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Last week was a welcome break. Not that I needed the week holiday, sandwiched between the end of school semester and summer camp, for any kind of recharge of the teaching batteries, far from it. The last couple months have been cruisy. More a chance to get out of the city and escape the everyday’s-a-Friday-when-you’re-a-flaky-laowai-teacher hedonism bubble. Nearly didn’t do it - the prospect of another easy week in Chengdu - to complement the previous 12 - nearly swung it. But myself and Eva, ex-co-employee of the Evil Empire, made our way to the train station late Sunday night. Train stations, considering the immense city populations, are always thriving, constant rushes for departures, swathes of people settled outside on mats, or squatting down, passing the time with newspapers and dojitsu, hours and hours at a time, cabs rushing in and out, and the inevitable calls of the hawker.

The guy next to me in this net cafe keeps drawing all of his phlegm up through his nasal passages and just unloading it on the floor. Doesn’t bother me on the street, but when its in this proximity, I can hear every fricative scrape along the canal, and its spattering an inch from my be-sandaled feet. The worst though is the noodle eating - first of all the tumorous, invasive suck then the wet slap of the lips as it is ingested - real personal bugbear. You’re allowed the occasional I-hate-China moment for sanity’s sake.

Chinese trains have 4 classes, at the top, soft sleeper (your own bed in a plush compartment), hard sleeper (a bed in a slightly more public arena), soft seat (luxurious sitting conditions) and hard seat. We had taken hard seat option, and saved ourselves 100 kwai from the next option up, 200 from the next etc. Not a typical laowai option though, a fact confirmed when we bustled onto the carriage with a minute to spare and every eye was trained on us. Not the standard western stare, using a newspaper or an itchy face as a subtle pretext, but full on gaze, people turning their entire body 180 degrees, others at the back of the carriage standing to achieve the view… Full stares back home, especially from strangers are perceived as confrontation, but that is because there is a greater emphasis on the individual’s private and inviolable space. Strangely, I have been here long enough for this not to be an issue, indeed have experienced it enough and in such generally good curious faith that it is in fact amusing. Others actively thrive on this reaction, being someone here when you’re no-one at home (cue snide replies),the funniest example of this was a poster on an ESL site who claimed he loved China because when he walked down the street he felt like a Beatle. Sino-laowai relationships vary immensely in type and always commence with a palpable sense of mutual distance. Although racism is exactly the correct word to use, in that people treat each other differently according to race, it has so many extra negative connotations that its not worth using. Its an obvious legacy of the country’s intensely hermetic status during its modern life-span, save for the last 10 years when it has dynamically started to open up. Deeply ingrained cultural values cannot be so quickly changed though, despite any number of McDonalds or KFCs that proliferate in the city centre. Mind you Coldplay is playing in the internet cafe right now. In the first 2 months I took on a proprietary attitude to all things British things out here, and for the first time in my life I felt British and would present myself as such - yet the longer I’m isolated and away from the cultural current the events that seems so huge on the Times webpage (i.e. Live Eight) are now just trifling.

The train journey was enjoyable for the first 6 or 7 hours, rounds of dojitsu, some beers and a mutual Chinese / English lesson with a group of students. The dead of night was nightmarish - everyone asleep or napping, while I was confined in the seat, legs bent and twisted. Thankfully the onset of morning just about beat the onset of dementia. Chongqing, my first experience of a major Chinese city outside of Chengdu, made me immensely glad I had chosen to teach where I did. It was everything that Chengdu wasn’t - rushed, aggressive, dirty, muddled and fairly ugly. Chengdu lies on a flat river-plain, and this has allowed it to accommodate rapid growth in a systematic, tolerable and even spacious fashion. Chongqing sprawls over violently undulating hills, which is the basis for its higgledy-piggledy high-rise jumble. The traffic is also far heavier, as the severity of the landscape does not permit bikes or walking as means of transport. Traffic is a dirty word in Chengdu, and the roads flow with impressive ease (also due in part to the large proportion of amateur rally drivers). Roads in Chongqing are jammed, buses overflow, and there is a massively aggressive use of the horn. Horns are obvious in Chengdu as well, but never heard repeatedly as in the aggressive-frustrated frame of mind discernible in Chongqing. Chengdu horns are used variously as mild warnings to pedestrians and other vehicles, as turning signals, by taxis hawking passengers, out of recognition of one another. Barely ever in irritation. The only time horns aggravate in Chengdu is at the immensely competitive jam of the central bus station, where the vociferous long-distance bus horns deafen the taxis that deafen the monotone beep of the electric scooters that deafen the tinkle of the 3 wheel pedicabs that deafen the various yells and entreaties.

