Here Be Dragons

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Here Be Dragons

China, Part One: Of curvy roofs, mountainous scenery and horrible, horrible Chinese toilets

Day one: Hekou, Yunnan province (just across the border from Vietnam).



And so it’s on to China.

The moment you cross the border from Vietnam into China, you notice how much friendlier people are here, compared to back in Vietnam.

When I walked out of the customs office and sat down to study my Lonely Planet, this lady came up to me to ask if I needed any help. Still in a Vietnam frame of mind, I assumed she must be some hawker or hustler or something, trying to sell me something. But she was just being nice.




People saying Howdy neighbour, humble folks without temptation



Apart from her, nobody speaks any English here in the Celestial Empire, so when I was asking for directions to an ATM from a girl in a clothing shop (pointing to the word in the little English-Chinese phrasebook I’d inherited from some really nice English girls I’d met back in Sapa, Vietnam), the girl simply left the store to walk me to a bank further down the road.

The same thing happened when the ATM didn’t like my card, and a bank teller walked with me to another bank. If you tried that in England, you’d probably get fired.

I like China.

None of this would have happened to me in Vietnam; Vietnamesers are mostly a bunch of crabby bastards (though not all).




Clichés



I’ve only been in China for a few hours, and already I’ve spotted five clichés.

First, the legendary bureaucracy. The Chinese customs official took longer to check my passport than most of their endless list of monosyllabic dynasties have lasted.

Second, there’s the infamous little-emperor syndrome. China’s one-child policy has created a generation of spoilt brats with no siblings to dilute their parents’ affection. They call them the ‘little emperors’.

There I was in the lift in my hotel, trying to get to the ground floor. In walk three generations of Chineser, yelling excitedly, as they do. The little brat starts pressing all the buttons on the way down, making the lift stop for nothing. Dad and Granddad were loving it, visibly proud of their offspring’s sense of initiative.




Accchhh ptoooee



Third, there's gobbing. Chinesers gob everywhere and all over the place, and they gob like they mean it: a good long snort, an ear-splitting hack and out it flies, con brio.




Media Corner



Cliché number four is Asians’ love of corny pop culture. Zapping through the channels (80 channels and every one of them in flipping Chinese), I lingered on one where they were showing some kind of talent show. A guy was singing Barry Manilow’s Copacabana in Mandarin, and the audience were loving it. These people are weird.

Another channel was showing a manga-style cartoon about a bunch of cool high-school pingpong players. Seriously. It was called “Ping Pong Storm”. You couldn’t make it up.

I finally settled on a channel that was showing the Chinese version of Bob Ross. I couldn’t understand a word, but it was wonderfully relaxing listening to the guy making strange soothing Chinese noises while he painted a happy little bush right there.

Fifth stereotype: absolutely everyone smokes, everywhere. Buses, hotels, restaurants, you name it. It’s like walking into an American’s nightmare.

I suspect most of them do it to work up more phlegm for gobbing.




Day two



I’m in frickin’ China and what do I hear? Mexican music. Aaargh!




Grog




The cheap grog here in Hekou, just across the border from Vietnam, is 52%!A(MISSING)BV (104 proof). I’m beginning to spot a pattern here: the piss gets stronger the further north I go.

And sure enough, if you take a map and extrapolate the direction I’ve been travelling, you’ll eventually hit Russia, where by law, all liquids must be at least 30%!A(MISSING)BV (60 proof). Anything under 70%!i(MISSING)s considered lemonade.




What am I, speaking Chinese?



One of the things that makes China difficult to travel in is the fact that so few people speak a word of English (or anything else for that matter), even by the standards of the region. So I’m having to point at things a lot, and pointing out words in my English-Chinese dictionary.

It works well enough most of the time, but a lot of Chinesers seem to have trouble grasping the concept of someone not speaking Chinese. So you get people repeating things a lot (yeah, that’ll work). Or even shouting, like there’s something wrong with my ears.

