Bound for Vietnam Read online

  The hostel café was attractive, but it cost a minimum of three yuan just to sit there, so I don’t think they did much trade. I saw few people except the staff patronise it. And they used it as if they owned it. The guests seemed to be the last consideration of anything run by the government. We were just a nuisance to be tolerated, but not necessarily with kindness or good grace. We were secondary to the fact that the entire operation was there to provide the staff with work or, should I say, a place of employment. An example of this was the tremendous uproar the night shift commonly made in hotels. With absolutely no thought for those trying to sleep, they shouted, shrieked, yelled, telephoned, laughed, played music loudly, hawked and spat and turned the television on full bore. Their friends visited them and did the same. Viewing the hotel as their home, they acted accordingly. At the hostel I was woken several times every night by staff noise in the corridors, or at the attendant’s station. And before dawn every morning I was roused by the Chinese man across the way screaming into his phone. Even through my ear plugs I could hear his long and convoluted conversations.

  Instead of using the hostel café I frequented the one across the road. It had an English menu that offered a fifty per cent ‘quicken charge’ as well as squid beards, the mysteries of which I would like to have unravelled but never did. The menu’s English subtitles were so scrambled that they were almost incomprehensible gibberish, and I could not decipher most of them. Once I tried to order fried eggs and dumplings but could not make myself understood. Finally the waitress pointed to a pile of fried eggs and sliced tinned ham that sat in a big enamel basin under the glass counter. I agreed and was served two eggs and some slices of ham – stone motherless cold straight from the bowl. Eating them with the chopsticks provided was a difficult operation. I had nothing with which to cut the food and it is not easy to get a great slice of solid ham into your face with any degree of delicacy without somehow reducing its size. I also ordered ‘French toast’. This strange item arrived after I had finished the Battle of the Ham. It was an inch thick doorstop of bread that had had something unidentifiable spread on it and then been fried in a sweet oil.

  One day while I was having lunch in the café I kept hearing strange noises that I presumed must be coming from a child. Then I realised that a woman eating at one of the tables had a live chook dangling upside down off the edge of her handbag. Later as I passed around the back of the café I saw her delivering it to the kitchen door. You couldn’t say that the food there was not fresh.

  Through the window of my room in the hostel I could hear the hoot of boats on the river, and I looked out onto several blocks of flats across the way. The apartments had no blinds or curtains and through their windows and balcony doors I could clearly see the residents going about their lives. Although the flats looked fairly upmarket, they only ran to two rooms plus ablutions and, judging from the way washing was hung out on the mesh-enclosed balconies a few pieces at a time daily, they had no washing machines. Several caged birds were also hung out on balconies during the day and I could hear them twittering away among the pot plants, while in the evenings I listened to someone practising the piano.

  Across the road from the hostel the White Swan Hotel, the ultimate in magnificent opulence, fronted onto the Pearl River. I visited the hotel to sample its loos and use its other salubrious facilities. It covered hectares of ground and a ramble around it left me almost exhausted. The White Swan boasted several massive foyers with incredible decors. One was dominated by a jade boat as big as a house, while in the main foyer a waterfall cascaded into a large pond that contained even larger goldfish and a huge jade carving of a mountain covered with flowers. Here I said hello to a batch of fellow-Australians – a flock of multi-coloured budgerigars in a very large gilded cage. As I wandered about, every now and then I came upon long rosewood benches on which magnificent bonsai pots containing tiny, but ancient, trees stood. There were also heaps of very expensive shops offering the ultimate in luxury goods. An American guest told me that upstairs the rooms were pretty ordinary, however, and the usual things failed to work. Learning that the White Swan had a medical clinic and a resident doctor, I decided to ask for some anti-malarial tablets. A fat lot of use that was. The doctor did not understand one word I said, even with the help of the phrasebook. I thought this curious. The people in the street did better than that. The doctor apparently did not have a clue what I meant by anti-malarial. So I tried the hotel’s fantastic big chemist shop. The staff there had never heard of the stuff either. I began to feel that I was the strange one, asking for this exotic product, yet malaria is prevalent in South China and causes many deaths. I had used my supply of anti-malarial tablets travelling through Indonesia and hadn’t planned to be anywhere that I would need more.

