China
I came round in Xiamen city at about 5 a.m., disrupted by something outside. Piped music had started playing over some tinny speakers. I looked out of the window. A solitary man ran towards a wall, and then ran backwards to where he had started before. Of course : they do their exercise routine in the morning, like in Japan. There was no way I was going to get any sleep now, was there ? I flicked through the flat TV at the end of the bed. Only one channel is in English here, and they are already showing a repeat of a documentary I saw yesterday.
The day faced a dissection by the 2 p.m. start of my train journey up to Hangzhou (24 hours ! Surely the longest I have ever been on a train ?) What to do with the morning, then ? I had read of the Nanputuo Temple, a little out of town, which was also near a photography museum, so I packed and went down to breakfast. It actually looked like last night’s dinner : fried vegetables, some prawns in pepper sauces, and great hunks of tofu. I nibbled warily at both before settling for the relative security of a boiled egg and a bun full of some sort of fruit paste. There wasn’t a cup of coffee or tea in sight.
Feeling slightly short-changed, I took a cab with relative ease to the temple. Although I was there shortly after 8 a.m. (when it opened), the place was heaving with tourists. As if staying in their own country gives them more excuse to behave even more outrageously than usual, Chinese tourists took pictures of each other with a ferocity and previously unseen disregard for the tourist attraction in question. Sweat streamed off me like it was raining…and I wouldn’t be changing out of these clothes till tomorrow afternoon.
After registering my disgust with my video, I found the Ethnic Chinese museum, mercifully empty and air-conditioned with a fascinating view of Chinese communities abroad. We’ve all been Chinese for years, apparently, but have not realised it. I was back in the hotel by midday via a rather pathetic attempts to take street life photos : I can’t do video AND still stuff simultaneously, it’s as simple as that. I caught a cab uptown to the train station, and my heart sank when I saw a massive queue outside. But then I was shown to an air-conditioned waiting room ! I had paid for a soft seat on the train after all ( I dread to think what the alternative was). I talked to some Canadians and we were duly called for our trains.
Initially my compartment showed promise. A family of four soon joined me and from then on the situation deteriorated. The grandmother in question kept on serving up snack after snack. They kindly gave me a plum or two, but it got a bit ridiculous when she pulled out a pot full of prawns and crabs, and started wolfing them down, complete with hideous crunching and slurping sound effects. Everybody kept jumping up and down all the time. I dozed off for half an hour, then went for a bit to eat with a bloke in the compartment, who struggled in vain with his English.
Nepal
For all the change in situation from the last 9 days, I slept miraculously well. Mind you, with the day we’d had, it was not surprising. The stomach seemed to have calmed down slightly, and I dared to have something resembling coffee and a bit of dried up bread with jam, but drew the line at boiled eggs, whch looked like the waiter had laid them.
What a piece of work the Nepalese restaurant is. How infinite in task, how little in understanding. To get a coffee requires a myriad of preparation. First you ask for a pot. Then the milk. Separately. Inevitably it will arrive a light brown colour, if you’re lucky. Then you need to order more coffee granules. Then you need to order a spoon. God, it just goes on. All that before 6.30 a.m. in the morning.
The main problem out in the west of Nepal is the heat. We’re all dripping by 9 a.m. and the humour degenerates accordingly. Today we were going to meet a local party head, and the journalist of yesterday evening, who I had met briefly before expiring last night, had offered to escort us. As Olaf and company flew about all the various meeting houses, I conducted my own tour with Nikon D300 very much at hand.
Yet something was nagging at the back of my mind. There had been a threat of more road blocks, and after the targeting of PRESS vehicles, I felt increasingly nervous. Olaf seemed to revel in it all, and got hold of a story about the recent sacking of a Nepalese village by Indian troops from just over the border, leaving 6000 people displaced, in Dang County. Did I want to join him ? Stamping on the urge to be a pussy, I immediately agreed, and the four of us set off tailing another minibus full of journalists and relief workers.
The approach was, at the road block, if they got rocks thrown, we just get the fuck out of there. “Brilliant idea”, I gulped from the back seat, and sat back reflecting on my life and whether it was right to end it this way. Of course, there was a total anti-climax when we got there, although one felt sorry for all the poor bastards living under a tarpaulin in a woodland area. Some of them were playing cricket, and why not ? I admired their spirit. The real question was, why had Indian soldiers done this ?
Olaf had heard of another tribe and we drove over there as the last stop of the day : it became too late to drive back to Nepalgunj and we persuaded the village head to put us up for the night. All of us were starving by now, and I chewed on pieces of chickenless chicken and burnt corn cob, although I didn’t care. Later there was dancing, but they turned out to be transvestites.
Eastern Turkey
Surely the overriding reason for coming to Kars must be a trip to Ani, a strange, ghostly plain of buildings left over from the former Armenian capital, but now deserted for centuries. Like any site that has been primped and preened by expectation, the danger lay in my initial, gut reaction. And that was one of it being more of a mood piece than architectural extravaganza. Not that there was much architecture left of the poor bastard. Half a mosque there, the odd bit of cathedral there. There was one whole building left, and that made a useful yardstick against which to take photos.
