China 2006 - pickled babies, ironic Starbucks, kid stalkers, the secret Great Wall & a backpacker’s worse nightmare…

A 24-hour train, doorstep-to-doorstep, all of Chinese civilisation literally whizzing past on a direct route to Beijing. I went for the cheap sleeper option, which was fine although the squat toilet was pretty foul by the next day and - as I was on the top bunk - I kept banging my head on the roof. The sadistic driver seemed to have a penchant for hard braking, causing the carriages to suddenly bang together - the purpose of the big metal bar along the side of my bed became clear and I only slept sporadically. By pure coincidence, a friend also working with our teaching charity in HK was on the same train destined for the same hostel, so I passed time chatting, reading and trying to communicate with our friendly neighbours. Rail is the best way to travel, plus I apparently saved 0.6 tonnes of CO2 - a sixth of a tree - or about 4 squirrels. The highlight of the long journey was when an Irish girl returned from the toilet and said “Hey, it’s got dark really quickly don’t you think?” I broke the news that we were actually in a tunnel and reserved the right to tease her until we arrived.

Leo’s Hostel was one of the best I’ve stayed in and I set right about seeing Tiananmen Square and the Imperial Palace. For 500 years no-one was allowed in the Forbidden City - today the tickets are sponsored by Nestle, the English signs are “made possible by American Express” and you can enjoy a frappuccino at the on-site Starbucks. Whoever granted planning permission was either a master of irony, or failed to realise how Starbucks is a symbol of American imperialism. I guess it’s all testament to China’s new capitalist direction. The area was huge with 800 buildings, all being restored, flooded with tourists mainly from around China. Soldiers and guards occasionally marched across your path - their source and destination not really clear, so I figure they’re just randomly sent out to keep you on your toes. In fact, Beijing as a whole seemed to have random-guard-syndrome with guys posted on small platforms at totally random intervals - kinda like the random cows in India, but probably more likely to kick your ass (even though they all look about 10).

It was whilst photographing the bizarre Starbucks that I heard from a distance “MMIISSTTAAH TOOOMMMM!!!” I spent all this time and money travelling hundreds of miles from HK to escape yapping children - yet in a country of 1.3 billion people, one of them still manages to track me down. Maybe it’s because I’m ginger and double the height of a lot of Chinese people - easy to spot. Problem was, as a teacher, you tend to recall only the really good or really bad kids, but parents expect you to remember their kid’s name and comment on their English. I teach about 300 children over a fortnight and I remembered this one purely because she has a uni-brow like Bert from Sesame Street. “Hey there… kid”, I posed for photos, made some generic comments about her making good progress. I spent the rest of the trip getting paranoid about other potential kid stalkers.

The huge Forbidden City features 8000 chambers and was home to 24 emperors - for two dynasties it was the source of all power in China. The luxurious palace was populated with literally thousands of eunuchs, concubines and servants - a single meal for the emperor would’ve fed several thousands of his poverty-stricken peasants. These things don’t float my boat much, particularly being so ignorant of the history - there’s just so much to learn about that it’s just overwhelming and you give up. I was more impressed with the political uprisings that had occurred just outside in Tiananmen Square. I explored it with a very camp American-Thai guy called Pete, who, whilst looking at the Mao portrait that dominates the square, said ““God, y’know, I’d totally do Mao.” Indeed. I suppose he’s one of the more cuddly evil dictators...

In China, Mao is a national hero rather than a mass-murderer - Mao merchandise in every form you could imagine is available everywhere. Tourists lap it up, from Mao waving watches to reproduced propaganda posters - it’s quite odd if you think about it. It’d be no different from holidaying in Germany and buying Hitler t-shirts. Saying this, I still bought a few Mao clocks and Little Red Books as quirky gifts for friends!

The entire capital is undergoing a transformation for the 2008 Olympics, buildings everywhere marked for destruction. The city is a huge construction site, and seemed a bit of a mess - leaving you wondering if they’d actually ever pull it off. The weather was cold but with a warm sun, the air was really sandy and dirty on the eyes - the desert is catching up on Beijing at a rate of 2km a year, sandstorms are common and it pays to wear sunglasses just to stop the crap infesting your face.

In the evening I made a trip to the Natural History Museum - run of the mill stuff but there was a separate anatomy building outside. Here, they had foetuses, body parts and full human bodies pickled in jars. All were real, although it seems that carrier bags had recently been placed over the faces of the gruesome full body ‘exhibits’. Suggest you don’t scroll to the bottom attached picture if you’re squeamish, be thankful I didn’t include the bottled babies.

Next day we took a tour to a ‘secret’ part of the Great Wall. Most portions of the wall open to the public are infested with hawkers and other tourists - plus they’ve been carefully restored. We were off to see a completely untouched stretch of the wall with a local tour guide. It was a totally knackering four hour hike over the crumbling towers and walls - it was a mess - in a lot of places it had simply disintegrated and you had to hold on to branches sprouting out of the ground to stay steady. The wall goes up and down and is punctuated with fighting stations. As you finally hike up to one of them, the view of the next stretch is awesome - but tarnished by the fact you actually have to climb all the way down to get back up again! There were no preservation efforts, but they say that if it wasn’t for tourism the whole thing would’ve fallen to pieces anyway by now. They also say that for every four steps we took on the wall, someone died in its construction. Legend has it that their bodies were used in the building materials. Despite being 7 metres high, 7 metres thick and 6000km long, it didn’t work in protecting China - but it was good for communications and transport. It was hard to imagine what it would look like restored, as we only saw the untouched version, it was even harder to comprehend how old it was and how it was made.

