Author's Note: 2000
China was the first of my 'big' trips, the one that really got me hooked on World travel. I went in 1992 and it was one of the most fascinating - and most alien - places I had ever been.
It was also the first place I visited that I tried to write about when I returned, and it shows. True I've done some editorial work on the text that follows but it is still rather disjointed and weak compared to things I've written since. I know the narrative doesn't doesn't flow very well. I know that there are almost as many places where I've given too much information as there are where I've given too little.
It's too long ago now though. My memory, even aided by the photographs, isn't up to reconstructing it.
Even apart from that it isn't current. I've spoken to people who have travelled to China much more recently and their experiences are at odds with mine. China it seems is a much changed place nowadays.
Chapter 1: Jet Lagged in Beijing
By the time I touched down on the runway at Beijing I was already exhausted. Sometimes I do manage to sleep when I'm flying but I never find it very restful. This time I hadn't slept at all. I had watched the four in flight movies - two of them in Chinese - and eaten six airline meals. I had stared out of the windows at the clouds that separated me from Mongolia. I hadn't however slept since leaving the warmth of my own bed back in Wolverhampton. That seemed a very long time ago.
I had been reasonably alert seven hours into my journey when I had spotted most of my party at Gatwick. I had still been capable of functioning when I picked out several more in our surreal stopover at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. That had been full of identically moustachioed men in uniforms from a nineteen sixties episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. They all looked very sinister and the casual way they held their machine guns as if they would feel naked without them hadn't inspired me with confidence in either their sanity or their restraint.
When we disembarked at Beijing I was therefore able to spot the nucleus of our group as formed around the tour leader. On the aeroplane I had been asked to fill in a landing card with a ridiculous amount of information, every disease I had ever had, how much money I was taking into the country, what electrical goods I was carrying, what I did for a living. I'd had to fudge the last one a bit. What I did for a living was working in the computer department for a police force and when I'd proposed to take a holiday in China I'd discovered we had rules about it. To travel to a communist country I had to get permission and be briefed on what I should and shouldn't do while I was there. I had expected some serious policeman to give me a list of stern warnings. In the event a rather dour chap in a suit had asked me where I was going and when and then told me not to get involved in anything illegal and try to avoid telling anyone I worked for the Police. He'd then told me to have a good time and ushered me out of his office. The restriction on telling anyone who I worked for was no great problem. When you work as a civilian for the police it's something you habitually lie about anyway as an instinctive attempt not to lose either your credibility or your friends.
So on my landing card I had written the vague 'Civil Servant' rather than anything more specific.
After the formalities on the plane I had been expecting it to be difficult to get into the country. It wasn't. Apart from having to temporarily surrender our passports and go through the gate in the same order that we were listed on our Group Visa there was surprisingly little formality and it was only a few minutes before we were in China.
One of the problems of travelling by air is that your first and most lasting impression of a new country is of its airport which is hardly the place to see a country at its best. The Beijing airport was a particularly fine example of what is wrong with airports. It created for me a first impression of China as a large dirty grey concrete building site littered with rubble and debris. It was not the most auspicious start.
There are other things that strike the visitor to China in general and Beijing in particular within moments of arrival. For a start there is the thirst which clamps like a vice around your throat before you are out of the arrivals lounge. The air is so dry and dusty that your tongue immediately takes on the texture of a piece of emery paper. This atmosphere must contribute in part to the second thing, which is the amount of coughing and spitting that goes on among the Chinese. To a westerner it is very disconcerting to see everyone from teenage girls to little old men hacking up a mouthful of phlegm and expectorating with gusto into the gutter. In Beijing anyone who fails to learn quickly the necessity for treading carefully is doomed to spend his time ungluing the soles of his shoes from the sticky mess on the pavement.
Much later, upon my return I mentioned this to a Chinese friend who replied
"Ah, yes. Very true. But have you considered how disgusting they think it is to blow your nose into a piece of rag and stick it back in your pocket."
I hadn't and quite frankly I didn't want to, but he had a point.
We all gathered around on the car park, making small talk and forming into small groups that for the most part would fragment and reform into more congenial groups as we got to know each other better during the two weeks.
The procedure, it was explained, was that we would part company with our luggage which would meet us at the hotel. The only explanation offered was 'because that's the way the Chinese do things'. The exact meaning of the phrase would not become apparent until we left Beijing and went on to Xi-An and even more emphatically underlined in Guilin. We all piled into our bus for the forty minute drive to downtown Beijing. I sat next to a cheerful bearded chap who introduced himself somnambulisticly as Andy. He appeared to be even more jet lagged than I felt. All around the bus people were in a similar state. The conversations were muted and desultory.
The drive into the city was, in spite of our exhaustion, pretty fascinating. The pervading impression was one of greyness. Grey roads cut through grey landscapes and between grey buildings. Grey Chinese in grey uniforms worked in gangs shovelling heaps of grey dust. We drove into a city through some of the most depressing urban landscape I have ever seen.
The rows upon rows of state owned apartment blocks looked more like grim multi-storey prisons than anywhere anyone might want to live. They had an indefinable cheerlessness about them, a greyness of the spirit to match they greyness of the bricks from which they were built.
Our National Guide was Robert Lau. He looked about fourteen but as I found it impossible to judge the ages of anyone vaguely oriental he was probably in his late twenties or even his thirties. He seemed pleasant enough in a distant and wary fashion as if he wanted to be friends but didn't quite trust us. As we drove past the ugly eyesores of the apartments he told us that they were government built and allocated but nothing more. When we had left Beijing a few days later he opened up and described the tiny poorly equipped apartments themselves in quite disparaging terms. By then he had come to know us a little better and it was also noticeable that the greater the distance between him and the capitol the more willing he was to be himself and not simply spout the official party line. At the moment though his reticence seemed a little odd. Coming from a culture where everyone from 'the bloke in the pub' to stand-up comedians on National Television feel that they have not just the right but the duty to criticise the government, it's hard for us to understand a culture where that doesn't happen, where it is dangerous to express critical views. When I realised that it was still only three years since Tiananmen Square it became much more easier to understand.
