Bound for Vietnam Read online

  My first glimpse of the ship was not appealing. It was old, tatty and worn and a row of fire buckets were once again the sum total of the emergency equipment. There were only a few cabins and they were grouped around an open central area, forward on the first deck. All one end of the deck above was taken up by a single large communal cabin that contained two tiers of boards with rush mats spread on them edge to edge, on which people were laid out in two long rows like peas in a pod.

  I stood on deck in the prow to watch our departure. Suddenly a bellowing, ‘Hellooooo’ came from somewhere above. I jumped a foot in the air and, turning, saw the captain above me on the bridge with a megaphone in his hand and his face split in a watermelon sized grin that displayed lots of teeth. ‘Hello,’ I shouted back. ‘How are you?’ he roared and laughing loudly blew a tremendous blast on the horn. I almost fell overboard. ‘I was fine before that!’ I bawled back. He roared with laughter again and we left.

  The boat edged away from the dockside, swung out into midstream and turning downriver, set off at a good pace into the setting sun with the flow of the stream. A peasant in a faded blue cotton jacket and rope sandals crept up to watch me silently, open mouthed with awe. I tried not to do anything too interesting, shocking or entertaining, but I still held him in thrall. ‘Dabidaze’ – ‘big nose’ he finally whispered.

  When dark fell half an hour later, we were still plying through Guangzhou. We passed many barges loaded with building materials that were so low in the water it amazed me that they didn’t sink. Some actually had water washing over their freeboard. We sailed past the White Swan Hotel, festooned with lights like a fantastic Christmas tree, and on the outskirts of the city, row after row of factories.

  My cabin was very small. It contained two wooden bunks covered with rush mats. There were no mattresses or sheets, but there was a doona and a tiny pillow. The ever-present thermos and cups sat in a plastic holder on a small wooden desk.

  I located the dining room on the top deck. It was a wonder and beat the eating establishment of any other boat I had been on in China. Comfortable and well equipped with real tables and chairs, it also had windows with curtains and wall and ceiling lights, almost all of which had most bulbs working – a major achievement. There had even been a cheery attempt to brighten it up with decorations. The staff were helpful and I managed to get some food by the Look and Point method. Even the food was great. I ate the best mushrooms I have tasted since I collected them myself in farm paddocks, along with great big clumps of a green vegetable that looked like celery. I had no implements to cut the greens, so I had to shove what I could in my mouth, bite off what was left hanging out, and chomp. Very elegant. A man who spoke a few words of English and his girlfriend shared my table. They were friendly, but he smoked non-stop.

  The boat did not run to a sitting room, but after dinner a television was set up in the open space between the cabins and I was invited to watch a film. A micro-sized shop near the dining room sold life-sustaining necessities such as cigarettes, noodles, biscuits and booze, and Chinese music invaded my ears wherever I went.

  Some time after dark we stopped in mid-stream, hooted three times and a big sampan pulled out from the shore to land a dozen or so people on board our boat. From then on we stopped and hooted at intervals and each time we did passengers or goods came out to us. This operation woke me at about two in the morning and I looked out of my porthole. By the silvery light of an almost full moon I saw the river, its surface dotted here and there with the soft lights of small boats, unfolding gently between the outline of low hills.

  In the morning I could see that the riverside was terraced with rice paddies and that the hills were separated by veils of mist that lay low between their folds. Soon mist also started to roll off the river until everything was obscured and we were creeping along through a world of dense fog.

  When the fog lifted later, I saw an occasional village or town. Clusters of wooden boats nuzzled the shore at their feet; their lives were obviously dominated by the river. The Pearl River was calm and nowhere near as wide as the Yangtze, but the villages were all perched halfway up hillsides – an indication that flooding was common. And landslides must have been too. I saw a place where an entire cliff of red earth had plunged into the river. Further on, the hills became heavily wooded and barges with big loads of logs went past downstream.