Another favourite trick is to keep saying different things in Chinese at me, even though by now you’d think they must surely have realised that, like most foreigners, I don’t speak any Chinese. Perhaps they figure that in the space of the conversation I will magically have learnt basic Mandarin.

And then there’s the geniuses who write things down for me, in Chinese characters. Yep; I don’t speak a word of Mandarin/Yunnanese/whatever, but I do happen to know 3000-odd Chinese characters by heart. You guessed it.




Off to Kunming



And so it’s off again. After a night in a place called Xinjei, it’s another six-hour bus journey to Kunming, capital of southern China's Yunnan province.

As you travel, you totally get used to long bus journeys. After a while, you blithely shrug off anything under eight hours, especially if it’s a comfy air-conditioned ride.

128,400 green bottles, sitting on a wall…




Yakkity Yak




An interesting linguistic difference between Mandarin and English, apart from the tones, is the volume.

When they’re not gobbing, Chinesers are always shouting. Any bus journey unfailingly entails the driver and the conductor walking around the bus yelling, till about 20 minutes after the scheduled departure time, or until they get bored with it, whichever comes first.

After which they'll walk up and down the aisle a few more times, yelling. This ritual is repeated at every stop.

The sleeper bus from Xinjei to Kunming was great though: it was only half-full, so I was stretched out over two bunks. Result!




Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province




The toilets at Kunming’s North Bus Station have burrowed their way up to the surface from the depths of hell. This is the only possible explanation for their existence.

It’s never hard to find a toilet here in China. There are public lavs all over and you can smell them from several blocks away. They really are the most vile, putrid bogs ever.

Remember that scene in Trainspotting where Renton goes into the ‘worst toilet in Scotland’? It was pristine compared to some of the abominations I’ve seen in the Middle Kingdom, I tell ya.

Touristy places sometimes have Western-style crappers, but most of the loos you’ll find in China are of the squatting kind (like in France). I call them ‘squitters’, short for ‘squatting shitters’.

I’m getting pretty good at them now. The first time, way back in Laos, was a disaster: my shorts got all wet from the water all over the floor (and it was water, mercifully); and I’d missed the hole so there was shit all over the porcelain.

I’m sure you wanted to know that.




Central Kunming



Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, is a pretty forgettable place, I think, to be honest. Travellers like me tend to end up there mainly because it’s a convenient hub for getting to the more interesting north of Yunnan province.

Sure, there’s a smattering of interesting spots, and the usual tours to ethnic-minority villages where you can walk around and watch the villagers being ethnic. But it's mostly concrete.

It’s nice to be able to take advantage of big-city amenities though, and I bought some supplies at Kunming’s ridiculously overstaffed Wal-Mart. Welcome to service-obsessed Asia: there were at least five staff guarding every aisle in case you need any help.

For some reason, Leo Sayer’s I Love You More Than I Can Say is a really popular tune here.

No way does this town only have 1.5 million inhabitants, as my Lonely Planet claims. There were at least 2.5 million on the number 5 bus back to my hostel, for a kick-off.

The yellow peril tends to be short and slim (you hardly ever see any fat Celestials), but it’s still amazing how many of them can squeeze onto a double-decker bus.




Dong



Checking my wallet, I noticed that I was still carrying 45,000 dongs. (How many times in your life do you get to say that?) No bank here in China will touch them, so I swapped them at the hostel for some yuans from a guy who was travelling in the opposite direction. Turned out to be £1.45. Woohoo!




Why You No Speak Engrish?



I’ve been in China for nearly a week now, and the language still sounds like bloody Chinese to me. Some buses (by no means all) here in Kunming have ‘helpful’ announcements in Mandarin, followed by English. Here's what it sounds like:

"坐在我面前告诉我说你爱我. Our next stop: 告诉我说你爱我."

Great; thanks. That clears that up.




Lijiang



Lijiang, in the mountainous northwest of Yunnan province, has got to be one of the most beautiful towns I’ve ever seen. Cobblestone alleyways, curvy roofs, stone bridges, ancient waterwheels: this is China like it’s supposed to be. It’s like a Disney version of China, but I mean that in a good way. Add a lovely mild climate and delicious food, and it’s close to perfection.

