Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  The Airport Hotel was in the main street of town, but the name written in Pinyin outside it was not Airport, but CAAC. Another trap for travellers in China is that sometimes a guidebook will give you English translations that are not the same as the hotel’s version of them. This hotel belonged to the notorious airline, but I did not hold that against it. From the street its façade was imposing, but the foyer strongly resembled a public lavatory. Once again the receptionist spent a long time examining my visa. It seemed difficult for her to understand the extension that had been added, or whether I was legally permitted to stay, but eventually she decided that I was.

  I was directed to a room on the sixth floor. At least, so far, the lift was working. For a mere twenty dollars I had a room with everything my heart could desire, including plumbing leaks, and hot water from an instant electric heater. I even had a door that opened on to a long narrow balcony that ran the length of the building and was entirely caged in with iron bars so that no one could climb in or out. All the rooms had balconies, but I wondered for what purpose they had been intended. Their enclosing walls were too high to see out. Their only function that I could see was to house a washing line. But, as it was still spitting with rain, the covered balcony was a boon. Although I was dead tired I washed some clothes and went to bed feeling virtuous. It was great to hang my washing out in the open again.

  My room had a wonderfully comfortable bed, the only decent pillow I had come across in China, lights that were in the right places and even a television that worked. I was supplied with numerous comforts such as shoe cleaner, soap and toothpaste, but no towel. And no key. I was still not that trustworthy. And bliss, the place was quiet at night. To make up for this lapse I was shocked awake at seven in the morning by some terrible shrieking. The propaganda machine was at work and the message was piped through a loudspeaker in the public square. In Nanning, however, perhaps to soften you up for the blow, it was always preceded by Beethoven’s winsome ‘Für Elise’ played at top pitch.

  In the dim light of a drizzly morning I looked over the wall of my balcony. Down below on one side I could see into the yard of a large bus station and on the other into the backs of tiny apartments. A grotty view.

  As I walked out of the hotel I saw was a young girl of about twenty dressed in simple worker’s clothes standing against a wall. A giant cardboard placard hung on a rope around her neck. It reached all the way down her body and out past her shoulders and was covered with Chinese characters. By her dejected look I guessed that she had done something wrong and this was her punishment. It made me feel sick to see her shamed in this cruel manner. When I first saw the unfortunate sinner, only a couple of people had stopped to look at her, but the second time a large crowd had gathered and one little old woman in a Mao suit was bent over in front of the girl reading every word of the placard aloud. I felt very sorry for her.

  The Airport Hotel was conveniently central and I could walk to most places I wanted to visit. I had read that there was a train to Dhongxing, the village near the border crossing into Vietnam, so I went to the railway station first. It was at the far end of the main street and could be safely reached by a massive underground walkway which was filled with vendors’ stalls. I thought this was a marvellous idea. You were provided with entertainment, as well as the definite advantage of getting across the square without being killed. Emerging from the underpass, I found myself at the foot of an extensive flight of steps that led up to the railway station. Here I was accosted by a mob of beggars who looked like gypsies. One woman pushed a little boy about three years old at me. I could see that he was a sweet child under the dirt. She said, ‘Loala, loala,’ and seemed to be telling him to ‘get the foreigner’. He seized hold of my pants and hung on desperately as though his life depended on it. I did not want to give money to the woman, but I was afraid the child might be punished if he was not successful. I saw more beggars in Nanning than I had elsewhere and I was frequently solicited for money. Apart from the people from ethnic minority groups who haunted the railway station most of the beggars were old people.

  At the ticket-office some helpful workers, with the aid of the phrasebook, told me that no trains ran to or near the village of Dhongxing. They said there was a bus and took great pains to direct me to the bus station. For once I had no problem finding my way. I was living next door to it. If the phrasebook was right, the bus I needed left at three the afternoon after next.