  The boat’s ablution block was unisex. To wash my face and clean my teeth I had to join a medley of men and women who were busy splashing in a row of wash-basins that lined the wall. The toilets were a hole in the tiled floor, but at least they were not communal. Each small cubby hole had a half-sized swing door.

  We reached Wuzhou, a large town built high on the riverbank, at a quarter to twelve the next day. I was now back in Guangxi province. When I got off the boat I hired a quiet boy who picked up my bag and calmly took charge of me. At the top of the inevitable thousand steps, he took me to the ticket office and tried to help me to get a ticket to Nanning. It proved unavailable. The river level was too low at this time for passenger boats to navigate any further upriver, so he took me to the bus depot instead. Then he told me which hotel to go to and put me in a taxi, getting out my map and making sure the lady driver understood where I wanted to go. Despite all this extra attention, he did not ask me for more than the price we had agreed on to get up the steps, but I gave him a bonus. The people of Wuzhou seemed friendly. When I had consulted my phrasebook in the street I had drawn an instant audience and two female students emerged from the crowd and accompanied me and my helper to the bus ticket office. Here all my entourage and an obliging woman official joined forces to ensure that I got the best bus.

  The hotel the taxi took me to was almost opposite the boat dock. An old four-storeyed building, it had terrazzo floors and a wide marble staircase. Some hotel receptionists hadn’t even looked at my visa, but this one took what seemed to be forever scrutinising and deciphering it. I was given a room on the top floor. There was no lift. But it was good for my legs! When I was told that the room cost only eight dollars, I expected a grubby slum. Amazingly I found a small, spotless single room with an alcove at one end that housed a tiny but clean bathroom. The hand basin even looked as though it had been introduced to the Ajax. A large galvanised-iron bucket that appeared to be the clothes washing facility reposed in one corner and a cumbersome wooden toilet seat hung from a nail on the wall. There was also the usual hand-shower with the usual broken wall bracket from which, I had been told, hot water only flowed after seven in the evening.

  The floor of my room was covered with check-patterned tiles which gave away its secret past; it had formerly been part of an old verandah. The mosquito net coiled over the bed reminded me that I was in malaria country again, but I could not fathom why the ceiling fan over the bed had neat newspaper parcels wrapped around its blades.

  From the barred window in the alcove I looked down on the flat roofs and tiny upstairs back porches of the surrounding houses. A couple of the roofs had veggies growing in mini plots of earth. I heard a cat crying and searched for it apprehensively, fearing that it might be tonight’s tea at the restaurant below. Instead I discovered a big white moggie rubbing the legs of a woman who was tending a plot of vegetables. He was telling her that it was time for his dinner. Meanwhile, on an adjacent balcony, a small boy kung-fued a cushion that had been tied on a washing line and a man performed his ablutions in a tin bowl.

  In the restaurant attached to the hotel I was the only patron, but I was not alone. Eight staff gossiped loudly at a nearby table. After much reference to the phrasebook, one girl more enterprising than the rest brought forth a menu that had some English translations. I ordered what I thought was mixed vegetables but only received a huge plate of the green vegetable dish I had had on the boat. It looked like the weed I saw men dredging up from the river, but I seriously hoped it was not. Not after what could be seen floating in those waters.

  My dinner contained masses of garlic. I ate at least a do
zen cloves with never a thought for my poor fellow travellers who were about to be incarcerated for twelve hours in a bus with me the next day.

  In the evening I went walking for a couple of hours. The riverside wharves contained extensive covered markets and a busy night market also spread through the small back streets close to the river. Everyone seemed to be out shopping or strolling. I bought some of the many varieties of fruit that were plentiful here and, as I had started to feel a bit squiffy since eating my dinner, I bought a big bottle of pickled chilli to take as a prophylactic. No bug can survive in your stomach if you drown it in chilli.

  Returning to my room I had a wonderful hot shower and went to bed. The old iron bed springs creaked and the lumpy coils prodded me, but I slept soundly off and on despite the noise the staff made outside my door all night.