It’s touristy, sure, but most of the tourists are from other parts of China, and Westerners aren’t too common. In fact, this one random girl from Hubei province who I’d never met before in my life walked up to me and had her friend take a picture of her together with me, an exotic foreigner. This is normal here. I readily complied, throwing in the required cheesy grin for free. Who knows; it might help the modelling career I started in Bangkok.

Just when I thought Celestials couldn’t get any stranger, I walk into a restaurant with live acts featuring performers in traditional local dress blaring away, the amp cranked up to 11. Most Chinesers seem to have this slightly nerdy quality to them, and the MC was no exception.

Next on were a troupe of local girls dressed in pseudo-Hawaiian get-ups doing a hula dance to the Lambada song. Seriously.

The noise, heat and just plain weirdness drove me out of that place stat as soon as I’d finished my meal.

Lovely Lijiang is protected (as well as being a major money spinner), so it’s unlikely to get redeveloped anytime soon. But traditional architecture in most of China is disappearing fast. Fifty percent of the world’s concrete is consumed by China, apparently, so if you’re going to ‘do’ China, best do so sooner rather than later.

It’s springtime, but concrete doesn’t blossom

China is one of those cultures where everything’s verbal, and nothing very reliable is ever written down. Back home, if you ask a station attendant standing underneath a sign the size of Albania proclaiming NEXT TRAIN DUE 3 MINUTES what time the next train is due, he’ll get annoyed.

Not so here in China, where what is written down on signs and the like bears only the most gossamer relation to reality, and asking what may seem like a stupid question is perfectly acceptable, even expected.




Have bus ticket, will travel



Here’s a good example.

I was trying to figure out how to get to Shangri-La (yes, it exists!), so I studied the information posted on the wall at my hostel. “So where’s this Yuhe Park Station place?” I ask the guy at the desk.

“Yuhe?” he replied, his expression turning to a confused frown. “Oh, that’s wrong. That’s from 2007.”

“Oh. So where do I go for my coach to Shangri-La?”

“You can take bus 11 from here,” he said, pointing to a place on the map, “to the coach station.” There was an arrow pointing off the map saying ‘Coach station 500m’.

“Oh, well if it’s only 500 meters, I’ll just walk it I think.”

“Oh no, it’s much further than that.”

“Oh.”

His work done, the hostel attendant sat back down at his desk, showing no intention of editing or taking down either the timetable or the map. So they’re probably still up there, blithely misleading all and sundry.




Shangri-La



And so here I am, in Shangri-La.

How many times in your life do you get to say that?

In 2001, the northern Yunnanese town of Zhongdian officially changed its name to Shangri-La, in an attempt to bring in those tourist yuans.

This clever move proved so successful that a number of other towns in the region soon followed suit, and there are now three Shangri-Las in China. Bit of a fright when for a moment I thought I’d got off in the wrong town: the guy I asked for directions told me it was 40km away.

Shangri-La is practically Tibet. 80%!o(MISSING)f the locals are Tibetan (they look just like the Han but darker-skinned) and most signs are in Chinese and Tibetan (Tibetan first!).

Yak meat and yak butter tea are on the menu everywhere. And, helpfully, lots of people speak English, something the Han rarely do.




PC clay




The local legend here is that the goddess Nüwa created human beings from figures of clay, which she baked in an oven. Some got overdone, which accounts for the black races; others were taken out too soon and these are the white races; and the Chinee came out just right.

It’s a very PC mythology.

And yet, some Chinesers have a very pale skin colour, especially the women. They seem to get whiter the further north you go.

On the subject of legends, by the way, Confucian temples often feature depictions of bixi, mythical tortoise-like dragons, carrying local scholars on their backs. It's an idea they clearly stole from Terry Pratchett.




London, 56,000 miles. Turn left here.




China is one of those cultures where they don’t really do street names.

It’s not as bad as Tunisia, where street names depend on who you ask, or Nicaragua, where most streets don’t even have names; but there’s definitely a certain flexibility.

