Save the bridge

MARCH 24, 2008: I'm guessing others who thought it was a tragedy and whinge whinge and so on have noticed the Leighton Beach development basically has none of the negative effects it was supposed to have, like on public access to the beach.

I'm more worried about them phasing out that awesome bridge over the train line. Can't see rich people tolerating something so non-picturesque for long.







Stands to reason tho, because Perth people are spoilt for scenery. And yes yes i know you've all seen it all before so many times but i don't think we Perthites (can?) really appreciate how good the Swan River is, at least until we've been away from it for ages. It's gotta be one of the most idyllic settings for a city imaginable.





Wank wank wank, yes everyone's seen it before but my excuse is i'm high.

My eyes! I'm blind!

MARCH 1, 2008: I haven't been exposed to this much light for a good 10 months. Perth's very, uh, a very bright place. Photos of Australia, Hong Kong

Anyway.

We got jobs proofreading ("editing" when we choose to get grandiose about it) - Boxxy at a Shanghai expat mag, me at a small-time publishing house that's republishing old English-language books about China from between 1800 and 1950. Two days a week pays the bills for the whole month, so i'm fresh out of excuses not to get writing.

Many of these old books embody the classic old Yellow Peril/Foreign Devil antipathy, and the first job I got is worthy of attention, if only because you'll never read it. It's called "Beleaguered in Peking", and it's the diary of an American doctor who was caught up in the siege of the foreigners in Beijing in the Boxer Rebellion (1900). It was published just a few weeks after the siege ended, so it was pretty sloppily done and has a predictable amount of knee-jerk ranting. Which is hilarious of course. And though the title was "Beleaguered in Peking" - even on the title page - on the original front cover it's called "The Yellow Crime". Probably a shrewd, last-minute move by the publisher at the time.

Other highlights include:
- The 'heroine of the siege', Mrs Chamot, "after some shells burst in the baking room and killed one and severely wounded others of the Chinese bakers, Mrs. Chamot, rifle in hand, held the coolies to their work."
- "A Peking Belle: Perhaps, after looking at this picture, there will not be so much wonder that occasionally a Caucasian selects a Chinese girl for a wife. That there are very attractive Chinese girls this picture evidences."
- "Norregaard drew his revolver and fired two shots into the mob. The effect was instantaneous. The brutal cowards dropped Cox at once, and ran away like sheep toward their encampment."
- "Thanks to Mr Stell in the coolie supply department."
- "[T]he seeds of disorder and riot that yielded such a bitter crop when they ripened; just as only a poorly-organized, semi-patriotic, but fully looting society could do".

And a very entertaining obsession with the words "ruffian" and "filth".

Just after starting these jobs, we had to leave Shanghai to use our return plane tickets to Australia. Timing, as usual, was exquisite: this time just as the largest annual human migration on the planet began to take hold. The 300 million-odd migrant workers, in their efforts to get home for Chinese New Year, were just beginning to bring the transportation system to a grinding halt. Our plane was departing from Hong Kong on the 27th. Around the 20th I went to the train station to 'pick up' a couple of tickets to Hong Kong. [Insert Family Feud shut-down noise.] No chance. So I went to a different ticket office to get a couple of tickets to Guangzhou, near enough to Hong Kong, instead. No chance. I went to another station and there, after standing in line for about half an hour in the crowded hall, managed to get my hands on two tickets – hard seats for the 20+ hour journey.

So we packed up and left, just as a fear-inducing "public announcement" got delivered to us, warning all residents of our compound that no-one going away for Chinese New Year should leave anything inside that they don't want stolen. Crucial to your chances of having anything left when you get back, but no guarantee, was to inform the landlord of your dates of departure and return. My impression of the greasy, slick-headed landlord (actually the landlord's agent) had not been positive. He's one of these Chinese blokes who reeks of baijiu in the early morning and apparently never speaks at any volume below shouting. The idea of telling him of the long period we would be away filled me with doubts. We slapped the padlock on the door, tried to make the place look empty, and left.

