Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  As the nights progressed I got to know Fulong better. I liked her and soon we were spending warm nights together, her arms brushing mine as we strolled. She had flawless skin, beautiful brown eyes and a rapid wit.

  ‘I had a Belgian boyfriend. We lived together here for two years—’ she faltered. ‘Then he left.’

  I entertained notions of staying here getting to know Fulong but stuffed it up after I asked an Israeli woman for a light of a cigarette and the next I thing she had annexed our conversation like it was the West Bank. Soon we were joined by other travellers, joking and laughing loudly until Fulong sunk under a sea of English words and disappeared. I never saw her again.

  ***

  The next day I left for Guilin, where I was told I could find a bus to take me to the city of Kunming. Due to the limited time, I’d thought I’d try and see the best parts of China. As I read up and talked to more people about it, the Yunnan Province seemed idyllic for cycling.

  It was away from the encroaching mess of urbanisation that had eaten away at the eastern seaboard of China; it was up in the hills; it was cooler; and there were numerous minority groups to see and old cities to explore.

  And so the next day, I cycled out of Yangshou. It was muggy, hot, Karst mountains peeping through the monsoonal mist while farmers were bent over in their paddy fields burning the remnants of cornhusks. As I rode past, one stood up to answer his mobile phone.

  Heading north along the Lijiang River, I took the east road, a dirt track, and already I was sweating profusely. I had set off at midday, not the best time in this weather. An hour later, I stopped for a bowl of hot noodle soup at Xingping, a small town by the Lijiang River. I enquired about taking a boat all the way to Guilin but was told by a group of forlorn travellers that boat operators had got themselves in trouble with the police for carrying foreigners. I hopped back on the bike and continued north out of town. Several well-meaning locals tried to get me to turn back even after I showed them where I wanted to go on my map.

  ‘Bu yao (Bad),’ they said.

  I assumed they must have thought I was a lost tourist, so I kept going, my Chinese/English map leading the way. I rarely found myself lost in China as after a while I started to recognise the Chinese characters.

  As I cycled along these quiet farming roads, the karst mountains seemed to dance in the distance. They obviously toyed with the minds of the locals too: on my Yangshuo tourist map, the mountains were given names that really stretched the imagination: ‘Tortoise Climbing Up Hill’, ‘Fish Tail Peak’, ‘Glove Hill’, ‘Lion Watching Nine Horses’, ‘Lonely Lady Rock’ and ‘Happy Marriage at Biya Hill’. It was somewhere near ‘Something I Made Up While On Opium’, that I found myself climbing up a road that disappeared behind brown hills.

  Below me sat a lake and a small typical Chinese village – sweeping roofs and tiled beams. Remarkably, this style has changed little over thousands of years.

  Above me, the faint sound of a motorbike struggling through its gears whispered through the mist. It was already dusk and I knew I would not make it to the top before the light was gone. I headed back down, bouncing on the gravel road, past a square-tiled school and several houses. The town appeared to have no centre, no place to buy groceries, not even a noodle shack. I followed a track and ended up at a double-storey house where a bald old man stood out the front, smoking the stub of his cigarette.

  I pointed to ‘hotel’ in my pocket dictionary. The old man looked over then waved his hand.

  ‘Méiyŏu!’ He could not read, it seemed.

  He pointed to his house, offering, I presumed, a place for me to stay. On a couch in the living room sat another man; round, grey and slurping rice.

  ‘Chī fān! Chī fān! (Eat! Eat!),’ old man urged. He whisked over a bowl and chopsticks and ordered me to eat what was in the wok on the coffee table. He clumsily funnelled a strong-smelling white liquid from a 20-gallon container into my glass.

  ‘Compai!’ The three of us clinked glasses and drank. It burned my throat and I winced. They both laughed. It was rice wine.

  ‘Chī fān! Chī fān!!’ the old man urged again and I did, shovelling the Chinese cabbage and pork into my mouth. This ritual continued – drinking quickly, eating quickly, the old man shouting and spitting rice and an hour later I was well and truly pissed. Somehow the three of us ended up singing some garbled mush like wailing dogs.