It’s not unusual to be met with a blank stare when you’re asking for the town’s main drag, or for a shopkeeper to be unsure of what street his shop is actually on.

And then there’s the lovely people at the local council, who sometimes put the wrong street name on the street signs. Seriously.

After what was supposed to be an easy one-kilometre trek from the bus station to my hostel, I really felt like hitting a Chineser over the head with my sweaty backpack and drowning him with it in a canal. Preferably one who works for the council.

Old people are the best for asking directions. Hell, if you’ve lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, you’re not likely to be too proud to admit you’re not sure where a certain street is.

You're not likely to feel the need to play that whole toe-curling game that so many younger Chinesers feel the need to play, where you stare at the map or the address for an hour or so, obviously completely oblivious, or point me in the wrong direction in a confident way, in order to save face.

Sigh.

Rock music in Mandarin and Tibetan sets the background to laid-back Shangri-La. Why is it that rock in the third world always sounds so dated? It’s like they all learnt to play in the 70s. You’d think that these days it would actually be harder to get hold of vintage music, for inspiration, than the latest chart stuff.

In English, music from that era tends to be better than today’s offerings, on the whole, but in other languages it usually just ends up sounding old-fashioned.




Ommmm



This close to Tibet, Earnest Traveller Types™ are getting thicker on the ground. Earnest Traveller Types™ are the kind of humourless, vegan, Buddhist, politically-correct trustafarians who take themselves and their surroundings a little bit too seriously.

You can spot them by their earnest expressions and ethnic kufis, their dreadlocks or greying ponytails swaying as they do their yoga exercises or pray to a Buddha statue (I've seen 'em do it).

Every little helps
Said Wang Chung Lee
As he peed into
The Yellow Sea — Ancient Chinese poem

At 3,200m, I’m feeling a little groggy because of the altitude. Nothing a bit of the local grog and a nice cup of yak butter tea won’t fix though.

Le plat pays qui est le mien

The weirdest thing: You know how sometimes a smell can bring back memories? I now totally associate altitude sickness (think lethargy, blocked-up nose) with the smell of burning. The first time I had it was in up-country Peru (4km), where council waste disposal is non-existent. I remember smelling burning waste everywhere. They use kerosene (seriously!) to burn it to a crisp, and you get the same smell here.




Nomnomnomnom



Chinky nosh is yum, but Chinese waiters have this annoying tendency to hover by your side while you’re looking at the menu, even if it’s over 30 pages. Makes you want to go “Shoo, shoo”.

On the plus side, I’ve become a veritable master of the chopstick. I can even pick up a spare rib and chew the meat off. I rule.

Well OK; at least I can with the rough wooden ones; not with the smooth chrome ones, which are too slippery for me. Not so for the Celestials though: they can do anything with chopsticks. They can even solve a Rubik’s cube with them. Seriously, I’ve seen ‘em do it.

OK, no I haven’t. But I wouldn’t be surprised.




Pigsy




It’s true what they say: Chinesers really do eat the whole pig, including the oink. They sell pigs’ ears, pig uteri, pigs’ blood, pigs’ trotters, entire pigs’ heads, the works. And the same is true for pretty much any other species on God's green earth as well.

There’s a popular joke around here: if Adam and Eve had been Chinese, we’d still be in the Garden of Eden. They would’ve left the apple and eaten the snake.

Leaving Yunnan, I foud that the security lot here at Shangri-La airport weren’t bothered about the bottle of water in my carry-on. I guess I don’t look much like a terrorist to them. Not since I shaved my beard, anyway.

Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into airplane engines. — Ancient Chinese proverb

Chongqing



There were no direct flights from Shangri-La to Chengdu in Sichuan, so I’m spending the night in a 'town' (4.3 million) called Chongqing, pronounced (roughly) ‘Chong Ching’. It sounds like a parody of a Chinese word, but it means ‘double happiness’ or ‘repeated luck’, I’m told. Which is kind of a cool name for a town, I think.