  Everyone I met in Nanning was helpful but highly amused at finding me there. They only see the odd foreigner. Nanning, a port on the Yu River, is the capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and a stronghold of China’s minority nationalities. The surrounding district is the home of many ethnic groups, including the Zhuang, Miao, Yao, and Yi, each of which has its own traditions, culture and costumes. Nanning means ‘tranquillity of the south’ and, located below the Tropic of Cancer, it is China’s southernmost big city – although its streets felt more like a country town.

  As I walked back along the main street, I came upon a small hotel that had a sign outside, ‘Travel Toursit’ it said. I went in out of curiosity. In the office, an obliging young lady gave me detailed information about crossing to Vietnam. I was thinking that CITS had certainly improved, when I discovered that this was not CITS but a private travel agency. The presiding angel turned out to be a charming Chinese-Vietnamese, who was dying to practise her English. We had a good chat and I found out far more about getting into Vietnam than I had been told at the Vietnamese Embassy. It was a great relief to discover that I was heading for the right place as I had still not been sure.

  In the front window of the restaurant nearest my hotel, several cooked and glazed dogs hung enticingly by their noses. But I chose to eat at a café called the American Fried Chicken Company that had, despite its name, Chinese food. Here I had the only cup of percolated coffee I got in China, but I had to send it back three times to get it without milk and sugar. It came served in a big glass that was too hot to hold, but at least there was a lot of it. I drank it to the sound of chomping noises all around me – other patrons doing exactly what your mother trained you not to do on pain of death – eat with your mouth open.

  It started to rain again and a profusion of purple mushrooms sprang up – plastic capes shaped to suit bicycle riders. Someone must have got a lot of purple plastic very cheaply; it was everywhere. As it rained for almost all of the three days I was in Nanning, I spent much of my time walking about in it. On one occasion two women stopped, stared at me and began to laugh riotously. I confronted them and asked them what was funny. They pointed good naturedly to my nose. I had become a spectator sport.

  Across the road from the hotel I found a place that took only an hour to develop films. I even received a refund on a couple of prints that did not come out. As I had already paid for developing the film in advance I thought the assistant was asking me for extra money. I was about to hand over the sum she had written down when I discovered that she wanted to give it to me. The staff thought this was extremely comical and had a great laugh about it.

  I was rejected by two taxi drivers whom I tried to persuade to drive me to the post office. They said they did not know what, or where, it was. When the third came along I didn’t give her a chance to say no. I jumped into the front seat with her. Lots of sign language and use of the Traveller’s Bible (Lonely Planet) resulted in my being deposited in front of the telephone exchange, not the post office. I walked a lot further looking for it and I eventually wandered into what I thought was a hotel to ask directions of an old man I could see inside. It was actually the police station. The elderly policeman walked me down the street and, at the corner, pointed the way and crossed his two forefingers. I decided that this meant either ten minutes or a cross road. It was neither, but I found the post office.

  At midday the next day I checked out of the hotel, left my bags at the bus station and then discovered I was like an orphan in the snow. What do you do when it is raining, you are in a
strange town and you don’t have anywhere to go? The rain had steadily increased until it was too heavy to walk about in, there were no picture theatres, and the museum had shut for a three-hour lunch. I opted to sit in the bus station, which is always a good place for people watching. Here you see the real Chinese, who make up most of the bus travellers. Trains are too expensive for them. Several men came to stand in front of me and stare. They were dressed in rope sandals, straw hats and faded Mao suits that stopped a couple of inches short of their ankles and wrists, fashion guaranteed to make the wearer look a proper dork. Put a heart throb like Mel Gibson in a suit like that and even he’d look the same.

  When I had bought my ticket to Dhongxing, the seller explained something to me. I had no idea what she said, although I was able to deduce that my bus left from post number seven in the station. Now that I was leaving China, I was finally able to decipher a few characters, including some numbers. But no one I asked seemed sure about which bus left for Dhongxing. Later I learned that this was because Dhongxing was not the destination of any of the buses – you had to change to another later on. I said, ‘Dhongxing?’ to the conductor of the bus standing by post seven. She looked uncertain, but assured me that the bus was the correct one for my ticket and to emphasise this threw my bags onto the bus for me. This was the only time an official person ever helped me on to a conveyance in China. I followed the bags onto the bus. More passengers arrived. They seemed to be asking the driver where he was going, so I asked him too, repeating like a parrot, ‘Dhongxing, Dhongxing’ my one word of communication, my passport. The driver didn’t seem to know where he was going, but he had the nerve to sneer at me because I didn’t.