As was always the case in these situations, I made myself scarce from any other company fairly quickly : it’s so much easier to go your own pace. Part of the site was distinctly off-limits : we were on the Turkish-Armenian border, after all. I charged ahead : we had three hours to do this site, and I didn’t know how to apportion my time. The camera was out in force, but it was difficult to strike a balance between the overall feel of the place and the detail of individual buildings.
The site was gloriously free of tourists, though, and it was quite eerie at times. I passed by heaps of rubble and one wondered what stories lay there to be uncovered. Attempts at restoration had been made, although by and large it was better left alone, or just a sympathetic semi-restoration. It took me two hours of fairly extensive snapping, but I was through by midday…and out of water. I set off to find a market but the heat drove me back to the gate, where our driver awaited.
On the way back, a bee stung him on the leg, something to which he is allergic, he cheerfully told us. I had visions of having to drive back, his corpse bloating in the heat on the back seat, an appropriately black tongue protruding through clenched teeth. Fortunately his allergy was only gradual : a cortisone injection from his GP this evening would fix it. Oh, that’s a relief, I said through gritted teeth and flashed a look at my fellow passengers. We were back in Kars by lunchtime.
After some pool of grease for lunch, the heavens opened and I retreated to the ever present cyber bar. Eventually, I made my way out to Kars Castle on the outskirts of town. In the gentle drizzle, the children playing in the mud made for a gut wrenching sight, and even I couldn’t take pictures. The view, as is often the case in these situations, was better than the building itself, and I was greeted semi-warmly by Turks wherever. Rather like Ani, the whole place seemed to hold ghosts of yesterday, and with the grey sky and ever-encroaching rain, it made for a rather depressing outing.
On my way down, I sipped a rather strange lemonade sitting outside a newsagent (the owner beckoned me to sit by him as I waited for the rain to stop). I made my way back to my hotel room to sit out the rest of the rain. Kars had atmosphere, there was no doubt about it. A sadness, somehow, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. The hotel staff seemed morose about something. Probably me.
I went out for an early evening stroll. All the shops had honeycombs strung up in the windows, embedded in wooden frames, and if I had been nearer the end of my journey, I would have been severely tempted. I stopped in at last night’s restaurant, for the town’s finest “Ali Nazik”, a kind of meat and egg plant stew that was truly delicious. I decided to book a flight with Onurair, Turkey’s cheapest flying coffin, to get me back to Istanbul on the 19th, from Gaziantep. Later, I sat talking with the hotel owner, on a visit from the capital, to view one of his seventeen outlets around the country !
Vietnam
If I thought I had cleverly missed the bus ride from hell by flying here, I was today sorely mistaken. The bus left at 7 a.m., and not knowing how difficult or otherwise it was to get a bike to haul me and my gear up there, I actually decided to leave the hotel at 5 a.m. ! You could never accuse me of under-anticipation. Anyway, I arrived at 6 a.m., but managed to change my ticket to leave on the bus to Lai Chau departing there and then. It seemed nice and empty, and fortunately we were not relying on the prehistoric air conditioning system installed.
We stopped within five minutes and five people got on. Five minutes later, another five…you know the score. Within half an hour we were nicely sandwiched. Every cloud has a silver lining, though…I was sandwiched between two hot Vietnamese babes, if you can call them that. And they were refreshingly open after five years of Czech babes. Every silver lining has a cloud, however. As we drew up into the hills, one of them, wearing a saucy white denim cap, began to vomit unceremoniously into a plastic bag. Now I know why the ticket collector was handing them out as we got on. I thought they were for the rubbish.
Then the bird on my other side started throwing up as well. As she convulsed with the aftershock of retching, she lay her head on my shoulder and sobbed. Every ten minutes she would summon up the effort to throw a bag of yellowed gastro-intestinal fluid past my left ear and out of the window…we were past the solid stage by now. Vietnamese stomachs and their wonderfully scenic mountain roads clearly don’t agree.
Suddenly, we drew into a hard shoulder somewhere and all the vomiters got off, as if in a wave of unilateral sympathy. Eventually we drew into Lai Chau, where I would get my connection to Sapa…assuming there is one, that is. It’s getting too stressful, this mode of travel. I ordered brunch, inevitably another bowl of Pho, the noodle soup, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to take photos of my neighbouring diners in a covert, undercover way.
I had been told it was another 8 hours to Sapa : imagine my astonishment when I read it was only another 18 km after we’d been going for 90 minutes. It was my lucky day. Mind you, after this morning, it needed to be. This time, I was stuck at the back, next to some drunk nutter, who kept telling me to photograph him. I pretended not to understand, but I kicked into action at Tran Ho pass, admittedly stunning even on my scale.
We pulled into Sapa around 4 p.m. and I managed to unbend myself from the seat. I discovered the predictable backpackers’s Mecca and after briefly checking into one hotel, decided to change when it emerged they didn’t take VISA. (A slight cock-up on the cash flow front) The management looked a bit dodgy as well. I found an excellent (French) bakery up a hill and sat outside stuffing my face. I carried on to The Red Dragon, which reassuringly described itself as an English pub on the noticeboard outside, where I talked to an English couple who actually seemed as eager to talk as I did.
