"What's my cat gonna do now?"

NOVEMBER 12, 2007: "What's my cat gonna do now? He's not gonna know whether to eat, shit, piss or bake!" Photos Ningxia, Shaanxi (Xi'an)

Xi'an, mega-city of squeaky clean pavements, atrocious air and hordes of foreigners. The above quote was the centrepiece of a night-making backpacker altercation between two drunken pommy dingbats and an grey-headed, moustachioed American whose name's not being Randy surely stretches the fabric of time and space.

The Xi'an backpackers charges the same price for one bed in a massive dorm as we were paying for an en-suite room in a small hotel. But its bar food and drinks were cheap. Randy (we'll be calling him that for entropy's sake), Randy was loud and loose. We'd seen him start drinking while we had lunch and when we returned to hit the booze 8 hours later he was exactly as we'd left him, prowling around, loudly playing games of pool against himself. So we settled in on some couches to watch him embarass the fat, intelligent American sitting behind us. This was providing good, cheap light entertainment - until suddenly from the direction of the stairs came a chaotic crunching, dragging noise along with the unmistakable sound of whooping, and in crashed these two clueless poms, laden with tattered bags. As they reached the pool table the long, long sports bag one of them was carrying tore open completely, and a torrent of various grainlike products poured out onto the floor. CDs, french sticks, a large metal bowl and various other flotsam followed. The poms giggled for about 10 seconds and then stopped. Randy was silent, but rapidly turning a discernable purple. The stuff was his - why the poms had been carrying it i don't know. Eventually he spoke. "You guys...you guys are my friends, and i love ya, but you really don't know how.......i'm pissed," he said, addressing his luggage strewn across the floor. He repeated this several times, louder each time, raising his head slowly until he was facing the two oafs, who could only bleat piteously, "i'm sor-rayy, sair-riously."

"You're gonna pay," boomed Randy, having dropped the "i love you" and "my friends" references on the second and third repetitions respectively.

The clearly disturbed Chinese staff attempted to drown interest in the sideshow by turning the music up full, but the PA system was no match for the roar of a wounded Randy. His anger increased steadily and before long he was rampaging after one of the poms, who fled hilariously, skipping around the room, hurdling low walls and tables like a gazelle being chased by a lion. As Randy reached his tattered sports bag, he stopped, stooped, picked it up and slowly poured the remaining contents (about twice what had already come out) on to the floor. "Come and take a look at this!" he shouted at the gazelle, who was watching from the temporary safety of the next room. The gazelle shook its head. "You have GOT to come and take a look at this!" pleaded Randy. "I got cat litter in the cat bowl, i got brownie mix mixed up with cat food...what's my cat gonna do now?" he demanded, looking around at everyone in the room. "He's not gonna know whether to eat, shit, piss or bake!"

"No, you're gonna pay," Randy refrained, moving towards the gazelle, who began another loop of the room. "I've got a 10pm train, and YOU GUYS are gonna go to the bank and get me 600RMB for this stuff." The poms weren't keen. It went on for some time, during which Randy kept increasing the amount and the poms could only respond that they would "wark e owwt". After about 15 minutes Randy was demanding 1000RMB. And all of a sudden, the poms were going...apparently to withdraw money. The intelligent fat American, who the whole time had looked ready to curl up into a tight, wobbly ball of shame, took the opportunity to slink out (slink is the wrong word), and the atmosphere returned to one of relative calm. But before long Randy was back in the spotlight, shouting down the phone. Apparently the poms had done a runner on him, gambling that he would catch his train despite not having his invaluable haul of cat products. This time, however, Randy kept his cool. He calmly walked into the neighbouring room and, in full view of all the staff and customers, picked up two two girls' handbags and stuffed them into his (last remaining) intact bag. The poms' Chinese girlfriends' bags, he explained, and walked out.