Eva and I decided to spend a couple of hours exploring on foot. Chongqing is one of the 3 Chinese furnaces legendary for their scorching climate. Considering the early morning bustle, the intense heat and humidity and the misfortune of choosing a route that ascended almost constantly for an hour, my T-shirt became streaked with ragged whites, as my body-salts were seeping out rapidly. As it was the first of only 3 change of clothes, and less than 24 hours into a 5 day trip, I would have to persist and explain it as tie-dye. We chanced upon Chongqing’s coolest feature Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! and took it for a few stops to check out the city panorama. We then met Sergio’s girlfriend, Gloria, a Chongqing native, who took us for lunch, booked our 3 gorges trip, sent us off in the direction of the most banal park I have ever seen and then advised us the wrong side of the road for us to catch a bus to the docks. In a stunning display of locals rallying around the hapless roundeye, 3 individuals proceeded to help us to our destination. None could speak Yin-Yu but my limited Chinese and of course the LP put our point across; they stared back pitifully, and from 2 separate buses, a taipo (old Chinese woman) guided us 15 minutes to the correct stop, while an old fella phoned up a bilingual friend to speak to me on his mobile.

We stocked up with noodles, and then decided on a pre-launch KFC. This would have immense repercussions.

Pretty boring docks. People were swimming in the brown, viscous filth of the Yangtze. Some Chinese tourists requested photos with whitey, a trend that would continue for the next 5 days. We boarded our boat via an incredibly pointless cable car / pulley system that cut out perhaps 50 steps. Eva was incensed, I bemused; although only 2 kwai, it was a foretaste of a trip that would drain patches of money in various ulterior fashions (par for tourist attractions everywhere though, I think). We boarded our 6 bed, 4th class dorm on the bottom floor of the boat. We would only be 4 however, as a Chinese couple immediately began to complain. I couldn’t discern if it was a laowai complaint or some other thing, but suited me fine. I suspected that on this immense boat we would be the only honkies, but we met a Swedish couple, and also became aware of 2 Americans in first class. We set off, and soon the tranquility of a cruise downriver, fresh air and the dark, silent night that drew in confirmed the decision to get out of the city as a correct one.

The next day and a half the boat would stop off at a range of temples, pagodas as we were cruising downriver. Typical fare for the Chinese tourist, but seeming to us like a bit of a dirge now after constant exposure. Our guide shepherded us around, replete with little yellow flag and mini-megaphone spouting incomprehensible Chinese.

The KFC decision was biting us on the ar*e. The cruise was a little more than expected, but we were told that we would have to get a bus from one-horse Yichan to big-time Wuhan (expensive at 100 kwai, and a little bit of a scam - why stop at a pokey town like Yichan when you can continue downriver?) and the train home from Wuhan was also far more than expected. I worked out that I had 7 kwai spare for non-essentials over the next 3 or 4 days. maybe 50 pence. So we staved off the persistent rants of our tour guide to buy a bus ticket there and then, pretty sure that we were being scammed, even though some of our Chinese companions had already bought tickets at this full price. A little risky. We held tight on the budget for the first few days, eating instant noodles and bread we had bought at the market and filling thermal flasks with boiling hot water, leaving the cap off and waiting 12 hours to cool a little. But the heat and the increasingly stinky cabin broke us (going nuts on a sub-tropical cruise in Asia? Been done.) and we started cutting into Eva’s reserve with ice cold beers, cheap at 3 kwai, although looking at the labels we were unsure if they had been fermenting in a bathtub for the last week.

