Tianjin: the sea can have it

DECEMBER 22, 2007: We reached the end of the wall with cash supplies alarmingly low but with an ever-expanding haul of Chinese products "to fall back on".

Most valuable among these were the vehicles: a near-new 3-wheeled peasant truck still under warranty and two fancy brand-name bicycles.

The former, being of terrible quality and almost certainly illegal in Australia, we decided to sell. The latter would be worth much more in Australia but were too big to be sent in the post. The solution: in one last heroic feat, our little 'trerrck' would carry the bikes down to the port to be sent by sea container. The following morning we set out for the port city of Tianjin, about 300km away.

Police regulations intended to force foreigners like us to stay in rip-off hotels ("For your own safety," went the claim) meant no decent, clean, inexpensive, law-abiding accommodation provider would accept us near the end of the Wall. Which forced us underground and into the unclean, unsafe, un-law abiding rat hole pictured above. I awoke unusually early and the urge to get out combined with some wishful mathematics brought me to the conclusion that if we left by 8 we could get to Tianjin by 3 that day.

The weather was still freezing and the highway wretched despite being relatively new. I'd like to know whose idea it was to spend millions on making a highway out of poured concrete. At nearly every intersection and through every town and village the road was literally crumbling at the joins. I'm not joking, every car that passed over the crumbling joins caused more pieces to crumble off, resulting in a highway as bumpy or bumpier than the average outback earth road - bumpy with harsh, jagged, missing-pieces type bumps. And what about constructing it? Easy, you know, just like driveways in Australia - mark each section with even pieces of wood, pour the concrete, spend hours smoothing it out and making pretty patterns - except literally 4000 times longer. I can't understand. Maybe the government was sitting on a stockpile of cement and dumped it on this highway for the sake of some friendly local cement plant bosses, i don't know.

If ever a child such as a nephew, niece or cousin asks you where those tiny matchbox trucks come from


tell them once a year the trucks of the world drive upstream for thousands of kilometres to mate and sporn in a huge frenzy next to a highway in northern China. When they complain that you're bullshitting them send them to this page. Lame.

Check out the face-off at a rail crossing. The train was about 2km long and kept everyone waiting for more than 5 minutes. As the queue jumpers piled up on the wrong side of the road, it was clear that the same would be happening on the other side of the crossing. And sure enough..


Either way, by 2 o'clock we'd only covered about 150km, and this was when i learned exactly the meaning of those ubiquitous yellow and red "DO NOT OVERTAKE TURNING VEHICLE" signs on the back of trucks in Australia and other places that aren't China. As in, i knew the principle, but never the reason behind the principle. We were on the outskirts of a medium-sized city and had come upon another very long and rather permanent looking semi-trailer jam. With no time to spare and very little movement from these normally docile beasts of burden, i weaved a course through, utilising a combination of the available roadspace and the footpath. I was steering a course between the footpath and the trucks and noticed ahead the space was about to get thinner. I slowed down to make sure we could squeeze through and we were about half way along the length of a roughly 30m-long semi trailer when i realised his soot-coated indicator lights were flashing. He was turning right, ever so slowly, into a side street i hadn't noticed. The driver, in turn, had apparently not noticed us. With the kerb roughly the same height as the front wheel, the choices were suddenly reduced to: go, fast, and hope he notices you or stop and hope he misses you. With the driver's cab already turning the corner, i chose the latter and held down the horn in the hope he'd know there was a problem. But in China, with the horn so commonplace and so ritually ignored, there is in fact no way to warn other drivers of any such real, urgent problem. He must have been going about 7km/h, but multiply that by the weight of a 30+ metre long truck, and we were smacked up from behind with an unstoppable force and a truly sickening steel-on-steel crash that cried out for those flat Kiwified words, "It's all gone horribly, HORRIBLY wrong!!!".

We were somehow propelled onto the pavement while the semi-trailer continued easing round the corner. While a few heads turned, upon seeing no mangled wreck or corpses, they turned away. But the reality is with a kerb that size we were genuinely lucky not to have bounced off it and been flipped out under the truck's wheels. For all i know, the driver might have seen us and decided not to stop based on the observance that we were just worthless peasants. It really could have gone that horribly wrong. As it was, we drove away, the 'trerrck' with a small dent and the goose with some whiplash.

We were only almost killed one other time during this carefree, 11-hour soujourn, when, on a narrow stretch of road marked "no overtaking", we were almost mown down by a carefree black Audi. He swerved onto the wrong side of the road as he approached a queue of traffic, forcing me to steer the bike down a ledge onto an extremely rough roadside dirt strip at 50km/h. One pothole or large bump in the dirt and we would have been hurled into a thick row of trees.