  8 Big Nose in Nanning

  By nine o’clock in the morning I had transported myself to the comfortable Wuzhou bus station down by the river. When it was time to go, I tramped down a flight of stairs to the waiting bus. It was neither deluxe nor airconditioned, as I had been promised, but it was a big improvement on the standard of comfort provided by some of the other local buses. My bags were heaved up in front with the driver, who was hemmed in with luggage by the time we left.

  At the scheduled departure time and with the bus only three-quarters full, we set off. I thought this was great, but I cheered too soon. We drove two doors further down the street and pulled into the rear of another bus depot where fifteen immense rolls of carpet, various large boxes, bundles and baggage and five passengers, complete with their breakfast and several bottles of Chinese whisky, waited. This band of hopefuls looked as though they had every intention of getting all their cargo, as well as themselves aboard. Weighty discussions with the driver ensued. Eventually he dismounted and, going to the rear of the bus, opened a small freight door that gave access to the row of seats across the back. Then, with an extraordinary amount of shouting from everybody concerned and about forty five thousand spectators, the driver and passengers pushed the stuff in. Sweating and straining they man-handled some of the rolls of carpet across the back seats, stacking them up to the roof and obliterating any chance the driver had of seeing out of the rear window. Each roll required a preamble of five minutes of shouting and screaming before it was stowed. When all but six rolls of carpet were finally aboard, I thought, Well done! But they hadn’t finished, not by a long shot. They dragged the rest to the front of the bus, hauled it in and filled the aisle. Then they put the bags and bundles on top. Lastly the passengers clambered up. Three of them sat on top of the mountain in the middle of the aisle; the other two got down on the only half square metre of floor left vacant and had a picnic with their breakfast noodles and bottles of spirit. They seemed quite unperturbed that this procedure had taken forty minutes and we were now running late.

  It took another hour to leave Wuzhou behind. At first we drove along cliffs that looked down into the river, then we were on tortuous country roads among the now familiar terraces of rice paddies. Even though there was no sun and a greyish-blue haze of pollution persisted the countryside was attractive. The peridot green of rice in the foreground, behind it sugar cane, with its lovely apple green stalks and bamboo-like flutey spikes, and in the background the blue mountains.

  The bus progressed slowly, still collecting passengers. I should have known better than to think that this would not happen just because I was on a classier sort of bus. When all the seats were filled, people sat on top of the carpet in the aisles; one girl leaned her head on the seat of the man in front of her and almost pushed him off it. He moved over to accommodate her. Another carpet dweller practically sat on top of the bloke in the seat in front of him. But no one seemed to think this behaviour was objectionable.

  At least on this bus trip the group of men who sat around me did not smoke. In fact, they kept opening windows and telling the smokers off! Apart from the young doctor I had met on the ship from Dalian, they were the first Chinese men I had encountered who did not smoke. Sitting next to me was a middle-aged man who wore glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles. We had a limited conversation in which he told me that he and his two companions, a young man and woman, were teachers. He asked if I was one too. I hoped this was because I looked intelligent.

  We stopped for lunch at a small wayside place where the locals were greatly intrigued by me. There were only two other women on the bus, and I kept a watchful eye on them, following them wherever they went in the hope that I might be led to a loo. Finally I hit the jackpot. The women went down some stairs that went underneath the roadhouse.

  As I descended the stairs I was delighted to see a row of five big pink faces look up at me, while ten bright, beady eyes drank me in with unblinking fascination. They belonged to beautiful young adult pigs as fat as butter, with healthy pointed ears and lively stupid grins. The pigs were housed under the same roof and very close to the family’s sleeping quarters, but in a spot with much more light. I am very fond of pigs. Breeding them and keeping them as pets changed my misconceptions about them. I now know that they are intelligent, clean, loving and affectionate. It made my day to see those cheery little souls.