We left the outskirts and came into the centre and were suddenly in an area that was closer to the feel of a European City, although still enough of an alien flavour to be disorienting. Here we saw for the first time the other thing that cannot fail to strike visitors to China - bicycles. For the careless pedestrian they may well strike him rather more literally than he would like. Coming over a road bridge we turned to the left sweeping round onto the slip for the main road below us and there, completely filling our field of vision were bikes, not just a few bikes but thousands upon thousands of them. Everyone in China, it seems has at least one bike and most people have several. Throughout the trip I saw increasingly bizarre loads being carried by bicycle, rolls of linoleum, baskets of chickens, even a three piece suite on a flat-bed tricycle. We weaved through the streets towards our hotel, dodging these ramshackle vehicles with their unusual loads. On the back of one such tricycle two men were sitting on ordinary chairs playing cards while a woman pedalled away furiously at the front.
We arrived at our hotel which was fairly impressive from the outside. Inside it was incredible. Walking into the air-conditioned, cool and above all dust-free atmosphere was one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life. We entered through the automatic doors and rode a short escalator into the lobby. I had never seen anything quite like it. It was an enormous open space, easily large enough to simultaneously stage a couple of five-a-side football matches and still accommodate a decent size crowd of spectators. A Chinese string quartet were playing selections from Mozart in one corner. In two of the others polystyrene models of the Coliseum and the Arc de Triomphe faced inwards towards a large blue tadpole shaped fountain. The final corner had a glass elevator that ascended to the tenth floor. We were registered with speed and efficiency and told to reassemble in the lobby in forty five minutes to go first to lunch and then on to the Temple of Heaven. I wanted to go to bed, to recover from my journey, but apparently that wasn't allowed. The lunch and the sightseeing were compulsory. Instead I went to my tenth floor room and held my head under the shower for five minutes to wake me up. That done I naturally started by examining everything and gazing out of the window. It was a room that easily equalled the standards of the best European hotels that I had ever stayed in, and the view was little different from the skyline of any modern city. My luggage arrived while I was soaking my head and I had soon showered properly and changed so that by the time I drifted back into that unbelievable lobby I was feeling a little fresher and cleaner although I wouldn't be getting what I really wanted - peace, quiet and a good night's rest -for some time yet.
Lunch was the first of our many visits to a 'local restaurant'. When visiting China on an organised tour you are expected to eat as a group and in places of the Chinese International Tourist Service's choosing. It is possible with a little effort to persuade them to let you off the leash to do your own thing but they prefer the majority of the party to follow their planned itinerary. Over the two weeks the standard of their chosen restaurants, which were clearly mostly for tourists, was variable. In that first one no-one was particularly hungry as six airline meals in fourteen hours will destroy the most demanding appetite. The place itself reminded me of a school dining room and apparently was in the embassy quarter and much used by embassy staff. The food was fine apart from including my first taste of Tofu, the ubiquitous bean curd that was in every single meal I ate in China. If it had been my choice it would have been my last taste of it. It has the consistency of solidified fat and the taste of second hand chewing gum and is quite probably the worst food in the world. I know that for a billion people it's a staple component of their diet and that even in the west there are many otherwise rational people who love the filthy stuff but I'm not one of them. The worst thing about it is how adept the Chinese are at disguising it as something else. The succulent looking piece of steak that you spend ten minutes manoeuvring to your mouth with chopsticks suddenly metamorphosises into bean curd as you bite into it and makes you regret the effort involved. If only their skill extended to disguising the texture and taste as well it wouldn't be so bad. Nevertheless, in spite of loathing it I ate it with as much grace as I could muster, good manners winning out over the urge to gag at every mouthful.
One or two people did grumble about the food which I put down to no more than jet-lag irritability. Little did I realise that such petty griping about food was to become a common theme from certain parties. Then the meal was over and it was time to start seeing things. Temple of Heaven here we come.
I remember being at Tiantan Park and the Temple of Heaven, just about. Specifically I remember setting out from the restaurant and driving around three sides of a large arid area filled with scrubby little trees. After that my mind is blank on the subject. Thirty hours without sleep had finally taken it's toll. I must have been there. I have photographs to prove it so I must also have been capable of operating a camera but it has gone from my memory. I suspect it never actually entered my memory, by-passing the long term storage as my body operated on auto-pilot. Anything I could write about the Temple of Heaven would regurgitated from the guide books and as much a lie as if I hadn't been there at all.
To say that the details of the rest of the day are fuzzy would be the grandest of understatements. I know we had 'dinner at a local restaurant' and I recall vaguely making a resolution that never in my life would I again try to use chopsticks while jet-lagged. This latter memory is accompanied by a vivid but random image of an oiled cashew escaping my grasp at high velocity and almost taking out the eye of a diner at the next table.
When we returned to our own hotel, the Tianlun Dynasty, I was astonished to find it was only eight O'clock. In China dinner is almost always taken early and everything is closed by about eight so that there is little choice but a string of early nights. That would have suited me perfectly except that I had reached the stage of over tiredness where muscles refused to stop twitching and my brain refused to shut down. I anaesthetised myself with two bottles of beer in the bar and went up. The last of my haphazard collection of memories of the day is looking into the mirror and wondering who the ninety five year old stranger staring back at me could be. It was a puzzle that eluded me. Somehow I managed to undress and climb into bed and then there was merciful oblivion.