Of course, before long it all went horribly wrong. Unbelievably, we were once again misinformed as to which train station to go to, this time by the clerk who sold the ticket. Luckily this time we had left 2 hours early for this very purpose, remembering that with 2000+km to travel and migrant workers creating mayhem at every turn, just one missed train or connection, one delay or mishap and we would miss our flight home. So, laden with suitcases and various bags, we descended again down into the subway. But the normally unstoppable subway train kept stopping in the tunnel. Then the doors at several stations apparently wouldn't open. At this point it was clear: though we in fact ARE migrant workers, heading home for Chinese New Year, our fellows were going to fuck us over.

But by some miracle we made it, and indescribably lucky we were. As we got into Guangzhou, after 1 hour's sleep (on the train floor, under the seat), the transport system went into its well-documented meltdown, due to the severe snowstorms across the country. Supposedly tropical Guangzhou was cold, colder than Perth in winter, and very very wet. The only accommodation available near the station was about 200 stairs higher than we were longing for. A little consolation of all this luggage-laden climbing was witnessing the strange arrangement of tall, narrow apartment buildings with narrow alleyways in between, creating what are effectively hutongs (tightly packed villages) stacked on top of each other. This means Guangzhou residents live about a metre from various neighbours' windows, but about 200 metres from door to door. I haven't explained this very well but the pictures sort of show it.



I'm glad I'm not one of the friendly staff on the Chinese train service, who would have copped it nasty from the millions and millions of stranded, shattered passengers being denied their only chance to see their families all year. When things go wrong, well, i wouldn't blame them for being a little confused as to how to handle the situation. This slogan on the red sign in the following pic reads: "Passengers first, safety first, service first".


So what happens, then, when snow storms make providing train services to carry millions of passengers home extremely dangerous? Which comes first - passengers, safety or service? The pictures on TV made the answer pretty obvious.

You know you're safe behind the razor wire of Hong Kong when you see a sign that states Falun Dafa (Falun Gong) is, gasp...


They carry out an extraordinarily aggressive propaganda campaign in Hong Kong against the Chinese Communist Party. The display in the picture below was in the middle of the Causeway Bay shopping precinct on a Saturday night, where body space is severely scarce. Surely they would need permission from the local authorities (who are actually selected by the Communist Party), to set up a stall like this in the middle of one of the busiest streets on earth. The "Practitioners demonstration" sign is interesting. The claims of organ harvesting are seriously horrific, but apparently Falun Gong is worried there are some who would see this and go home to try extracting organs for themselves. The Chinese writing above the English actually reads, "Practitioners demonstration, please do not copy."



So, homeless once again, after we got bored with riding up and down the above escalator we dumped our bags at the train station and headed for an internet bar to sleep. On the way, we passed Kowloon's harbour promenade to check the latest fashions. Not really, but Boxxy couldn't help but notice this picturesque couple.


Here they are, officially on "the Thrillseeker fashion blog, a daily digest of the best dressed people in seven cities across the world". That's what they think anyway, poor fools.

Two haircuts and no real jobs

JANUARY 18, 2008: In Shanghai, apparently for the next year or so. News is that at some point very soon i'm going to have to start being a journalist. On that note, i'll indulge in a mournful lament: The comic life and tragic end of old trusty $3 camera. Photos

A few years ago in Melbourne, i didn't have a camera, had never owned one and wanted to take some pictures. Shocked by the price (and concept) of disposable cameras, i didn't buy one. But soon after i was in an Op Shop, where i first laid eyes on that special unit, that which was to become 'OT'. About 50 grams of sturdy black plastic, no flash, no batteries, one blue button - to "take picture" - and no hint of any brand name - though it did have a high-tech sounding model number - 'T-808' - slowly fading away on the front. And a high-tech slide-across lens cover.

The camera plus 3 rolls of film - effectively three disposable cameras plus a camera to keep - totalled $13. This expendable Victorian op-shop unit proceeded to follow me to the edges of my world - to London, Dili, Busselton - accurately depicting the fuzziness with which i saw many of these scenes. And, pricelessly, my faithful companion required no attention or protection at all to keep within my possession. I could leave him unattended and his appearance of worthlessness would keep the wolves at bay.