  When his friend departed, the old man and I were left staring at each other until he interrupted the silence by shouting and spitting rice at me again. He must have been at least sixty-five and had deep-set eyes, tanned skin and a face that was set in a deep scowl. To be honest, he looked bit like the bald villain, The Hood,xxv out of the 1960s TV puppet show, ‘The Thunderbirds’.

  His bachelor farming life pervaded the living room – hoes, buckets, baskets, boots, bags of rice, tarpaulin on the walls and to my surprise – a wide-screen television and a DVD player.

  The old man pointed to the television, then poked the remote, indicating that it didn’t work and that perhaps I could have a go at fixing it. I got up, looked behind the television and saw the problem – it wasn’t plugged in! I hesitated for a second, thinking that maybe someone had unplugged it for a reason and if I did plug it in now maybe it might blow the television up and then God knows what would happen.

  I did it anyway. The television instantly flickered to life causing the man’s eyes to burst wide and embrace me with a big laugh.

  With the babble of the television, his relatives and friends piled into the house from next door, some wearing trousers and no shirts. They stared at me for a brief while but then, bored with this, fixated their attention on the screen.

  After they left, the old man pointed to the bathroom, indicating that this was where I could wash. He turned the taps on and stripped to his white boxer shorts. He motioned me to wash with him but I stepped back and left him to it.

  When I yawned, he showed me my room, which was large and had a double bed. I had a wash and retired to my room. Stretching out on the big bed, I was dreaming of the beautiful countryside I had experienced – the karst mountains, the paddy fields, the Lijiang River, the quiet roads and sparseness – when there was an almighty BOOM!

  The door exploded. The old man charged in shouting and then sat on the edge of the bed in his white boxer shorts. He leant over me and I curled away further up the bed, wondering what he wanted.

  He sat back, barking in the dark. I pretended to sleep as I waited tensely for his next move. He then did nothing but yawn loudly for the next half-hour before he eventually left.

  I got up and shut the door behind him. Two hours later …

  BOOM!

  He was in my room and again sat at the edge of the bed and yawned. This time he only stayed for ten minutes and then went back to his room. At three a.m. I was woken up again, but not by him – by Sylvester Stallone.

  I could not believe my ears. Stallone?

  But then I realised that Stallone was mumbling something to Harvey Keitel in the movie ‘Copland’. The volume was pumped right up, and even though the door was closed, it sounded like the television was next to the bed. The old man indulged in this for an hour before yawning loudly and shuffling off to bed for good.

  I tried to sleep but I was edgy by now and didn’t know what he was going to do next. When I did fall asleep, I was woken up again, this time by the sound of knives being sharpened.

  Oh, fuck! He’s going to cut me up like some victim in a Roald Dahl novel. Or is it the Public Security Bureau coming to take me away?

  ‘HAAANGG YOUUUU!’

  What?! He’s going to hang me? Huh? International Rescue, where are you?!

  I looked outside and sighed with relief to see it was the local butcher. Knives hung from his belt and a pig lay in a wheelbarrow, its body cut in half, legs indecently spread. People were already coming up and taking portions home.

  I got dressed.

  The old man was up, smoking a short, rolled ci
garette and feeding muffled quacks in a trough. He tried to get me to stay for breakfast and I could only think what would he expect after that!

  ‘No, no. It’s okay!’

  Eyes full of red no-sleep, I thanked him, then left, cycling into the mist of the jagged green hills above the village.

  25

  GUILIN – KUNMING

  Mid-October

  I woke up bouncing up and down on a bed, which in itself is not a bad way to wake up. It only became a problem when I hit my head on the bunk above me with a loud thud.

  Disturbingly, a small Chinese man next to me jerked and convulsed.

  What the hell is he –?

  Then I noticed in other beds, bodies shaking, heads rolling and limbs falling out the side of their metal railings.