  An old man lumped two hessian bags aboard. I smiled at him and said, ‘Neehow,’ and he told me – I think – that he was going to Dhongxing and I should watch him. ‘Like a hawk, old son,’ I replied. Although the bus waited for a long time while the conductor tried to drum up more trade, six people were all that could be rounded up for the start.

  We drove out of Nanning in pouring rain in the gloomy darkness of late afternoon. Owing to heavy traffic, it took a long time to clear the dreary outer town, but as soon as we did the driver put his foot down. He may have been driving a bus, but that was incidental. He was firmly convinced it was a sports car. He zoomed up hills, roared down them and screamed around corners until, twenty kilometres out of town, we had our first casualty. We ran into and killed a buffalo that had foolishly got in our way. The bus screeched to an abrupt halt and a voracious half-hour altercation with the buffalo’s owner ensued. Most of the noise was produced by our conductor. A very shrill woman, she had started nagging the driver the moment she got on the bus. I had thought, Oh, no, a back seat driver! She’ll nag him all the way. And she did, in an incredibly unpleasant yappy voice that sounded like a fox terrier after a rat.

  When the driver hit the buffalo, the conductor gave him a terrible tongue-lashing. Then she started on the buffalo’s owner. You’d have thought it was his fault. Eventually the matter was settled. The bus crew handed over the front number plate of the bus to the buffalo’s owner. I supposed this was a token of good faith and identification. Meanwhile the male passengers alighted to visit the bushes. I envied them. As the actress said to the bishop, ‘That’s a very handy thing to take on a picnic.’

  The bus took off again. Undeterred by his recent mishap, our driver continued to go as fast as he could when the road permitted. The country we were passing through was mountainous and on the slopes that weren’t wooded it was beautifully terraced. At times we climbed very high up and then descended deep down again. I saw many rice paddies and an ever-increasing number of bananas. Despite this indication that we were heading south, it was very cold, as the bus had no heating. As dark fell, we were still dropping off and picking up people along the way.

  We came to a fairly big town. I still have no idea what it was, but later I realised that it was the destination on my bus ticket. I got the message when the driver and the ogress hauled me and my bags off the bus. Then they trundled me through a gauntlet of blokes who were trying to get me into their bicycle taxis. I would have made this mistake if it had not been for my helpers as I thought this must be Dhongxing. The bus crew were probably just glad to be rid of the pesky foreigner, but I was grateful for their help. I would never have found my way to Dhongxing if it were not for them. I was shepherded into the street behind the bus station where, to my surprise, I was shoved towards another bus.

  I heard the word ‘Dhongxing’ shouted at the driver of this dilapidated old crate, and that was when it dawned on me that I was not there yet. He grabbed my bags, threw them on board, then threw me on too, grabbing and man-handling me as I went in. I had to scramble over a mountain of enormous hessian bales that blocked the aisle, but otherwise the bus was empty. The other passengers had got out for refreshments. When they returned, a woman went to sit down next to me. In the half-dark she did not realise that I was a foreigner until she got close. Then she leaped up again as if she had been shot and, with alarm on her face, shied away and was about to bolt. I smiled disarmingly, patted the seat beside me and said, ‘Sit down, please.’ After a bit more encouragement, she gingerly resumed her seat and gradually relaxed. Then deciding that I was innocuous, she began trying to talk to me and, smiling and laughing, was very affable.

  The rest of the people on the bus, who seemed to belong to an ethnic minority group, were also very friendly. There was no conductor just a lot of self-appointed helpers and an enormous amount of baggage. The colossal lumpy bales tied up in hessian were packed all the way down the aisle, and across the back and front of the bus so that from where I sat in the second seat I could see nothing, not even the driver.