Old Trusty came with me to China. But signs of a breakdown were showing. Winding the film back at the end of each roll now required inserting a knife directly into the film. Which in turn led to a prising open of 'OT's plastic shell and the leakage of sunlight. But, like a senile old man whose stories keep getting better as he gets closer and closer to madness, OT's leaks made for more and more interesting pictures. OT ended up on a bicycle expedition, where his owner encouraged his madness by hanging him off the bicycle handlebars in the direct sunlight. This also allowed him to snap people and things without interrupting the flow of the journey, or interfering with the scene. And you should've seen us - him and me - against the girls in the Chinese photo processing shops. EVERY SINGLE TIME they'd hand back the film, having done none of what we wanted, saying, "These pictures - all no good!" To which i'd reply that, yes, we knew, and no, we didn't give a fuck what they thought of our photos, and yes, go back right now and do it...every single damn photo...yes, 38 for the price of 36, yes, even the black ones at the end...And they'd look back at us like we'd just told them to go remove the gizzards from the flat cat on the road outside because we were hungry. In short, Old Trusty was at the peak of his game.

Taking this into consideration, you'd expect i'd become a little more protective of OT once we moved to the peasant truck stage. But OT's life was always happy-go-lucky. Messing around with different positions, safety ropes - paying attention to safety generally - was against the spirit of OT's existence. So he sat beside me on the front of the truck, ready to spring into action.

Then one day he wasn't there. By the time i realised, it'd been 20 minutes at least since he fell. I turned the truck around but already i could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. For in China there are people who literally subsist on what falls from passing vehicles. So, of course, after close to an hour, the search was called off and an era was over.

I tried to console myself with the thought that some really poor person had probably picked it up - poor enough to pick it up off the road - and they'd now have it as their first camera. This was indeed comforting, but the reality soon descended that, even if it did happen that way, as soon as they got the first pictures back from it - if not sooner due to all its stickytape holding it together and the requirement for a knife to wind back the film - they'd decide it was worthless and Old Trusty would be condemned to rest among rotting chicken hearts, feathers, light bulbs, engine grease, dog bones and torn plastic bags on a lonely open garbage pile on the banks of the Yellow River.





Old Trusty $3 China photos. RIP.

---------------------------------------------


So, as the title would suggest, after two weeks in mainland China's richest city, we're poverty stricken. Once again, maybe i've been in the countryside too long but i don't think it's worth it - for the most part Shanghai's rather boring, especially to to look at.

What's struck me most about Shanghai is its sheer completeness; systematic, orderly and insanely busy. The subway system is practically flawless; the trains come every 3 minutes for 18 hours a day. That's nearly 800 trains per day, just on our line. Not only that, it's close to 100% utilised, i.e. you can almost never get a seat. Not exactly comfortable, but a rare combination of extremely convenient yet not wasteful. Peak hour is insane...the people cram onto these trains literally moshpit style. The subway is almost new (built in the 1990s) and most stations have these as glass barriers to prevent crowd surges into the path of the oncoming trains. People here are so busy that there's a marriage market every weekend in the city square - hundreds of middle-aged to elderly people (the parents) gather to seek a match for their children. This can take many months. The people i spoke to have been going for almost a year now and haven't found the right match. That's obviously because they're very specific in what they want; one lady's requirements were good job, good education, high income and not good looking because good looking is "too hard to control".


The magnitude of this city's hard to grasp. It's so big that it takes almost half an hour to walk two blocks as marked on my metre-long city map. The population is 10-12 million. That doesn't include migrant workers - the peasants who come here to work factory jobs to send money back home - of which there are millions, 5 million by some estimates. Shanghai railway station is where a great many of them enter and leave, and it's getting close to Chinese New Year. Even that kind of chaotic process is done in an artificially orderly fashion, for China.



At street level there are legions of traffic inspectors preventing jaywalking and batallions of street sweepers - human ones in concert with mechanical ones. There's also an extremely orderly network of high-speed "Elevated Roads" - basically freeways on stilts, that allow people to drive around the city at 100km/h with no traffic lights. Now, the spaces below a stilted highway or metro railway, you might forgiven for expecting perhaps a bit of decay, bit of graffiti, a few patches of wasteland - at least some disorder of some kind, right? But in Shanghai even that space is utilised in a neat and orderly fashion, mostly with low-speed normal roads following the same course as the "elevated" ones above, and of course, immaculately kept gardens in the median strips. There are, i admit, occasional examples of the chaos and contradictions you'd expect in China's biggest city.