  Oh my God! The old man has put something in that rice wine and now I’m in some kind of group exorcism! Or worse … they’re gonna take my kidneys!

  And then, I realised where I was: I was on a ‘sleeper bus’.

  Instead of seats, the bus had bunks, and when I first boarded it in Guilin I thought that I would have a comfortable, sleep-filled 24-hour journey to Kunming.

  As I was to find ‘sleep’ and ‘bus’ were mutually exclusive terms. They were not compound nouns rubbing up against each other all nice and snug. No, sir. This was some kind of Orwellian oxymoronic double-speak.

  For three days loud, ultra-violent Hong Kong films blared through the bus. For three days, we were ‘gassed’ by the constant thick haze of cigarette smoke and I was forced to spend most of the time like a Labrador with my nose jammed out of a small sliding window. For three days we lay, crammed up against each other’s bunks just above us like we were on a slave ship. For three days we were bounced and bashed by the bad roads. For three days, I was left with the memory of the smell and revulsion of eating dog-meat-soup at a bus stop restaurant.

  It felt like I was on a bus full of political dissidents bound for a labour camp and this journey was part of the ‘softening up’ process.

  To my surprise, on the last day, and out of sheer exhaustion, I did sleep. When I awoke the next morning my handle bar bag had a big hole cut along the side of the zip.

  My camera was gone.

  When I told my neighbour, or rather ‘communicated’ this, he gave me the oddest of reactions – he laughed! I could only rationalise that this was how Chinese people cope with bad news (well, when it happens to other people) for I remembered a time when I lived in Taiwan something similar happened. When a photo-lab ruined all of my Cambodian travel pictures of Angkor Wat, rather than apologise, they giggled. Bizarrely, the more I got angry, the more they laughed.

  I told the bus driver of the theft and in the next town several short, plain-clothed policemen in badly-made Miami Vice-like dinner jackets turned up and searched all the passengers. But I wasn’t the only one to get nabbed by thieves. An amorous Israeli couple (who hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other for the entire trip!) had $US200 stolen from their bags. Alas, our thieves had slipped off in the night at one of the many stops.

  Eventually we arrived in Kunming in the middle of the night and I took a room at the very comfortable Camellia Hotel. When I told the receptionist of my theft she said and did the kindest of things.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry for you. I hope you do not have bad feeling about China.’

  ‘No, no. It could happen anywhere.’

  She said something to her manager who nodded. ‘You can have one night for free,’ she smiled.

  How lovely was that? It’s moments like these that can make your heart sing with gratitude.

  ‘Xie xie ni (Thank you very much).’

  ‘The Bicycle Porter will take your bicycle. The Key Porter will show you to your room.’

  A squat woman with a face so old it was probably listed as a UNESCO site burst out of her cubbyhole and marched me to my room, keys and locks jingling off her belt like a prison guard.

  ***

  The next morning, I went looking for a new camera and walked into a shop and found myself staring at a vagina.

  How was I supposed to take pictures with that – and, what’s more, where was the flash?

  There it sat – shrink-wrapped and lonely in its white box, the words ‘VAGINA’ emblazoned across it just so you knew what it was and not some kind of mechanical calamari. Next to it an enormous red vibrator stood to attention like a ballistic missile about to launch.

  This is what happens when your camera is stolen in China – you end up in a sex shop, face to face with rubber sex toys.

  It didn’t look like your regular sex shop. No red walls, lacy underwear or plastic-wrapped magazines littering shelves. It was somewhat innocuous – full of plain white boxes stacked in a great wall on top of each other. They could’ve been selling shoes for all I knew. The sex toys were just a bonus! Adding to this clinical affair were the staff who walked around in white laboratory coats with the seriousness of scientists. They glared at me when I walked in as if I’d just interrupted an important experiment.

  I ducked out of the sex shop and bumped into breasts: large breasts, small breasts, saggy ones and perky ones, before and after. It was a breast-enlargement clinic.

  Obviously I’d been given bum directions and hoped not to come eye-to-eye with the pneumatic one.