  Later I visited a couple of the large pharmacies in the town. You could tell from the goods they stocked that the Chinese are a nation of hypochondriacs, who widely practise DIY medicine. It was possible to buy everything imaginable over the counter, as well as instruments for home surgery and dental work. You could even buy boxes of teeth to make up your own set of falsies, or to whack in a spare or two. But I found no malaria prophylaxis or treatment. The pharmacists did not even know the word ‘malaria’, despite my now having it written in Chinese on a piece of paper. But I was offered potions, pills and antibiotics enough to cure the ails of the world as well as any stray headache, diarrhoea, sore throat or toothache I might suffer.

  Then, during my investigations of the small Shamian Island streets, I spied a building with a small red cross painted on its wall. On internal inspection this place turned out to be a local medical clinic, although it appeared to have once been a warehouse. Stepping in off the street I found a large hall that contained two antique wooden counters topped by iron grills and bars. I looked through these and saw what resembled an old counting house on the other side where a man in a white coat sat at a dilapidated wooden table that pretended to be a desk. His outfit was crowned by a theatre cap. Ready to do instant surgery on me? This impressive gentleman could not understand what I wanted, but he was exceedingly polite and, signalling that I should wait, sent for help. The reinforcements arrived – a young couple in army uniform who spoke English. They told me that I should go to the Foreigner’s Clinic which was located in one of the big hospitals. Then they obligingly wrote its phone number and address in Chinese for me.

  I took a taxi to the hospital. Another agreeable surprise, it was a marvellous place. It had large grounds full of gardens with pretty plants and lofty trees full of singing birds. It seemed more like a delightful park than an institution. The hospital wards were arranged along colonnaded and covered walkways that now and then passed under pagoda-shaped arches and were lined with shaded seats. And it was all kept squeaky clean by small women who were busy on the ends of very large brooms. Proceeding along a walkway, I looked in some of the windows and concluded that, although it may have had wonderful grounds, the hospital’s medical care looked primitive. Theatre patients returning from their operations were trundled past me on the walkway. The unconscious patients were jolted along on trolleys wheeled by orderlies. Although they were accompanied by a legion of their relatives and onlookers, who shared the duty of holding up the drip bottle (the trolleys were too ancient to run to the luxury of a drip stand), there was no medical help in attendance. It all seemed very casual.

  Now and then I saw a sign written in Pinyin, but nothing like a Foreigners’ Clinic. I asked some staff I encountered, but they just turned their backs and giggled. I kept asking more people and was pointed upstairs. On the third floor of the building, I found a surfeit of nurses, six of whom lounged idly in an office. They giggled uncontrollably at the mere sight of me and when I spoke to them went into hysterics. But I persevered and eventually they tried to find someone who could speak to me. The nurses wore old-fashioned, clean, but unironed, white cotton uniforms that reached almost to their ankles, had sleeves down to their wrists, collars up to their chins and tro
users underneath them. Their feet were clad in any white shoes they could find, even very unprofessional looking high heels. The odd one wore a cap.

  Then a very superior and supercilious young man with a white coat and a very bad cast in one eye, materialised and proceeded to tell me off. He berated me soundly for being in the wrong place. When he paused for breath I said, ‘Now look here. I can’t help it if I am in the wrong place. I am only asking directions.’ At this he calmed down and drew me a mud map and in the end we parted friends.

  Even with the aid of the map I still couldn’t find the Foreigners’ Clinic. I did find the enormous outpatient and casualty department, but by now this was closed to business for the usual long lunch. A few hopeful patients seated on the benches that lined the walls gawked at me as I wandered around. I could have done what I liked, there was no one to stop me.