And in the former "foreign concessions" there are a few old European buildings in pretty good condition. But in most areas i've seen, whatever was here before, if anything, has been pulled down and rebuilt since the 90s, so most of the city as it stands today dates back only that far. You may recall that in Songyuan can be observed many fine examples of 90s decay. But outside appearances actually count here and the apartment blocks withstand the winds of time a bit better.

Thankfully in many ways, the Shanghai prices and our dire financial situation forced us out to the fringes. Here it's a tad more interesting. We live in probably one of Shanghai's best attempts at a canal-side slum area. The housing's low-rise, mainly 2-storey, and hemmed in among several woodwork and cardboard factories - although against the cracked, whitewashed walls - almost all of them - is a network of immaculately manicured hedges. The back wall overlooks the canal.



We live in a ground floor "apartment" in a complex full of (fellow) migrant workers from the provinces. The complex is aimed at them - the name means either "Residential Area" or "Little Migrant Housing Area", depending on how you interpret the Chinese. My money's on the latter because i've yet to meet a Shanghai person in the vicinity. To get to our place you have to take a left off a main street, walk 100m then turn right at a driveway, go through the left hand gate when you reach the dead end (the right one leads into a factory), then take the first alleyway on the right, walk straight for about 100m, bear left past the first building of the complex and you're there. We do, technically, have an address but it's next to useless: even a professional courier couldn't find it when he tried to deliver my mail. I had to meet him at the main road. It's really a maze, and the out-of-place hedges lend a strange authenticity to that feeling.

Our place is really more of a room than an apartment. Bare concrete floors, squat toilet, cracked windows that don't close properly and very, very cold. We had to buy two heaters with a combined power of 3000 watts to even make it livable. And this is a 12 square-metre cupboard we're talking about. The 1-inch gap under the door doesn't help. Strangely, those long grain-filled draft-stoppers that are common in Australia - where houses generally aren't drafty - are impossible to find here. So we feebly try to stop the cold air with a broom. Our bed consists of a pot-holed old couch and a wooden board propped up on six stacks of bricks. Can't complain, however - i think the previous tenants, migrant workers from Anhui province, slept four people on it. Many of the other flats in the complex are loaded with numerous bunk beds. Also the fact it has running water and an indoor toilet at all means it's still above the whole-China average.


Obviously Shanghai foreigners in general are another story. "A city of foreign decadence" is how Shanghai is often described - both old and new Shanghai. There are scores of foreigners here - westerners, that is; locals say there are scores of Japanese and Koreans too - and when it comes to anything involving money, beggars excepted, they do not hold back.


Most cafes and restaurants are simply out of our price range. We have hit the western pubs and clubs a couple of nights, and it's like being in a room full of division one Lotto winners. There is a genuine sense of of people throwing away vast amounts of money in a very indiscriminate and rather vulgar way. One Australian told me westerners enjoy something approaching impunity in Shanghai, due to a rule that says only English-speaking 'tourist police' can talk to foreigners. Told me the story of a friend of his who was parking his expensive SUV and collided with a guy on an electric bicycle. Story goes, he inspected the paintwork of his car, assessed the cyclist as being very poor, picked up his electric bicycle and put it in his wagon. Cops showed up, he told them what happened in charades, drove away with the poor dude's transport. End of story.

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.

Muertos Che

DECEMBER 19, 2007: What do a blue 3-wheeled peasant truck, a maroon 3-wheeled peasant truck, a crane, an elevator and a bicycle have in common? Photos from Hebei and Shanxi

Why, isn't it obvious?...they're all "che"s. Not viva El "Chay" Che, but "chuhhh" che. Try saying it...it's a very addictive sound once you start, at least that proved the case with this small mind. But that's fine because in China, any 'wheeled vehicle' is a "che". In fact, it doesn't even need to have wheels (crane, elevator etc.), pretty much any machine that moves and is not a boat is a "che".