  It was a big surprise to me to see sex shops in China at all, but then again it was another sign that the social mores were loosening up.

  After the communists took power in 1949, the People’s Republic had suppressed overt sexuality, reviling it as a plaything of the idle rich. Sex education went only as far as hygiene, or cloaked in political rhetoric. Masturbation, for instance, was condemned as ‘sapping the revolutionary will’ (and perhaps why Australia has never had much of a rebellion!). Homosexuality, until recently, was denied as even existing by many Chinese, though literature in the Ming and Qing dynasties showed that it was quite prevalent, describing sodomy as ‘playing with the flower in the back chamber’; its common name translated as jijian – ‘chicken depravity’. (Obviously using more than just the feather there.)

  As China continues to modernise, increasing numbers of unmarried couples are living together, talk shows are openly discussing sex, and there are now telephone hotlines for gay and lesbian people. Permissiveness, once the fashion in the 20s but unthinkable under communist China, was making a comeback.

  In some ways it was perhaps no mistake I ended up in the sex shop district. You see, the Chinese were seemingly obsessed with my sex life. Or lack thereof.

  Some locals thought it in my best interests that any time I happened to sit near the opposite gender I should consummate the seating arrangements. On the sleeper bus, a man on the bunk above mine, while smiling and spitting pumpkin seeds, made lewd gestures with his finger and thumb then pointed to the woman on the next bunk. When I nodded, understanding what he meant, he laughed.

  Or, as I would find later, cycling up in the Tibetan Plateau, truck drivers would shout out, ‘I LOVE YOU!’ as they nearly ran me down with their 40-ton cargo.

  It wasn’t just the men doing the classy Benny Hill act. While I sat in a noodle shop waiting for the bus in Guilin, a woman pointed to another woman on the table I was sitting at, made funny eyes and enacted the same routine with her finger and thumb.

  What the hell was going on? Did I simply look too eager about everything?

  Also, the recent departure of my camera seemed to fit a new pattern I had developed of late – losing things. In the past two weeks I had lost luggage, my glasses, shirts, my camera and, worst of all, a journal. Gone, it seemed, were my travel survival skills – I was paying too much for hotel rooms and bus tickets, and getting on wrong buses.

  I eventually did buy another camera. I walked about the city and unlike the hell I had been told about Chinese cities (namely that they were very polluted), Kunming was clean, organised, with tree-lined boulevards and markets and set amongst the green rolling hills of Yunnan.

&nbs
p; Everything looked new. Flashy new buildings – five-star hotels and glass-marbled malls – blinked in the overcast sky, and designer labels spread across posters of European models with stern smiles, tight jeans and clean shirts. From billboards on nearly every street corner, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Neanderthal blockhead endorsed washing machines with a muscular thumbs-up. Couples hung off each other in Italian copy shirts, shoes and push-up bras while bored shop assistants folded and refolded clothes.

  But despite the appearances of Western living, it all stopped at street level. While architects sweated over the latest eye-catching designs, public toilets had not yet been fashioned into anything more creative than a drain.

  At one particular public toilet, four-foot high walls separated me from my neighbour, allowing enough privacy for us to pick the food out of each other’s teeth and listen attentively to each other’s bowels explode. An open drain passed under each mini-cubicle, and when the cistern was pulled at the other end a tidal wave pushed the output of other patrons towards me until something resembling the archipelago of Indonesia sailed past under my feet. It was a struggle not to fall into it while I retched.

  This was positively lavish compared to another public toilet I’d suffered on the long bus journey. In the darkness and armed only with a roll of toilet paper all I could see was not a hole but a giant slide! It disappeared into the darkness and god knows what else. There were neither handles nor privacy to speak of and if you lost your grip, you weren’t going to get out in a hurry.

  ***

  ‘Things are changing so fast in China,’ said Alex, part owner of the Wei Pizzeria. Alex’s large Dutch frame dwarfed many of his customers and staff as he played with his two kids, giving them piggyback rides, chasing them around the restaurant, making them squeal and giggle.