Chinese Whispers

I never really cared about going to China.  For the last half-decade or so that we've been planning this trip, my head has always been filled with images of sweltering jungles and banana pancakes.  Lao, Thailand, Cambodia, those are the places that stir the imagination.  China, on the other hand, brings darker things to mind: open sewers, dirty streets, contaminated food, crushing mobs of strangers who spat and smoked and shouted, toxic clouds of pollution, an oppressive government spying on its citizens or disappearing them in unmarked vans.  These ideas come from the American media, from friends who've spent time in China, or from my own frantic imagination, and even though I knew they were probably of limited veracity, they hung over my head as our ferry pulled into Qingdao port.  Years in Japan had intensified my already timid nature; I feel like crying when someone cuts in line in front of me, how the heck was I going to cope in China?

Over the next four weeks, though, I found myself proven wrong in the best possible way.  The people we met were friendly, welcoming, and chatty (even when we didn't understand a word that was being said).

The food was abundant, easy to order, cheap, safe to eat, and damn delicious.

Except for the scorpions, of course.

The scenery was absolutely breathtaking.  Especially where we did all of our cycling, Yunnan province, which means "South of the clouds."

And the cycling, most importantly, was top-notch.  Mountainous, sure, and therefore exceedingly difficult.  We were unable to keep up our usual molasses-on-a-cold-day pace what with all the 20-kilometer climbs, and so we had to cut our visit short to get out of the country before our visas expired.  But if we had had another 30 days, we would have spent every one happily pushing up those mountains and taking photos of clouds.

The road leaving Kunming is lined with these solar- and wind-powered streetlights.  On a windy day like this, the turbines hum like cicadas. 

Unfortunately, China's nice modern roads are the product of constant construction, which leaves day-long patches of road that are nonstop mud puddles or dusty pothole fields.

 

Of course, not everything about China is perfect.  Beijing was a good city to be a tourist -- easily navigable by bike or foot, plenty of English, lots to see and do -- but the pollution was so unbelievably thick every day we were there.  It was so bad that skyscrapers a block away were all but invisible and the sun looked like it was coming through smoked glass.  In a way, Beijing felt like being in the future.  The dystopian future, y'know, where the earth is too far gone to save and all we can do is cough and squint and hope that it doesn't go completely kaput until we're already dead.  Leaving the city for the countryside was a relief, but we haven't forgotten how awful it felt to be somewhere so polluted, and I hope we never do.

And we did find the pushing, rude, anarchic China that we'd head so many horror stories about.  In fact, we lived it for one brief afternoon.  On our trip to visit the Great Wall, which is only a short train ride away from Beijing, we made it to the train station an hour early for our return to the city to find the station completely mobbed.  We took our place in line and scoffed at the bent-backed grandmothers and young spiky-haired dudes trying to muscle past us.  "Where do they think they're going?" we asked each other quietly, unable to believe that someone would be so rude in order to get on the train 5 seconds faster.

As time ticked closer to departure, though, the station swelled with more and more passengers desperate to get a spot on the next train, which was also the final train of the day.  Miles from the city, none of us could afford to be stranded out here overnight.  Hundreds packed into the hallway, and it grew more doubtful that there would be room on the train for all of us, much less room to sit down.  After an hour of waiting, all thousand of our knees began to ache and we all knew that we needed to get on that train.  Uniformed officials shuffled around uselessly, occasionally making announcements far too quiet to be heeded (also they were in Chinese).

When the gate to the platform opened at last, civilization collapsed.  We all broke into a run.  Elbows out, backpack clutched to my chest, I sprang between mothers and their children, headbutted my way past old men with canes and young women in high heels.  A hand grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back, but I shook it off and sprinted to the end of the platform were there were already a dozen people waiting.  The train pulled up and hundreds of eyes stared at that door hungrily, all breathing that we would kick our own mother in the shin to get a spot on that train (sorry, Mom), so tired were we of waiting and so desperate to get away from this awful place.

In the end, we did make it on the train.  As far as I know, no passenger was left in a bloody heap at the station.  Somehow, Jenn and I even got seats.  We stared out the window into the smog, breathless and dry-mouthed, and we wondered if the price of getting our seats was worth the spiritual toll we paid.  All it took was a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of fear to turn two friendly, sensitive hippies into crazed animals who were perfectly ready to murder the crap out of Piggy if that's what it took.  If this is what train travel in China was like, if this sort of unmediated competition for limited resources was a regular situation to be in, then that must really make it hard for the people who live here to be nice people.

