupted our discourse to pull a tooth. No anaesthetic was given and no attempt was made to save the tooth of the young woman. She was a stoic; she did not even flinch. The ‘dentist’ used unsterile pliers for the operation, thus giving the patient a good chance of acquiring septicaemia. She spat out a stream of blood onto the floor. I left.

At the hostel I’d had a change of neighbours and, now, when I relaxed on my balcony in the evening, a pair of Chinese tourists from Hong Kong sat close by. He was a round chain-smoking butterball and his girlfriend must have been hilarious. He shrieked in a high-pitched giggle at every word she uttered. She, however, had nothing to smile about. Although she was dainty and smartly dressed, he was unattractive to an extreme degree. His teeth were like crooked washboards you could have driven a truck between and he had tiny piggy eyes. Sick of his noise, I concluded waspishly that he must have had some well hidden attribute like a large wallet.

Some evenings rifle shots rang out from the side of the mountain that faced me on the balcony and I saw ant-sized figures moving on the path that wound around its densely wooded slope. Another endangered species for the pot.

The surrounding villages took turns to hold their markets and on the morning that the village of Fuli had theirs I set off to visit it by small boat. Although Fuli was only five kilometres away by road, it took an hour to chug down the river lazily. It was a glorious morning and the other passengers, two German boys, sat in the soft sun on the deck of the prow and played Chinese chess with round checkers.

The river’s still waters reflected the beauty of the mountains and buffalo stood ankle deep in the shallows. Maybe it was too cold for further insertion just yet. Men in small boats harvested water-weed for animal food and women squatted at the water’s edge to beat their washing on flat rocks. Occasionally a water carrier came down to dip his two wooden buckets in the river and move off with them swinging on the yoke across his shoulders.

We landed on the riverbank opposite Fuli, and I stepped from stone to stone across the rocks that made a path through the shallows to the other side. Reaching the roughhewn stone landing, I climbed a lofty flight of steps to the top of the bank where, shaded by colossal old trees, a pretty pagoda looked down on the river. From here a narrow cobbled lane, lined by tiny old wooden houses with tiled roofs, meandered round before it reached the centre of the village high on a hill. Most of the houses consisted of only one room with wooden shutters that opened onto the street across its front. Most shutters were open to the sun and I could see that the houses were frugally furnished with wooden stools and low tables. One house sported a big picture of Chairman Mao surrounded by other deities. Some dwellings were being used as warehouses, or for cottage industries. In one I saw a girl treadling an old-fashioned sewing machine and in another, wool was being spun. Women sat on stools in their doorways. Some knitted, one young mother fed a bald baby noodles with chopsticks. I noticed that all the people of this district wore conical straw hats and traditional clothes. Outside the barber shop a young man washed his hair in a red plastic bucket – that must have been the shampoo service. There was obviously no running water or electricity.

I reached the market; a long, narrow cement floor flanked by concrete pillars that held up a peaked roof under which were housed several avenues of stalls. Throngs of people slowly wended past the goods – clothing, shoes, wool, buttons, bows and gegaws –which were displayed on benches or on the ground. In the press of bodies, I moved as fast as I could through the meat section, another of those places it was best not to dawdle in. The poisons department, positioned conveniently next to the food, offered bottles and packets of lethal potions, as well as a tastefully arranged display of large dead rats as proof that they worked. There were also medicines that I concluded must be for your afflicted buffalo. A munificence of fruit and vegetables was exhibited, as well as sacks and baskets of every kind of grain and lentil imaginable. And a marathon array of an unbelievable variety of spices, condiments, herbs and Chinese medicines were lined up neatly in tiny hessian bags with their tops turned down. Next came all kinds of dried plants and animals and stacks of dried ducks, as flat as pancakes, which were the colour of dirty tan shoes and looked just as tasty.