Ahh whitey. And for all he does to disgrace himself, the caucasian and human races, the kinder the city of Xi'an is to him. Clubs, fast food, western restaurants, supermarkets, bars, tourist attractions, translators, signs in English - Xi'an is the most westernised place i've been to in China, including Beijing. We've been staying in this awesome "village" - it's been consumed by the city and is now five to six storeys high but the village vibe somehow remains in the blade-thin alleyways. There's an outdoor (cooked) food market that rumbles 24hrs right outside our door.


But, so predictably, Xi'an not exactly as kind to its locals. On Tuesday this 10-storey scaffold collapsed onto a usually-busy sidewalk. It apparently only injured three workmen, although one guy told me it killed "quite a few" people...as long as those people were workers and not passers-by that's possible. (Passers-by would very likely be rich, workmen poor.) Unbelievably, you heard it first here - there've been no (English) news reports about it so far. A few hours later the workmen were slaving away clearing up the mess. Here's a place, Joe McDonald, where you're actually needed! Your wobbly, rolling gait and figure would fit right in here, too, among the hordes of wobbly rollers. For here in "communist" China, it appears class conflict is strong - a rich Chinese dude at the backpackers bar told us he didn't know or care to know anything about the incident only 400m down the road "because in China the rich don't care about the poor and the poor don't care about the rich". As Boxxy rightly points out, that's precisely the attitude behind the appalling safety standards that lead to thousands of horrific work deaths each year. Just a couple of examples of massacres (30+ dead) in the last six months: death by molten aluminium, roasted alive in a factory fire, gassed, incinerated or buried alive in coal mine.

So we're in Shaanxi Province now, only 2 more after this. It's statistically poorer than Ningxia, though richer than Gansu, but this includes Xi'an, and Xi'an is A.) very rich and B.) contains, with its 8 million, more than 20% of the province's population:



And momma, do they lerrrve the Walmart in Xi'an.


It's got surely the best maintained city wall in the world, 12 metres high and about 12km long, though that doesn't seem to help the people's relatively sombre disposition.




The same idea seems to have been attempted with the Great Wall where it reaches the Yellow River just outside Yinchuan in Ningxia. The execution, however...


Ningxia, like Gansu before it, left its worst until last. The last four days of riding were nothing less than terrifying. The road was home to an almost constant stream of massive quarry trucks that are all of half the road wide. It had no emergency stop lane, so whenever there was traffic going in both directions (which was about 40% of the time), we had to either slide off the road or stop completely.

On the second day out of Yinchuan, after 13km of steep up-and-down (and a return of the associated teleport effect), we came upon Shui Dong Gou ("Water Cavity Gully"), a site of archaeological discoveries like cave man tools, ancient animal bones and a Ming Dynasty army labyrinth. This was cool, especially the labyrinth, so we thought we'd take a look for about half an hour. Unfortunately we didn't factor in that "Water Cavity Gully" is in fact a gorge and, as such, doesn't have many exits. Once we bought the ticket we were locked in for a two-hour hike/boat/donkey ride. It was 5pm when we left, without a hope of getting to our destination and only a vague hope of getting to a place to stay at all. Sure enough it got dark. But this didn't mean any fewer trucks. A desperately bad time ensued, first being scared shitless that the trucks wouldn't see us, then walking the last 4km in pitch dark. Worse still, it was a steep downhill slope that we could've cruised down had we been an hour earlier. Instead we had to restrain the bikes as we walked, stopping to turn and watch as each mega-truck came past.

The following day on the same road, high winds took to trying to blow us into the path of the oncoming trucks. It was blatantly too dangerous so we jumped on the back of a truck to the next major road, which had a stopping (ie bicycle) lane...for about 80 metres. Then back to sharing the road with the quarry trucks. Heckling the truck drivers for being so "soft and gay" as to drive trucks instead of cycling probably got us through the day. Boxxy got into the spirit, heckling some kind of highway patrol (i didn't think of this) for their "soft and gay" highway.


But Ningxia did at least drop us a final bone, with two Great Walls (Ming and Qing) running parallel for about 50km. The Ming Wall (older) is mainly gone, but its watchtowers remain. This was one of them.