So, with "che"s all the rage among the upwardly-mobile Chinese peasantry, what exactly should the aspirational farmer expect from his brand new 3-wheeler - after he follows the face of China's biggest film star, Gong Li, down to his local 'Big Sun 3 Wheel' dealer? Here's a glimpse of the fascinating dramas that might just pan out in the first 2500km of his che's working life:
- Punctured front tyre (before leaving the showroom).
- Front brake doesn't work (dealer's comment: "oh, they're all like that, even the expensive ones").
- Handlebars snap off (day 2. Dealer repairs promptly).
- Reverse lights don't work (luckily there's a looped recording of a chipmunk squeaking, "PLEASE...NOTICE....CHE" instead).
- Speedometer stops working (but he's repaid for this because the odometer is linked to it, thus extending his 6000km warranty indefinitely).
- Brake lights don't work (thankfully, the brakes are so weak that it doesn't matter).
- Indicators stop working.
- Rear vision mirror screw thread breaks, rendering mirror useless.
- Engine cover comes loose (due to fearful rattling about 45km/h).
- Gearstick - metal gearstick - snaps off, leaving him stuck in fourth gear. (It happens on a pitch dark road in the freezing cold and he won't even realise until he's made it home, whereupon he'll have to search the road for more than an hour and only find it when he runs it over, partially destroying it.)
- The usually weak, ineffectual brakes suddenly lock up completely, without warning. He'll have a mechanic look at it, who won't understand the problem. He'll continue on his way and by the time he stops at the next workshop, the problem will have disappeared. But he'll be terribly worried because it's been snowing and there's copious ice on the roads and he knows if it happens when he's on the ice he will be, well, probably fucked. The next day will pass uneventfully until he hits a sudden rough patch in a black tunnel and screech uncontrollably to a halt with traffic behind him. By some miracle he'll survive and the next mechanic he shows it to will recognise that a large bolt holding the rear axle in place has fallen off.


- He'll decide to sell this "che" and return to the dark ages. But three kilometres from the buyer's place, it will shudder to a halt on a busy city intersection. He'll push it clear and find a mechanic. He'll push the "che" 2km to the workshop, where the mechanic will take it apart, piece by piece, until, after completely dismantling the engine, he identifies the problem as a very critical gear cog, completely worn out. He'll ring his supplier...but the peasant will have driven too far - he's out of "Big Sun 3 Wheel's sphere of influence! Here it's all 'Big Capital 3 Wheel'. As such his 6000km warranty will be completely useless and the spare part 3-4 days and a large sum of money away. Exactly thirty-five days after he rushedintoyourlocaldealertograbasuperdealtoday and purchased this che for 46 Chairman Maos, he'll sell it to the mechanic for 10. He'll leave it in 1000 different pieces. But he'll be alive.

But not necessarily. The second-last problem (the brakes locking up) was an atrociously dangerous one. Through the last week or so, every road had large patches of thick, smooth ice. If we happened to be on one of them when the brakes locked up, we really would have stood little chance against the traffic and/or mountain slopes. It was Boxxy's birthday. The only redemption is that China's a relatively good place to be brake-less, as drivers here tend to use the horn instead of brakes, and the obstacles are accordingly nimble as a result. As if driving on ice itself wasn't bad enough. All the roads except the highways were 90% covered in ice for 2 or 3 days after the snow. Especially the winding mountain roads. On the downhill parts, engine braking is the only way to slow down. If you can add the tiniest bit of braking, you can slow down, but the second you brake too much the wheels will lock up and you end up in the disconcerting position of having to release the brake if you want to slow down at all.

And the journey...