One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to a Taoist temple, tucked away in the suburbs. The temple was a walk-through of what is said to happen in the afterlife. It had a series of several dozen alcoves with statues inside - when you die, you visit each ‘department’ and the guys inside will judge you on a certain issue or aspect of your life. So you had your obvious ones like ‘department for sympathy and pity’, which would measure your altruistic efforts and the ‘department for rewarding good conduct’, which would weigh up your good deeds. But then, as you went along, things got a little more vague - the ‘department for halting destruction of living beings’, ‘department for oppressing obscene acts’, ‘department for controlling bullying and violence’, ‘department for suppressing schemes’, ‘department for false accusations’ and - my personal favourite - ‘department for implementing 15 kinds of violent death’ - basically a bunch of guys who decide who’ll die in a weird and horrible way. Another interesting twist was that visitors could leave offerings at departments they felt they needed help with - the corruption department was adorned with tons of offerings, perhaps evidence of tons of Beijingers with a guilty conscience!

Since I was in touristy areas, food wasn’t too bad - you could usually get Western stuff. I somehow didn’t fancy rat, dog, turtles, toads, maggots or any of the other delights on offer. A stroll around the market reveals the ‘if-it-moves-eat-it’ policy, and they like things fresh! As in, alive-fresh. Chinese cuisine isn’t exactly the sweet-and-sour chicken we’re used to back in Blighty… On the final night in the capital, we got a bunch of folks together to see a Kung-fu story at the theatre. It followed a child learning about Kung-fu, growing up, being tempted away and finally reaching enlightenment. The kid actors were seriously kick-ass and could’ve easily beaten up an adult.

It was then a choice between super city Shanghai, Xi’an - home of the apparently disappointing Terracotta Warriors, or hippy hangout Yangshuo. No prizes for guessing I went for the latter - and it was one of the best places I’ve been to - China’s answer to Goa, without beaches. It was another 27-hour train journey, which left me cursing myself for spending two whole days travelling. The beautiful scenery compensated for the discomfort and it was all worth the trouble - the village was gorgeous and completely geared towards (and dependant on) tourists. It was almost theatrical - because you knew the main, pedestrianised thoroughfare wasn’t really China, but it perfectly matched the idealist stereotype and preconception. Cobbled streets, lanterns, shops selling ethnic tat - it was eerie but so much fun. Here, I met up with Katie - a fellow teacher from HK - and we eventually grew into a big bunch of weird, wonderful and eccentric people from the UK, Japan, Israel, Canada and Europe.

For about 70p, we hired mountain bikes and cycled to Moon Hill - passing idyllic paddy fields and farms tended by women in conical hats. Moon Hill was one of the many massive rocks that populated the landscape - similar to Ha’long Bay which I’d seen at Christmas in Vietnam. This rock was special is that it had an almost perfect semi-circle punched in the middle, the views from on top of it were magnificent.

On the last day in China we visited some caves - I was hoping for some scientific insights into how the various rocks, stalagmites etc... had formed, but instead the guide spent 3 hours pointing out oddly-shaped rocks and telling it what they look like. So instead of geology, we got “boob”, “cat”, “hand”, “phallus”- it was funny, particularly as he didn’t speak English so had to communicate with hand gestures. Amongst our happy crew was Bridget - a 50-something Irish expat who lived in Hong Kong for 15 years, she was an absolute legend and I joked that she seemed so delighted cycling on her bike that I remarked how she was the perfect advert for a life insurance ad. The look I got back was something in-between confusion and contempt, I couldn’t tell.

I only got a glimpse of what is set to be the world’s new superpower, but you can feel the mood is definitely optimistic - in Beijing anyway, where the Olympics are coming and people overall are enjoying more freedoms and prosperity. People were so friendly and change is in the air, yet the Chinese Communist Party - CCP - is still, practically, an oppressive dictatorship. We’re all celebrating China, tripping over ourselves to do business with the new economic giant, happy to overlook its huge human rights abuses. No questions asked about jailed bloggers and journalists, forced evictions, lack of press freedom, environmental protection, internet censorship, Falun Gong oppression, the death penalty, peasant revolts, Tiananmen massacre, the widening poverty gap, widespread corruption, one-child policy, worker’s rights, Tibet occupation, Taiwan, systematic torture, lack of religious freedom, the Dalai Lama, the Guangdong protestor massacre last year, the lack of democracy and transparency…etc..etc..etc… I’ve heard many a defence of China’s system whilst living in HK, but my opinion hasn’t changed - and whilst we’re no angels ourselves, abuses in China affect hundreds of millions and go ignored. When the world’s media descend on China for 2008, I just hope the people take the opportunity to rise up, protest and show the world what’s really going on. I hope activists and NGOs flood the city, occupy Tiananmen, hijack the games, embarrass the CCP and open everyone’s eyes to the bastards in change. In the meantime, check out this Sky News report and the Nine Commentaries - a famous collection of articles on the CCP. We’re planning a few stunts with our protest group in HK before I leave in early June.

So about that worse nightmare thing… When I eventually got back to HK, after a truly horrible and completely sleepless night on a sleeper bus and getting lost on the wrong side of the border, I began to unpack my bags. I always wear my day pack 24/7 as I keep my cameras, valuables and snacks in there - I reached down to the bottom to round up dud batteries and came out clutching a very real snake. It must’ve been in there a couple of days from when we’d climbed through the Moon Hill scenic reserve. It was dead, so had either suffocated or starved. What’s creepy is that several times a day I’d be swirling my hand around at the bottom of the bag to locate my smaller camera. I wish I’d gotten a picture of it, but after much psyching-myself-up managed to fling in the bin in the hope it wasn’t hibernating. I thought these things only happened on TV - finding a snake in your luggage after a trip abroad is meant to be like slipping on a banana skin - it’s a cliché that just isn’t meant to happen in real life…

Tom =o) x
globalcitizen.co.uk

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