  Later this day our bus was halted by roadworks in a village where a street market was in progress. We stopped beside the meat section, and judging by the amount of trotters present, the meat was mostly pig. Slabs of bloody animal flesh, exposed and covered with multitudes of flies, lay directly on the wood of dirty old trestles and was being handled by passers-by. They picked it up, played with it, put it down and moved on.

  Hours passed in the bus as we climbed gradually towards the mountains, I knitted, read and refrained from drinking too much. There had been one stop for relief a few hours after lunch. The driver pulled the bus up beside a field of sugar cane and all the men dashed into it. There was no way I was joining them. Not only for reasons of decorum– it was broad daylight – but also because sugar cane is a notorious harbourer of vermin and I had just read that millions of reptiles resided at the snake farm near Wuzhou. One million a year are sent from there to the tables of restaurants all over China, Hong Kong and Macau. Working out that they had to get those snakes from somewhere around here, I decided that there was no way I was putting my bottom anywhere near the ground in this district. I let the men have the sugar cane all to themselves.

  The bus was equipped with a video machine, but thankfully we were not subjected to the usual Kung Fu film. Of all the unlikely items, we were shown an Asian beauty contest. The female contestants were dazzling, but they all looked the same, like clones of Joan Collins straight out of Dynasty. Like over-dressed Barbie dolls weighed down with masses of gaudy jewellery, with hair that resembled fairy floss that had been glued into solid shapes with litres of spray, and faces that were plastered with pounds of paint, they wore clothes that were pure soap opera; brilliant coloured shiny material bountifully covered with glitter. In the talent section, the contestants were brought forward to perform like monkeys. One danced the tango, one sang and one did a bit of karate. It was the sort of degrading affair that feminists condemn, and in this case I would have agreed with them.

  I imagined that we would stop for another meal towards evening, but as it began to get dark we started climbing very steep hills and there was no village in sight. The bus ground on, up and up, passing other broken down or overturned buses along the way. We had almost reached the top of the mountain chain and I was congratulating myself on choosing a superior sort of bus, when a tremendous, clattering crash reverberated underneath us. It sounded as though something very big had fallen off the bus. We stopped and after half an hour of much shouting and carrying on with flash-lights, the driver climbed back in and we started off again very slowly. Now we had no headlights and in total darkness we were descending downhill extremely steeply, with the driver braking often as if he could not see what was ahead. I prayed fervently that what had fallen off the bus was in no way connecte
d with the brakes or steering. Careering along in this uncertain, but precipitous manner, we zoomed down a long way, until we came to one of the many toll gates that were found on these roads. Here we shuddered to a final sickening halt. With the help of all the available men, the bus was pushed to the side of the road, and we were left sitting there in the frigid black of night.

  After about an hour, a small local bus came along. My schoolteacher friend went out to look at it and came back indicating that I should go with him. I had no idea where, but it was now raining heavily and anything seemed better than spending the night on a mountainside in the freezing cold. Half of the other bus passengers got up and left, so I followed. My friend had saved me a seat in the new bus and I was poised in mid-air, with one foot on the step, when a man shoved me aside and knocked me over. I went down in the mud, in a tangle of bags. This man wasn’t being intentionally rude, he just didn’t think. When he heard me shriek as I fell to the ground, he turned around, dusted me off and helped me onto the bus. Then, to add insult to injury, a conductor arrived and made me pay another fare.

  Bumping along towards Nanning at the thirty kilometres an hour that was the maximum speed this latest conveyance could muster, I had plenty of time to be grateful to it, boneshaker though it was. Although it sounded like a sick chaff cutter, it was transport and it seemed to be going in the right direction. I looked out of the window but could see nothing. We were now on a small back road and outside there was only an inky void.

  When we reached Nanning, I discovered that the teachers had decided to take me under their wing. Looking at my map, they agreed that the Airport Hotel I pointed to would be suitable. Ignoring my assurances that I would find it myself, they carried my bags to a taxi and the young woman came with me. At the hotel I tried to pay the taxi fare, but the girl, who was going to continue on in it, refused to take any money. I was absolutely floored by the kindness of these people.