Our welcome to the final province, Hebei, was long, enthusiastic and very strange - thanks to one man: Master Zhao, pictured above. This guy spends all his spring, summer and autumn holiday time hiking along the Great Wall, solo. We met him randomly in his town, Chicheng ("Bare Wall"), and very mundanely - he saw us unloading the bags and came over to investigate. He insisted on taking us to dinner even though we didn't know him, so we paid and slipped out to check our email. When we got back to the hotel he was waiting for us, maggotted on baijiu and almost crying with joy to see us because he was "so worried" - evidently having forgotten my telling him we were going to 'shang the wang' (go on the internet). He invited himself up to our hotel room, ostensibly to make plans for a trip to some remote section of the wall the following day, but between primping my hair, inviting a drunken Communist Party boss to join us (who danced and sing and then passed out onto Boxxy, spilling burning tea all over her and her book, and then left), giving sudden massages to me and the Party goon, commenting on how "beautiful" i was, and posing for photos when i returned the complement (e.g. the one above), little planning was done.

Chinese men either put on a brave face for their toxic hangovers; at 7.30 sharp he was bashing on the door, bearing breakfast. At the service station a businessman on a scooter pulled up behind us just as the attendant finished serving a customer, got her attention by waving money and both proceeded to ignore my angry assertion that "we were next". Master Zhao was smiling - i asked if this would annoy him. "Yes," he replied, adding by way of explanation, "but he saw your 'che' and thought you were a peasant." When we reached, an hour or so later, what appeared to be the Great Wall, i went to park the che but no, said Master Zhao, 5 more kilometres. Here the road turned from surfaced to sand, then to a rocky river bed masquerading as a road that was so bumpy both Zhao and Boxxy had to get out and walk, so violently were they being thrown about. It wasn't a big problem as i could barely drive above walking pace anyway. After half an hour we came upon a group of 4 or 5 houses. The residents were busy dismembering a pig and clearly had no idea what we were doing. But another half an hour after asking them for directions, Mr Great Wall Master seemed to have lost the way. No sign of any Wall and at least 8km since he'd said 5km to go, with plenty of terrible road laid out in front. Here the road climbed a water channel on the side of a mountain that looked how i imagine Kurdistan or some other barren, mountainous, snowy, cold, utterly godforsaken place. About half way up the hill the ridge that constituted the road i was driving on ended and i had to cross to the other side of a water channel. As i was doing this the engine suddenly yelped like a dog being stung by a bee and suddenly i was standing with one foot on the ground, holding the che as it tried to roll, only my left leg between it and the bottom of the valley. No superman feat, however, the thing's so light that i was able to right it without any trouble at all. After crawling down the other side and through a village where animal shit and feed formed the road, we still hadn't seen any sign of impending Wall. As the narrow road skirted the hillside above a small gorge, suddenly there in front was a thick, slippery glacier that sloped gently across the road to the edge, then plummeted straight down into the gorge. Zhao recklessly told me to drive across it; i could only imagine half way across the wheels would lose grip and slide, slowly, slowly, towards the edge. We'd all jump out in time and try to stop it but agonisingly wouldn't get any grip on the smooth ice and the che would slide ever so gently over over the edge, roll three times and be wrecked at the bottom - 15 agonising kilometres from the nearest road. No, Master Zhao, no, we'll spend half an hour making a road across. And then we'll get there, walk through the magical snowy pine forest where the snow is untouched despite being weeks old and has a pine flavour.

This part of the wall appeared to be rocks, piled on top of each other. The Wall generally speaks for itself but Hebei and Beijing have by far the most spectacular Wall there is. So if you happen to want to see pictures, what i think are the recent decent ones are here.


After leaving Master Zhao behind we hit the Beijing area. That's the chunk of countryside extending 50-100km out from the actual Beijing. Surprisingly enough, being located close to one of the most polluted cities in the world, it's clearly the best countryside we travelled through in China. Mountains, birds' nests in the tree-lined roads, yadda yadda. The roads are excellent, and the road signs plentiful:


But strangely the Beijing authorities were stricter towards us - and the general population - than anywhere else. It's the only place i was ever asked for my licence; there are police check points at unexpected intervals, every single hotel required recording the details of both of our passport details before we could stay. Worst of all, in a place called "Pingu Area" (the following day's destination was "Bambi Mountain"), a small inn run by an old couple let us unpack, eat dinner, undress and almost sleep before telling us we couldn't stay due to some regulation that said foreigners can't stay in cheap hotels. You'd expect the most open part of China to be more open. Perhaps it is open to foreigners and we don't count. People around here have probably seen enough foreigners to know that they don't drive around in peasant trucks...what is it the WA Police call it..."probable cause"?