The laowai effect came into play. Deciding to sit out on deck, a Chinese woman began interrogating us, which we followed up with the now-standard ting bu dong! she ran back with a ticket, and worked out that to sit out on deck you needed a ticket, and as we were laowai, we must have bought one with our immense bank balances and just lost it. Thanks again! It gave me an image of the Titanic, being locked below deck as the ship sinks, playing violins and jigging, just plain content being the most 2 dimensional Irish stereotype in movie history.

The day of the gorges followed, first at 5 in the morning, bruised blues and purples slowly broke into softer greys, the second gorge at lunch time, a mini-cruise down the little three gorges, then the third in the late afternoon. All impressive stuff (all the more if the level hadn’t risen by 180 metres) but by the third gorge we were a little engorged and slept through, save for the flicker of Eva’s eyes as he glanced through the thin strip of the cabin window and pronounced it green and hilly, pretty much the same.

Things were getting truly filthy. The days were immensely hot, and any walking at our stop off points exacerbated this. Thankfully our female cabinmate had incense sticks which she lit and left on the air conditioner to disguise the rank odour. Unfortunately, her other half was a real noodle-shlurper and had also been consistently stubbing cigarettes out in the pool of water that had seeped in, and was ebbing back and forth over the floor. One of our Swedish friends had developed a nasty looking rash at sporadic points over his torso. I’d also seen a cockroach crawling about.

We came to the ultra controversial 3 Gorges Dam project, a bold, ultra-modern move to invigorate the farming economy of the Chinese interior, or dangerous, slipshod construction that was ruining the world’s most impressive river cruise by raising the water level so much? Plenty of time to ponder this, as it took perhaps 8 hours to pass through the various locks. Everyone was attentive at the comings and goings of the first pass, but it waned until just about everyone had turned in by the third. Dusk had encroached as we waited at the entrance to the dam proper, and the bleak, imposing high grey walls mottled black, the intermittent fiery discharges, the slow, foreboding operation of the gates, the elevation and single point intensity of the lights, and the creaks and groans weren’t so much reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, but moreso the industrial wastelands of Bladerunner or the final scene of Full Metal Jacket.

Eva noted that the first lock was not fully water-tight.

We came to Yichan, and had the night prior been offered the bus ticket at a reduced price. Some money to play with. The bus to Wuhan was utterly crowded. A Chinese woman had been so offended after the five minutes that I had sat next to her that she negotiated with an elderly chap to swap, who after the ordeal of a further five minutes swapped with a middle aged man. Though uncomfortable, I entertained him with my limited Chinese, and he in turn gave me a lesson.

Wuhan came not too soon though. Into another furnace. Horror of horrors - no sleeper tickets left at the station so the immensely sharp, unhelpful ticket clerk said, so hard seat it would have to be. Though horrified at the prospect of a 17 hour hard seat journey, we would at least have an unexpected sum of money to play with before our afternoon departure. We checked our bags and headed to the centre, a Maccers breakfast with our newly released funds. A taxi to the famous yellow tower park, where we took a picture of the tower, but decided against paying to enter the park, rock formation, pond, mini-temple, table, old men playing mah jong, all the same sh*t. We passed the docks, where yet again people were swimming in the unseemly brown river. While there I was caught in the middle of some turf wars. I finished my bottle of Sprite, a young boy demanded that he take it, but then a toothless old tramp wandered into the fray, and imposed himself on the tense bottle negotiations. I gave it to the tramp cos he smelled like he needed it more, though the kid looked murderous. Then a bus to a museum on the outskirts (passing by the charmingly titled Wanka store, never found out what it sold) and free entry as we assimilated into a tour group.

As we made our way back to the train station in the North West, provisions were hastily bought (including the Oreo imitation cookies interestingly named Olinos - Pandemic Cookies‘ and they tasted that way too), and Eva took umbrage at a kid who had wordlessly followed us for 20 minutes:

Eva - Why are you following us?
Kid - I am not following, I am a shy boy!
Eva - Go away!