  The old heap of a bus took off, the interior light went out, and we rattled slowly along through the pitch black countryside. My friendly neighbour, who was the only fat woman I saw in China, went to sleep with her head resting firmly on my shoulder and her hair mingling with mine. I hoped that nothing was ambling across this bridge from her to me. She emitted a strong smell of soap, which, when someone you don’t know is sleeping on top of you, is reassuring. A few days later in Vietnam, however, I discovered that it was possibly only her clothes that gave off the strong carbolic smell and that it did not necessarily extend to her hair. My head started to itch and I realised that some of her livestock had been transferred to me. I rushed to the chemist to get something lethal to head lice. I looked up the word for them in my Vietnamese phrasebook, but the scholarly Vietnamese gentleman who had written that book had not envisaged its being used by low life who harboured walkies in their hair. In the shop I performed a charade of a flea-bitten tourist. The young girl assistant looked at me aghast, her eyes wide with horror. I hoped it was because I did not look the type for this kind of medicine. Finally we sorted out what I needed and I was washed and cleansed of my impurities.

  For an hour and a half the bus banged along a bumpy track. The only town I had seen since leaving Nanning had been the one where I had changed buses. Apart from that, there had been only tiny villages and now there were not even many of those. Then we came to a military checkpoint miles from anywhere and suddenly my newfound friends, the fickle wretches, abandoned me like rats deserting a sinking ship. It was as though I had suddenly developed the plague. Shouting, ‘Loala! Loala!’ they stumbled over themselves to get as far away from me as possible. My erstwhile good neighbour, who only a minute before had been happily asleep on my shoulder, belted to the back of the bus. They wanted nothing to do with me in a situation where the military was involved. Foreigner might mean trouble out here.

  Three heavily munitioned soldiers got on the bus and body searched all the men. Then they came to me. Two kids who looked about fifteen swung on the end of great big cannon sized sub-machine guns, while a snippy boy with pimples shouted questions at me. I understood nothing. I wanted to shout back, ‘Look, sunshine. I’ve had a long hard day during the course of which I have been an acc
essory to the murder of a buffalo. It is now nine o’clock at night and my bladder is up to my eyebrows, I have no idea where I am, or for that matter where I am going or where I have been and you want to ask me stupid questions.’ But all I did was smile and, as I felt that I had to answer something, I kept repeating the magic word, ‘Dhongxing, Dhongxing’ like a mantra.

  The soldiers pointed to the pile of baggage. I presumed they were asking which was mine, so I indicated it. While they examined my bags, I wondered if this was the Vietnamese border. I hoped not. I wouldn’t be allowed to pass through two days before the date on my entry visa, and there was no town nearby where I could stay.

  It turned out that we were only at a Chinese military check post. There was insurrection in these parts, as well as much smuggling, and the soldiers had been looking for arms. We could have had bazookas, tanks, bodies, anything, in the massive bundles that they had failed to inspect. A little later these mysterious bales were dropped off in a village, being extracted from the bus only after much sweating effort.

  By the time the bus stopped at what seemed to be the end of the road, my former fickle friends were now my chums again. Three beaming women helped me off the bus and trundled my bags across the road to what looked like a fairly upmarket establishment for way out here in the wilds. From the outside I wondered what I was stumbling into. Perhaps I had come to a brothel, or at least a nightclub. Next to the main entrance several well painted ladies hung around a very dark doorway from which loud music issued forth invitingly. The big red characters of the sign on top of the building could have said anything, disco, house of ill repute, hotel. But I figured that as my friends from the bus had steered me this way, it was probably safe.

  I was halfway up the long flight of steps that led to the entrance when a small laughing man rushed down to greet me. He seemed overjoyed to see me – the only time I was welcomed in China was the last place I visited. The man grabbed my bag, shunted me up the steps and in the door and announced me, shouting what seemed to be, ‘Look what I have got. A foreigner!’