The Beijing government has rebuilt quite a few of the best parts of the wall for tourist purposes, none of which we visited. Far more interesting - horrific, some would say - was the part where they appeared to have started rebuilding and abandoned it half way through because they were fucking it up so badly.


A bunch of tourist-aimed businesses and aggressive sellers remain to pounce on the wayward traveller as they read the "Wall close strictly fobit climb" sign - and move on.

And on the last day it was all over. We drank beers on the end of the Wall. The one in the tin tasted good. The one in the bottle tasted bad. It would have been at sunset but the sun was already behind a thick cloud of smoke.
________________

Don't mess with the mountains of Mongolland....

DECEMBER 1, 2007: Welcome to coal country in winter. Most of the countryside here in north-central China is cloaked in thick brown smoke at least 20 hours a day. Locals like to claim it's "humidity" but the clear air in the few places where there are no people is all the evidence i need (aside from the fact that it's obviously smoke). Photos from Shanxi and Shaanxi

The blanket will hang around for about the next 4 months, given it's now sub-zero day and night and practically everybody burns coal to stay alive. If the Yellow River is the giver and taker of life elsewhere, coal is the giver and taker of life in north-central China. The roads here are so dominated by coal trucks that some poor souls manage to stay warm by walking along the road and collecting the small pieces they drop. The plants close to the road live and die in coal dust and the roads leading to and from the mines are coal dust roads. And have you ever been stopped at a railway crossing for 5 minutes by one of those endlessly long trains? When we crossed from Shaanxi Province into Shanxi Province (yes, two different provinces, same pronunciation in English) we had to navigate around a nose-to-tail traffic jam of giant coal trucks the right lane of the highway that stretched over 20km back from the border. I am not exaggerating - nose-to-tail, more than 20km long, and only very occasionally moving, crawling, a few metres forward. There's a whole economy based on this permanent coal-and-metal snake, the result of a requirement that each truck be weighed before it crosses a bridge at the border.


The coal has even managed to give me a "makeover" in its own image. Day after day, i have looked in a mirror and was shocked to see an eyeshadow-clad emo staring back. Not only that, i've been waking up in the morning with black nuggets of reconstituted coal in the corners of my eyes instead of sleep.

Speaking of which, in Fugu, or "Prefecture of Grain" (where not a grain of grain is to be seen, only coal) i awoke in the middle of the night convinced that the hotel would burn down. This outrageous premonition, however, was immediately supported by a terrifying raft of evidence. The place was very warm and very cramped. Our tiny room was surrounded by 5 or 6 others. Through the paper thin - combustible - walls (effective at stopping noise like a sieve stops water) came a regular clicking of lighters. I had looked into most of the other rooms - cupboards would be a more apt description - and none had any furniture other than beds. So people all around were definitely smoking in bed. One exit. No fire alarms. And then the clincher: i went to the toilet downstairs near the exit...the only exit...and found it blocked by a steel door, padlocked shut. Average, China.

In truth, compared to the supposedly dirt-poor places we've been before, this part of China has little respect for average lives. Despite being relatively rich statistically - due mainly to coal - people here live, work and breathe in filth. While in Gansu and Ningxia most people have their own walled compound (country) or Soviet apartment (city), people here live mostly in hillside grottoes (country) or stinking, crumbling alleys (town and city).


The area is full of historical relics and many towns and villages have ancient city walls either within or nearby. People often make their homes in them:



Datong ("Big Alike") is a big, big city with more than its fair share of palacial hotels and black Audis. But off any of the flashy main streets you find squalor - even right in the centre centre.

Since obtaining the peasant truck there's been less excuse to divert from the original brief of taking the closest road to the Great Wall. So what happens when you follow such a ridiculous idea too closely?

Around here the Wall marks the border of Inner Mongolia, the large chunk of what was traditionally Mongolia that China now rules. (The Mongols can't complain of course, having taken over China a few centuries ago.) As usual, my two maps of the area didn't agree on which roads did and didn't exist. So when i pulled out the map of Inner Mongolia and saw a nice, straight road running right alongside the Wall for 50km, it was clearly the time for a Mongolian adventure.