  Finally I came across a woman in uniform who ambled by clutching a large white enamel bowl slopping over with bloody water. I followed this Chinese Florence Nightingale to a desk where a bevy of nurses promptly went into convulsions of laughter at my appearance. In the fullness of time, however, one of them recovered sufficiently to call a porter and put me in his charge saying, ‘You go.’ I went. Back again to where I had started. The porter and I came to a building which sported an English sign – Department of Gerontology! My guide led me into the first Geriatric Clinic I have had the misfortune to visit as a patient – I admit that the first bloom of youth has long since fled my cheek, but I don’t think I qualify for aged care just yet. At the far end of the Geriatric waiting room we came to a sign that announced – Foreigners’ Clinic. So there was one all the time! It was just that almost no one in the hospital knew about it.

  The Foreigners’ Clinic was empty. The porter knocked on a door and opening it revealed a nurse laid out on an examination couch having her siesta. He shook her awake. No feeble cries for help from a distressed patient would summon these stalwart ministering angels. The nurse opened the door of an adjoining room to disclose a very large, very handsome, male doctor – also asleep on a couch. He was not thrilled to see me. He quickly found a female doctor to take over. I wished I could explain that I did not mean to disturb them and would gladly wait until they were sufficiently refreshed by sleep. Handsome returned to his slumbers and the ladies – I had four in attendance by this time – did not say, ‘Wait until opening time,’ but with incredible patience, and no English, tried to find out what I wanted. I drew diagrams. I performed pantomime. I did charades. We consulted the pharmacopoeia together and they eventually worked out what I was asking for. Then they told me that they did not have it! They said to wait twenty minutes more and they would get their superior.

  While I waited I had ample time to examine the clinic. It was a spotlessly clean time capsule from the 1940s. Instruments and thermometers rested on layers of cotton wool in glass jars half-filled with sterilising fluid, wooden-framed screens leaned against the walls and metal stands held enamelled basins. There were shelves and cupboards of white painted wood and plastic flowers.

  The superior arrived. A gracious woman with a little English, she told me she might have something to offer me. After a lot of time spent writing notes and sending messages to people – the phones didn’t seem to work – she produced some literature on the drug in question for me to read. I agreed to try it and was handed over to a nurse who took me to the pharmacy where I sat on a wooden form in a long corridor until I was called to the counter and asked to contribute. The consultation had only cost a few cents for all that work, but for the exotic and rare pills, reeling with shock, I had to cough up sixty dollars.

  Outside once more I realised that the process of procuring the pills had taken two and a half hours. I taxied to the bank to restock my funds. Afterwards I caught sight of a Muck Donalds in the distance and was making a bee line for it at a hard trot when I passed a group on the footpath. Sprawled beside a wall on the busy street, with their few tattered belongings around them, were a dirty and ragged youngish man and two male children. The man held the smaller child across his knees. It seemed to be asleep, but it looked sick. He stroked its face gently, tenderly, and looked at it with such love in his eyes that I was moved. The other child lay alongside him on the ground. They looked exhausted, as though they had come far and suffered greatly to do so. They were not begging. They just sat there while all the world went by unheeding. And me with them.

  At Mac Maggot’s bright beckoning entrance it hit me that I had felt the same misery in them as I had in the badger. I walked up to the counter, money in hand, looked at the pictures of the food on the wall with the image of the sick child behind my eyes and lost my appetite. I couldn’t help the badger, but I could help him. I turned around, went back and kneeling on the ground laid the money beside the child’s hand.

  Since I had arrived in Guangzhou several days before, the weather had been cool, raining or overcast, but then a lovely spring-like day dawned. Soon children accompanied by their minders were enjoying the sunshine in Shamian Island’s pretty street gardens. I watched them playing as I waited for my lunch at the tiny table of a sidewalk café. I loved this café. A tree grew right through its centre and out of the roof. I remembered how the foyer of the hospital I had visited had also been built around a massive tree. A high glass atrium accommodated it all – branches, top, the lot. And another tree trunk went through the middle of the outpatient’s waiting room. Despite the fact that China is not very friendly to the environment, other countries could learn from the way they sometimes refuse to cut down trees.