The destination, Tianjin, turned out to be the first Chinese city i've really disliked. Overpriced transport, overpriced accommodation, 1950s London style air pollution, unfriendly people, rip-off merchants everywhere targeting foreigners, and an inordinate number of golden arches. Have you ever heard of a bicycle traffic jam at the bicycle traffic lights?



Guess i'd been in the country too long. The streets were so poorly signposted and so tangled up in spaghetti flyovers, underpasses and roadworks that it took me an hour of utter confusion to find the inter-provincial train station to pick up our bikes. Quite the opposite of China's usual orthodontic grid cities, Tianjin's roads splay in all directions. A great many signs inform you of the roads ahead, very few tell you what road you're actually on; signs at intersections tell you which roads is in which direction - but again, none tell you which road you're on. Signs tell you what bridge you're on, but alas, not what road you're on. And signs direct you to all kinds of obvious nearby places you've already arrived at, but none point the way to such landmarks as the inter-provincial train station. Not only that, my fresh whiplash made it painful to look around and, i was told, my type of che was banned in the city. I was probably lucky to find the place after only one hour and five accostings of strangers.

But when i got to the office, the woman took my ticket, looked at it briefly then brought down a big red stamp and threw it back at me. "That address," she said, pointing at the imprint. No explanation, no directions, no help at all. I was so gobsmacked and crazy from being endlessly lost, in pain and cold for the last hour that i couldn't respond, though i went back a minute later and sprayed her.

After that there was nothing for it but drive around almost aimlessly, about every 3 minutes asking a pedestrian for directions to the stamped address. It took another hour and a good samaratan at a news stand to get me there; though i was only 150m from it, i would never have found it on my own - an unmarked warehouse tucked away behind a large stack of sea containers.

But, having obtained the bikes and - after more unexpected duress - some space in a sea container, we discovered Tianjin, the "port city", was in fact 40km from the port. Lucky we had the "che", then. Then the che lost it completely at the critical moment so we didn't have a che. After half a day trying to organise reasonably-priced transport, we ended up on a public bus with two bicycles, four suitcases, two giant 'Mikey Mouse' bags and a guitar. They charged us 50RMB for the 5RMB a person bus ride. "Why did we get on this bus?" i shouted, jumping to the conclusion we were being scammed yet again, "we could have bought seats for our luggage and it would have been half the price". But as the bus quickly filled up, my anger melted at the mere thought of 50 cranky commuters jostling in the aisle while nine large pieces of luggage occupied seats.

Driving between Tianjin and the port must surely be one of the most hazardous drives in the world:


The city's built on marshes and as soon as the buildings finished the traffic slowed to a crawl as the highway was shrouded in a thick fog. Hazard lights were the only thing stopping enormous pile-ups on the stilted road above the marshes. The driver was effectively driving blindfolded; you literally couldn't see more than 5-10 metres in front. This didn't prevent him from speeding up alarmingly whenever there were no lights in front - that is, speeding up whenever he couldn't see anything at all. He wasn't averse to using the emergency/bicycle lane. Any cyclist or 3-wheel "che" driver caught in such a situation would be run over without a doubt. When we arrived, two hours later with no hope of catching our next train, they cast us out on the side of the road, along with our 9 huge luggage items.

The following day, after six unwanted days, we were predictably keen to get on the next train back to Jilin. However, Tianjin had one last test in store for our sanity: The next morning, with hours to wait for the next train, we checked in our bags at the luggage lockers. We arrived back six minutes before the train was due to leave - too close for the average Chinese, but standard for box and goose. But the attendant was nowhere to be found. When eventually we located her, we only had two minutes to get through the ticket gates, down onto the platform and onto the train - unlikely, but still possible. "Which way?" i yelled to a railway guard. She pointed forward and left and told us to run. So we ran, turned left and went up to the gate. Locked. "Hey!" I screamed to the guards on the other side, who were nonchalantly meandering about, "hey! How do we get to the train?" One of them cocked their head, questioningly. "Do you understand me??" I yelled, red-faced and pouring sweat. "K102train!!...HOW....DO...WE...GET...TO...THE...TRAIN?!!!" i screamed, while Boxxy moaned, hopelessly rattling the gate. One of the guards came over. He slowly, agonisingly took my ticket, poured over it, and eventually pointed to his right, towards the next gate. Only then did i notice the 200 or so people waiting behind it, queued, staring in wide-eyed bemusement at the live entertainment. "Your train's late," said the guard without a hint of either annoyance or amusement.