Backpacking China pt 2
// October 21st, 2008 // Articles/Features
I must have drifted off for a few minutes, that felt like a few hours, you know those sleeps, the ones in uncomfortable places like planes where you wake up and feel immensely proud of yourself:
Did I?…hum…dribble at edge of mouth….slight headache….yep, I fell asleep!
Awesome…finally…phew, we must be nearly there now, great.
Until you realise only 7 minutes have past, and seven thousand still remain. What woke me was the sound of the buses reversing noise – ‘beep, beep, beep, beep’ which roused me, cranky and hoping to be greeting by
a)a red carpet
b)Wuhan
c)A comfy bed
Instead I got to see us reversing from a bridge, whose entry barriers were down with flashing orange lights that didn’t exactly scream welcome. After turning round, the bus just sat there. 10minutes, 20 Minutes, 30 minutes passed as it looked out away from the bridge, scanning the scenery for a plan of what to do next. I’d have like to think that John Wayne called an emergency bus crew meeting:
Team, we have a situation here. The bridge is closed and we have two westerners on the bus tonight. One is from England, you know that little hobbit place where they have picnics in castles, and play bridge and eat scones with the Queen. England is the size of a large slice of toast and I’m concerned he may die of travelling fatigue as the longest journey he is likely to have done before is 12mins. We need a plan……Whiteboards would appear, maps would be consulted, friends called until ‘operation minimize westerner discomfort’ whisked us to our destination.
I suspect the real situation was closer to:
Team, we have a situation here. We’re running very low on whisky. The bridge is closed and I have absolutely no clue where the fuck we are, and therefore where we can buy more whisky. It’s also freezing cold. Now we have two westerners on the bus, so we could kill them and use their pretty white skins as extra blankets. The male is particularly hairy, and his thick monkey hair he would make a fine duvet. “Boss?” “Yes Chen.” “I don’t really like my wife; can we just stay here for the foreseeable future?” “Yes, good idea Chen let’s just stay here……”
And so we stayed there.
I have no idea for how long, but eventually day broke and revealed the harshness of the landscape surrounding us. Popular consensus tells us that China is over-populated. Popular consensus is spectacularly wrong. Sure the cities are bursting at the seams, but the countryside?! Vast chunks of China are as barren as the moon. It would not have been a surprise to me had a NASA space probe landed to perform tests on this foreign planet, looking for water or sub-prime mortgage opportunities. Come to think of it, it’s possible they were sitting on the other side of bridge. If they weren’t and are planning a visit, skip it guys, this place is uninhabitable. Nothing lives here. Not anything, it just a spectacular wasteland.
Eventually, as the morning became mid-morning we set off in the opposite direction driving at break-neck speeds on icy empty roads. It continued to snow, relentlessly. It was now 3 weeks since we’d seen the sun, or experienced heating and looking at my watch it was just about to be become the time we should have arrived in Wuhan, and having no idea where Wuhan was, or where we were now, I had no idea how much distance we had covered. Nothing much happened for the next few hours until a toilet break. Perhaps toilet is an grandiose way of describing a wooden shack. The men’s was a big trough, about 8 foot wide and 4 foot long. All the men crowded the edge and peed into the centre, like one of those dancing water fountains you might find in Disneyland, only yellow. The shack had no door. Had it not been freezing the smell would have been at least putrid, for that I have no doubt. But being a man, I suspected peeing simultaneously with 10 men in an open toilet sewer with no door was probably Christmas Morning compared with what was in-store for Annett on the other side of the wall. There they had a narrower open pit, only this time only wide enough for 4 women to squat across, and so she waited amongst a queue of watching women seeing a row of four shitting/peeing whilst simultaneously spitting clucking chicken women. After she’d overcoming her phobia of public urination we washed our hands in snow, with a feeling I’d imagine is something similar to what Andy Dufresne might have felt after climbing out of the Sewers of Shawshank. It didn’t last long…
Back on the bus, deflated and exhausted I pulled the blanket up to my face and turned to Annett and we held hands across the aisle. We didn’t say much, there wasn’t much to say. You’re miserable, I’m miserable. I hate this country, you hate this country. But we’re here, stuck, but we’re stuck together. Fuck the no public affection rule, let’s hold hands for a while and pretend we’re back in Germany riding bicycles on a blissful summer’s day on our way to buy a bottle of Beck and a €1 kebab.
Sixteen hours had now passed.
Before we got on the bus we’d just finished having dinner at Simon’s place, the Chinese friend/guide that we’d met in Tangkou. We were the only westerners in the whole town, so he’d opened just for us, made our favourite meal and arranged our bus tickets. As he walked with us to the bus stop we debated whether we needed food for the journey. As it was relatively short (12hrs is not that long by Chinese travel standards) we decided that we probably didn’t. But then for a reason that escapes my memory we did make a last minute diversion to purchase a couple of croissants, a pack of Pringles and a bottle of water. So it was surprising that after eighteen hours of not eating we weren’t starving. It was as if my body having assessed that the chances of corner shop anywhere round here, perhaps behind one of those big rocks in the distance, were actually pretty small. So it didn’t bother me with requests for food, because that would be futile. Futile and frustrating. I rewarded it with half a croissant and a few sips of water.
Twenty hours had now passed.
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Carl