As bad as we felt, we still kept our seats.  I don't know how many orphans or limbless veterans had to stand up for another two hours, and I didn't want to know.

I don't know why China has such a terrible reputation in the West.  I think a fair amount of it stems from good old-fashioned racism; hell, Chinese people have been distrusted or outright reviled in the US for a couple hundred years.  There's also a healthy dose of distrusting the other major world superpower.  I mean, there are more Mandarin speakers than English speakers in the world, and that's scary as hell to a place where few dare utter that USA does not equal #1.  I guess the biggest reason there's such a negative image of China, though, is just basic media scare-mongering: people will watch a news program about a big bad empire of not-white people who oppress their citizens and hate our capitalist freedoms.  Programs about diverse, complicated places don't really make it to air.  And I don't mean to say that China's without problems (because that would be a dumb doo-doo-headed thing to say), just that it's really easy to assume from watching the news that America is nothing but school shootings, state-sponsored executions, and McDonalds, and that's just as ignorant a caricature as thinking that China is nothing but jack-booted authoritarianism and poison toothpaste (and pandas).

So I guess the lesson here is: don't trust the media (sorry again, Mom).

The other, probably more relevant lesson?  China's an awesome place to tour, and we're sure as hell coming back someday.

Boredom on the Orient Express

Hour 0: The guidebook tells us that Beijing West Railway Station is the largest train station in Asia, and it certainly seems busy enough to justify so much square footage.  Even at 9:00, when we begin lining up for our train to Kunming, Waiting Room 4 must have five hundred people crammed into it.  Families squat among islands of bags that clog up the aisles, though nobody sits on the floor but us.  When we see people hack up big wads of phlegm and spit them on the floor, we understand why.

Most of the men crouching by the walls are slurping down cups of instant noodles.  We came prepared, having stopped for a plate of the famous Peking Duck before coming to the train station.  Or at least, that was the plan, but somehow we ended up being served an entire roasted pigeon instead.  It was good, but greasy.  And gnawing on the bald head was an experience I’m not eager to repeat; made me feel like I was cannibalizing Patrick Stewart.

o_O

We’re called to line up for boarding at 8:45, and the aisle turns into a scrum.  Old men shoulder past me to squeeze ahead one place in line, young women in high heels elbow past us, dragging their children by the collars.  Gradually the space between passengers is reduced to an inch, then to nothing.  Compared to yesterday’s train to Beijing from the Great Wall, this is completely senseless; everyone in line has an assigned seat on the train, which means that getting to board three seconds sooner brings no reward but an extra three seconds of train time.

We board our train and congratulate ourselves for sending our bikes ahead instead of bringing them on board and hoping for the best: our hard sleeper car is composed of stacks of bunks and little else, with virtually no room for luggage.  We happily take the bottom bunks, which have the added luxuries of a table and storage space under the beds.  We make ourselves as comfortable as possible and settle in for the next 43 hours.

Hour 1: One of our bunkmates is a youngish guy who bellows every time he yawns.  He sticks around the whole trip, serenading us with his sleepiness.

Hours 2-17: Toss, turn, and fret about our bicycles.  The young English-speaking employee at the freight counter in Beijing assured us that everything would be fine, but images of broken spokes and missing cycles haunted my thoughts, keeping me awake even on the surprisingly comfortable bunk.

Hour 18: We’re finally on the ball enough to catch sight of a sign at one of our stops.  We’ve made it to Changsha, yet another Chinese city I’ve never heard of.  Looking at our map, it looks like we’ve been going due south since getting on the train.

Hour 20: Xiangtan.  Our previous bunkmates have all moved on, and we are joined by a couple of middle-aged ladies and a smiley 3-year-old with a long rat tail and a toy musket that he tries to jab in his mom’s eye.  He quickly becomes the star of the whole car: he’s patted and spoken kindly to by every other passenger, and Jenn and I pass an hour entertaining him (and ourselves) with hilariously inept magic tricks.  He laughs every time we speak English; for comparison, I try saying nonsense syllables for awhile, and he finds these less funny.  He then tries to force-feed me an enormous slice of grapefruit, and I completely fail to teach him the word “no.”