  A young man near me at the café sipped a can of Carlsberg beer elegantly through a straw and a strong smell of petrol wafted over from the gutter where the cook and his assistant – identified by their high chef ’s hats and white aprons – laboured away trying to start the generator with a pull rope. They both wore knee-high gum boots which gave me pause to wonder how mucky it got in their kitchen.

  After lunch I walked across the bridge to the local market. It covered a lot of ground, flowing up and down covered alleys so narrow that there was only enough space to squeeze between the stalls. I struggled quickly through the reeking meat section at the entrance. Thankfully this soon gave way to the wonderful smell of herbs. They were sold dried or naturally fresh in strands or bundles. I had no idea what most of them were, but I recognised camomile. Woven into round fragrant mats, it was ready to make into tea or to blonde your hair.

  I stepped back repulsed when a vendor held out two bear paws with great claws attached. Bear paws are considered a gastronomic delicacy. Not for me, though. The medicines included dried lizards flattened into the shape of the emperor’s fan and dried, coiled snakes, repulsive and real-looking. And anything that resembled a phallus was sold as a ‘tonic’ – a euphemism for an aphrodisiac.

  In the fresh food department, I saw cages of live birds of all kinds as well as dogs, turtles, lizards and snakes. Remembering how Saint Patrick had needed to perform a miracle to clear the snakes out of Ireland, I thought that the job should have been given to the Chinese. They’d have done it quicker – they would have eaten them out. Moving on, I bought a string of fresh water pearls for a ridiculously low price and had a new strap fitted to my watch at a watchmaker’s tiny stand. Once again I unwittingly examined the contraceptives. The packets always look so inviting that they get me in every time. Then I saw numerous stalls lined with row after row of bras. Something about them seemed weird so I administered the prod test. My finger encountered a rock solid substance. Now I knew why the girls in China did not look flat chested. But wearing a bra like that must feel as though a couple of saucepan lids have been strapped to your chest.

  After twisting and turning through the market streets, I found myself in the kind of small back lanes that I enjoy. This was where the Chinese people lived, shopped and worked. I especially liked the roof-tops of the crowded and narrow houses. Some were pretty and decorated with gardens and fancy balustrades; others looked as though th
ey were about to fall off, or crumble at any minute. On many balconies piles of junk, makeshift lean-tos and the odd tree in a pot were pushed together, surrounded by any kind of fencing that could be called into use as a barricade to stop it all falling down.

  Through the hostel’s resident travel agent I learned that the nearest big town to the border into Vietnam was Nanning. I could travel to Wuzhou, which was part of the way there on the Pearl River by boat and from there boats left for Nanning. A riverboat departed from Guangzhou on the evening of the day my Vietnamese visa had been promised, so I bought a ticket. I half-expected not to be granted the visa, but it was duly handed over to me by a young Vietnamese lady in a beautiful embroidered blouse. Once again I was told that I was only permitted to cross the border at the Mon Cai Pass and only on the date set down on my visa. I was still unsure of the location, which I could not find on my map, but I thought that it was in the mountains.

  The day of the boat’s departure was again lovely, birds were singing and the sun shone brightly. I filled in the time until boarding by sitting in the park, then I did the rounds of the posh hotel lobbies in the vicinity. Some of them were tourist attractions themselves and in them I could indulge in one of my hobbies – people watching. It surprised me that hotel staff never threw me out of these places. It must have been because of my white face. It came in handy sometimes.

  Boarding the boat was easy. A helpful member of the wharf staff pointed the way and I went relatively placidly onto the vessel. There was not a big crowd of passengers and there were smooth ramps I could roll my wheeled luggage down. But the boat was so small that at first I thought it was a day-tripper. It had only two decks and a cargo hold below. Immediately I stepped over the gang-plank and onto the deck, however, I was hit by the stench of the toilets. It was not a happy welcome.