It started well: the road was new and flat. But after about 10km we were heading in the wrong direction so i asked a peasant for directions. He sent me back where we'd came, looking for a turn-off we hadn't seen just past a bridge we hadn't seen. With help from another peasant we eventually identified the turn-off, a rough, rough sandy track that led us quickly into the most picturesque rural setting i've ever seen - ploughed-up fields everywhere, chickens, ducks, pigs rummaging through rubbish piles, tethered sheep, chained dogs, donkeys with carts moping next to mud and straw walls while peasants thresh corn or dig holes or warm their hands on wood fires. It's all a big mocking irony of the Wall: the land outside it is noticeably better than inside. It probably has a lot to do with the large population it protected.

Anyway, as i said, the map indicated one long, straight road. What we found, in this agrarian fairyland, was a very large number of very similar-looking roads criss-crossing one another. And "villages" here (and in China proper) are not singular dots as they are marked on the map but usually are several groups of houses spread around a valley or over a hill so you never know when you've reached the next dot. This was, to begin with, a mere annoyance: ask another peasant "Are we here yet? Is it left? Or right?" Right, they tell you, but the road looks suspect. It's slightly smaller than the one you're on, has no recent tyre tracks, and cuts between two fields. You follow it anyhow but it simply takes you into a small leafless forest and fades away after 5 minutes so you turn around and go back and you want to shake your fist at the peasant but as you drive past her she asks you if you've seen her sheep. The question is so quaint that it melts your heart and you smile and tell her no, you haven't seen any sheep up that way.

More and more wrong turns precede more and more consultations with bemused peasants. Eventually, by a process tantamount to trial and error, you're alone again, climbing a grassy mountain and you hope there are no more junctions ahead. But there are and you waste time exploring several more dead ends. The day wears on and by 4.30 the sun is setting and you're on top of a mountain and you still have, you guess, 10km to the nearest proper road. Then, after an unbelievably rocky stretch, a peasant tells you you're going the right way and you spot a blue 3-wheeled truck ahead and "Ah," you think because it's the first one you've seen since this little adventure began, "we'll follow him all the way to the highway." And after about 15 minutes he takes a strange turn, left a crossroads, ("i thought we were on the right track"), and you follow him anyway, waving to try to get his attention to ask him where he's going but he's in front of you and doesn't see you or doesn't want to stop and instead keeps going faster which puts a lot of dust in your eyes. Eventually 2 guys coming the opposite way on a motorbike set you straight - back the way you came and go straight where the blue truck turned left. Now you're getting anxious with darkness closing in and you're thrashing the shit out of your fragile little 3-wheel scooter/truck and poor Boxxy in the back howls as she is flung against the side of the truck with every painful bump on the rough rough road while you think about how royally a mechanical failure would fuck you up, here atop a mountain where? in Mongolia but precisely, you don't know and it's getting very very cold. You've gotten a few hundred metres past the crossroads when you come across another village but this time there's more than the usual loose dogs to worry about. The villagers are in the process of building a kind of drainage or irrigation ditch, right across the road. The thought flashes through your mind that the last remaining untried direction at the crossroads might be some kind of detour or ring-road around this tiny village or part of a village. No way, you think, and frantically seek a villager to set you straight for what must be the 15th time. "You can't get across", he says. "Can i carry it across?" you reply rhetorically and he stays out to help you. You're just about to attempt this when he suddenly remembers he has wooden planks inside and goes and gets them for you and you get across with your wheeled vehicle only falling into the ditch once. Evidently not too many "wheeled vehicles" pass through here. And 20 minutes later you make one final wrong turn, based on nothing but a whim. And it turns out to be a shortcut, and you've found the highway and you will live tonight.

(But not before a one-hour ride at 50km/h in -10 degrees which equates to -22 degrees with wind chill and leaves you with no option, you feel, but to shriek classic popular songs out at the top of your voice in both volume and pitch. It genuinely warms you a bit.)