Chongqing’s a busy town. The days when Chinese cities’ roads were crammed with bicycles and hardly any cars are long gone. The bikes are still there, but they’ve been overtaken in number by cars, and especially mopeds and small motorbikes. Depending on income, Celestials mostly ride Chinese mopeds that break down regularly, or Japanese ones that don’t.

China is now the world’s biggest carmaker and its biggest car market. Twenty new car makes have sprung up here in the last ten years, most of which I’d never heard of before because they’re not exported (yet). The reason is that car makers don’t need to, because of the huge demand right here in China.




Discreet surveillance



Sitting in the train looking at the beautiful landscape between Chongqing and Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, I notice there are very few straight lines, even in the cultivated fields.

I'm wondering if that’s simply down to the uneven terrain, or whether there’s maybe also a philosophy behind it. Chinesers design their gardens with little or no straight lines, in order to emulate nature, and they traditionally built their roads with lots of twists and turns so as to confuse malign wandering spirits.

I’m killing some time on the train reading and typing this on my trusty little (Chinese!) netbook. Back when I was reading my book, the interest from my fellow passengers (lots of them; everything in China is crowded, always) was enormous. Several of them leaned over to look at what I was reading (Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, if you’re interested), with no bashfulness whatsoever.

Then, when I started scribbling in my notebook, their interest doubled.

But this was as nothing compared to the utter childlike fascination when I pulled out my puter and started typing. Some of them were staring wide-eyed at my screen without any sense of embarrassment whatsoever.




Trafficking



Traffic in Asia ranges from the meticulously orderly (Singapore) to every man for himself (Vietnam). Chinese traffic is somewhere in between.

It's very civilised after Vietnam. Chinesers occasionally use indicators, stop for traffic lights, etc., though of course there's still the occasional lab experiment who changes lanes without looking, much less indicating.

This includes bus drivers, by the way. I’ve seen 'em do it.

Pedestrian traffic is very civilised too in China. Sometimes people even queue (illegal in Laos and Vietnam).




And so on




And that's all she wrote for now, my litle Sichuan hotpots.

It's on to Sichuan and Hong Kong next. Stay tuned.

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Photos

Engrish
Mraco Polo

Tractor/truck thing
Hella-China

Mini folding bike
You know you want one

Trotter's Independent Traders
I so want to drive one of those

3-wheel van
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Chinesers drive the coolest contraptions.

Xinjie bus station, Yunnan
I can't remember why I took a picture of this, but here it is. Tadaaa!

Alleyway, Xinjie
Officially picturesque, this

Chinese caterpillar fungus for king penis!
Ace!

Engrish
Reaches agreement the bar!

All his ducks in a row
Market, Xinjie, southern Yunnan Province

Chinese hi-tech
Why they're better than us

Moo
A yak skull over your door is this season's black in Yunnan

More huge tobacco bongs
Some men might call them average

More Engrish
Waiting Meteor!

Chinglish
Stop ticket ride. Obviously.

Hostel life
Furry dragon

Kunming
View from my window

Good name
Jizzbone condoms. For your jizzbone.

Tibet, In China!
Photographs displayed at my hostel in Kunming. Beijing reluctantly accepts the fact that ethnics exist, but the caption stresses the fact that Tibet is in China. Or else.

In China!
And don't get them started about Taiwan

Hostel life
Itty bitty kitty committee

Comments

[Rosie]

Great writing and cute kittens ...
Nice and police ppl .... sounds like my kinda place. As a polite only child myself may I respectfully point out: a) the cliche all only children are spoilt brats is a steaming pile of yak dung; 2) nb 'little emperor' not empress - female infanticide has been practiced for centuries in China (despite laws prohibiting the practice) as there, like India, sons are preferred. The one child policy has led to an imbalance of sexes among young adult Chinese; finally may I be so bold as to point out 3) at the end of your story you mention an older sister so how is that kid an only child?

[Aaardvark]

@tigerlilyrosie: Sshhhh

[kaleem]

chinese caterpillar
dude, bring some back. the monarchy is likely to fall on hard times sooner or later.