5 minutes early. Then the madness would begin. We couldn’t find the departure gate, showed a steward the ticket, who responded half-amused, half-bothered to the sight of it. We were taken to the ticket desk where one of the sole English speakers explained that it was a ticket for the station in the south-east of the city. No way could we get there in 5 minutes. We had been sold a ticket for a different train station, which is unexpected in China, as you usually can only buy a ticket for a train from the station which it departs. Absolutely no mention of this was made by either the English-speaking ticket clerk, nor the person who we had left our baggage with, and the English name of the station was not printed on the ticket. The local aid that we found so readily in Chongqing was not so forthcoming here.

Then the aftermath, aggravated by the massive hoo-midity. The shift manager was brought out. The longer we listed our grievances the wider he extended a grin that just made you want to punch it until your arm wore down to your elbow. It drew a large audience, as any laowai show invariably does, and a ruckus was nearly sparked by a guy who left the back of his queue hitched over my shoulder and started ranting about laowai having preferential treatment - considering the obstinacy we were encountering, hardly true. He conceded that he could secure us a berth on the following day’s train, but we would have to stand for the 17 hours - No. The train the day after would arrive too late for our Sunday lessons, so that was not an option, as we not only wanted to avoid the late fine, but more importantly did not want to feel the company had one up on us and something to exploit. So we tried making contingency plans. We caught a taxi across to the correct train station (which frustratingly we had been very near earlier in the day) and on the way dropped in at the long distance bus station. I figured that we would never find a bus to transport us across a third of China, but it was worth a go; but, sweet Christmas, they had one, for only 200 kwai, leaving in 20 minutes. Untrammeled relief. We went to board showing our tickets, but another problem - we were informed that the bus was going to Chengzhou, not Chengdu, a paltry 200 miles away. A relatively painless refund this time. Money was becoming an issue, as again we had overspent and had not anticipated staying another night in Wuhan, so we had to walk to the train station. The talk was of flying back to Chengdu, but that would run to a quarter of a months salary. Carrying our travel bags and rucksacks, sweat was forming in great patches as we strode agitatedly to the train station. All the while, Chinese people were behaving as you should in the furnace, shirtless, languid, fanning, cards, cold beer, staring at the inhumanely brisk, shimmering laowai. But we did buy a ticket for the next day…the grinner was lying.

We needed cheap accommodation now, so I wandered outside the arrivals section of the train station muttering Hotel! in Chinese, until we were taken to a place directly opposite. I haggled for 25 kwai each, a bargain I thought. Then we saw the room. Vast holes in the skirting board, peeling paint, brown trails stretching across the wall, and gnarled, deeply polluted carpet. Still. We talked of making the most of the extra night in Wuhan, but a beautifully cold shower was followed by lying on the bed and sweet oblivion.

Until a nightmarish phantasm. I stirred to consciousness as 5 sharp jabs dug into my shoulder, shifted it slightly in a sleepy reaction of unknowing irritation, then a patter of steps as the rat excitedly scampered over my face in the darkness. I sat up screaming, I will admit. It was real, though Eva mooted that it was just a natural outcome of the frenzy that the day had produced. I picked up my trainer, found the largest entry exit point in the skirting board and jammed it in as far as it would go.

In the morning we found that evolution was progressing apace around the environs of the skirting board. A scuttling rusty coloured thing with antennae twice the length of its body and with squat hind legs that suggested instant attack was circling my bag. The family of roaches had also seemed to accompany us from the cruise.

Enough money for some supplies, and tempting the God of Chance, a further fingah-lickin lunch. Our train left on time, we were on it, and it arrived on time. We occupied the time with dojitsu, and got smashed with a Chinese guy who produced a bottle of baijio, and probably lost all the face he may have gained by drinking with the laowai by becoming Flank the Tank and just plain acting crazy, nutty gestures, spilling baijio all over the cabin and just shaking our hands and heaping (unwarranted) praise on us for our Chinese skills. We later found out that he was a major publisher in Chengdu and owned a range of bookstores. Water had run low quickly, and the last few hours were spent horribly cottonmouthed.

The taxi on the way home was massively delayed by construction. A fitting full stop to a trip that often resembled an oriental sequel to Trains, Planes and Automobiles.

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