Hours 20-41: The boy's mom and her friend eat.  Just, like, eat and eat.  Cakes, fruits, lunch boxes, instant noodles, dumplings, candy, chicken.  In fact, it seems that nobody on this train brought anything to entertain themselves with except for food.  By the end of the trip, we're wading through plastic wrappers and crumbs.  In that time, we finished a book, knit half of a sock, played Settlers of Catan, and drew adorable pictures to help explain ourselves to people who don't speak any of the languages we speak.

Hour 22: I look up from my falling-apart copy of Tom Jones when I hear a plastic hissing noise.  The little boy, under the half-watchful eye of his mom, is peeing into a trashcan.  Jenn and I exchange shocked looks.  The toilet is just down the hall, after all.  And hey, that toilet is scary as heck, and I certainly don’t want to go in there, either, but it must be horribly unsanitary to have a puddle of pee sitting open in the train.  We try not to think about it, and are a little more careful about putting on our shoes.

Hour 25: Improbably, impossibly, the radio starts playing a song from “Pure Moods.”

Hour 28: I wake up, realizing the lights and radio were finally turned off at some point.  Jenn is still awake, tells me that she can’t stop coughing.  “I hope I didn’t catch something from that kid,” she says, and I can’t do anything but agree.

Hour 35: Wake up in a city somewhere in Yunnan province, I think.  Sharp, tooth-like mountains jab up from the earth, breaking up the roads and bridges of an otherwise unremarkable, new-looking city like all the ones we’ve passed so far.  The smog seems to have returned, though that could be...just fog?

Hour 37: The endless fields and rivers have turned to dramatic rocky mountains sprinkled with distant rice paddies.  When the train veers closer, they turn out not to be rice paddies at all, but stairs of narrow paths cut into the red earth.  Too small to be rice paddies, or really anything agricultural.  What are they?

Where the cliffs are too steep for these paths they are covered in wild grass or impenetrable woods.  We’ve come a long way from the bamboo forests and gray stone of Japan.  The mountains grow higher and higher around us and my heart sinks in proportion.  Did we make a huge mistake in deciding to ride our bikes here?  Sixteen hundred kilometers from Kunming to Laos.  If all of it looks like this...

Jenn points out that it looks like Tuscany, but with more mountains.  And more dengue fever.

Hour 38: An old man in the next berth beckons me over and asks me something in Chinese.  I follow my usual M.O. and smile, shrug, and say, “Sorry.”  He repeats his question, and I go with my buest guess and answer, “Kunming.”  This seems to satisfy him, so I clarify: “Beijing to Kunming.”  Then he asks something else, and I try, “USA?”  He laughs.  Apparently I guessed wrong.  Somehow he’s able to ask me how I’m planning to travel in China without speaking Chinese.  Mister, I couldn’t answer that even if the two of us shared a language.

Hour 39: I finally break down and order a lunch box from one of the vendors that wheel up and down the aisle.  I take a picture, then judge it immediately too gross-looking to share with the world.  Tasted OK, although I question the wisdom of giving cabbage and kidney beans to people who have to share an enclosed space (and a severely nasty toilet) with one another for 43 hours.

Hour 42.5: We pull into Kunming a good 20 minutes early.  We are stunned that, 3000 kilometers later, this is the same country as Beijing: the smog has all but disappeared, replaced by the hawkers, colorful ethnic dress, and zillions of scooters that scream "Southeast Asia."  Our stomachs tighten as we eventually zero in on the freight office, but all the worry turns out to be for naught.  Our bikes and panniers are fine if slightly dirtier than we remember.  We reassemble Sally and Jenn's bike (which remains unnamed, even though I proposed the name "Bike Tyson" that Jenn dismissed with, "Why, because it's black?").  The crowd of movers and customers stop what they're doing to gawk at our routine and say what I hope are encouraging words and not, y'know, bitter curses.

Jenn and I frantically try to remember which side goes down.

Altogether this voyage cost us about 200 bucks and 43 hours of our lives.  Beats flying any day of the week.  Though next time we'll probably pack more food.  Incidentally, Jenn did catch something from that kid and spent the next 24 hours coughing.