Thursday, 15/11/2012 – 154 A.D.
to Friday, 16/11/2012 – 155 A.D.
It’s 760 miles to Shanghai,
We’ve got four tubes of Pringles,
The wind’s getting up,
The rain’s coming down,
It’s November,
And we’re wearing shorts.
Hit it!
Not quite. First I
had to get up and deal with a toilet that suddenly decided to stop refilling
its cistern. It’s probably five months of travellers’ suspicion getting to me,
but my paranoia was telling me that this was some trick the Chungking Mansions
play – they flick a switch, a pipe blocks, the toilet doesn’t work, and they
charge you for breaking it. Then I slapped myself and returned to reality. With
a bit of jiggling and some temporary filling from the shower, that bog was up
and running again in no time at all. Are there many career opportunities as a
plumber? Might look into it when I get back.
[Don't forget that it also doubles as a shower room!]
Checking out of
Chungking proved to be an uncomplicated affair, though descending ten flights
of uneven stairs with full backpack wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. I
found my tri-lat-quads aching heavily afterwards. Fortunately the subway was
just around the corner and it was only one stop to Hong Kong’s main railway
station, the funkily-named ‘Hung Hom’. There was the usual checking of baggage
and big waiting game before several hundred Chinese people and two Englishmen
surged forward to board their locomotive.
Coach 6, berths 19
and 20 were our beds. No soft sleepers for us, this time we’d be doing things
the hard way, quite literally. The main differences between soft and hard
sleepers are that the softies only have four people to a berth (not six),
there’s a door to close them off from the rest of the carriage and there are
lots more hooks to hang your belongings from. Tim and I had opted for the two
top bunks to be out of the way of any hustle and bustle going on below us. And
this plan pretty much worked, the only issue being the lack of headroom, which
Our Kid didn’t mind too much, but I was starting to wonder how many bumps I’d
get under my newly-trimmed hair after banging my head on the ceiling for the
third time.
[Oooh, it's a long way down!]
From the get-go
the whole carriage was filled with what sounded like a thousand chattering
Chinese voices – why do they all speak so loudly? Don’t get me wrong, they’re a
friendly bunch, making amusing gestures through body language (NOT with their
middle finger) when the spoken language barrier proves too difficult to break.
Directly below us we have a middle-aged married couple. She spent ten minutes
at the start of the journey talking to whoever drifted past our berth, then got
under the duvet and slept for virtually the whole journey. She snored as well,
but that bothered Tim much more than it did me. Her husband is a quiet chap
with a tache who seems unable to settle, hovering here and there, but never
looking comfortable. He’s okay though. On the bottom two bunks are a couple of
Chinese ladies of advancing years who seem friendly, but not well-versed in
English. We’ll call one of them…I dunno, Margaret. You’ll find out later why she
needs a name, any name. There she is in the picky below (clue – the legs aren’t
hers).
The train journey to Shanghai would take about 19 hours, so it seemed a bit wrong to spend all of that time up on my bunk in the roof. So I hung out for a while at the little table in the aisle, which was above the thermos flask of hot water provided for the passengers. These Chinese folks sure love their tea and they tend to drink it from jars, often with lots of green floaty bits at the bottom. To help the tea go down, some member of the railway staff pumps some pretty bizarre music through the speaker system – traditional Chinese instrumentation meets, errr, traditional English tunes, e.g. the classic boogie-fest that is Greensleaves. I had one of those mad moments staring out of the window and thinking I was on an 800 mile train trip across the vast eastern land that is China and listening to a piece of music supposedly written by a 16th century king of England. I had to reach for my iPod soon after that and bang on a bit of Motorhead to keep me grounded.
[Everyone who is anyone hangs out in the aisle.]
Tim came down to
join me for a few games of cards, but once the darkness arrived and the scenery
disappeared there wasn’t much more to do than head back up to the bunks and
expand our knowledge through the medium of film. Tim had dared me to watch Love actually and I’d dared him to watch
In Bruges. We both rose to the challenges,
with mixed results. Unfortunately Tim decided to call it a night about 22:30,
and he wished me a sound sleep and rolled over to head for slumbered oblivion.
I was a bit taken aback because of how early it was, though I didn’t know at
the time that he’d had a rotten sleep the night before. Still, I hadn’t
finished Love actually (long film,
actually!) and I wasn’t in the least bit tired. Think about it, Jimbo, what
have you done today – checked-out of a hotel and got on a train! No wonder
you’re wide awake!
By the time the
film finished, I realised that no one else in the entire carriage was talking,
or if they were, they were no longer talking at typical Chinese volume. Even
Margaret and her friend down below had been silent for some time. Suddenly I
felt guilty for being awake and needing to climb down the three bunks to go and
clean my teeth before bed. I figured I better do it before it got any later,
but there was no way I’d turn the lights out just yet, I’d watch a bit of Boardwalk Empire before I rolled over to
sleep in my two foot wide bed. Getting semi-undressed and into my sleepsheet
was a challenge and a half and I probably woke the chap below me, if he wasn’t
already sleeping (his wife was happily snoring away). And so, about ten minutes
after settling down to watch the netbook again, I saw my day bag stored
precariously on the luggage shelf, at least six feet away from me, start to
move. It was starting to move because I’d dislodged it from its secure spot
when I’d shoved my boots into the tiny available hole in the luggage space. Now
my expression turned to horror as I watched in slow motion as it toppled from
its place high up on the shelf…
…fell quietly
through the air…
…and crash-landed
far below on the carpeted floor with a thud, right next to Margaret, waking her
with a start. It almost hit the poor woman slap-bang in the face! I felt
extremely sheepish as I reached for my jeans and tried to work out what the surprised-yet-hushed
Chinese voices were saying below me. I have learnt one word in Chinese since
being in this country: “share-share” [written phonetically] – it means thank
you. And all I could frantically whisper was, “share-share-share-share-share-share…”
Margaret seemed cool about it and husband handed the bag up to me, accompanied
by lots more share-share-ing from my ashamed lips. From then on, day bag went
beneath my pillow and I turned everything off – lights, laptop – though not my
mind for a while.
Sleep did become
me, though it unfortunately eluded Tim again for most of the night. He said he
was kept awake in the early hours by someone sitting in the aisle slurping
noodles rather audibly. I woke up about 09:00, but didn’t get up `til quite a
bit later when it seemed like everyone was packing up to get off. Didn’t really
want to face Margaret again, but I did need to go to the Gents. While waiting
for the toilet to become available, I got talking to a nice young lady who’d
previously lived in the USA and therefore could speak the lingo pretty well. I
never got her name, but I cheekily got her to translate my apology to Margaret
when she appeared in the aisle with case all packed – bless her, she laughed it
off with a big smile and I believe Anglo-Chinese relations suffered little for
the whole affair.
Upon stepping onto
the platform at Shanghai Central Station, one thing was obvious – it was
cooooold! Yes, you lot back in England are grinning from ear to ear to read
that I am now experiencing the suffering you’ve endured since that last warm
day in August! No more single layers of clothing for us, that was for sure. But
it got me thinking – on this whole trip, there have probably been only a couple
of places where the temperature was just right. Although it’s recent memory,
Hong Kong was spot-on, New York was okay (apart from when on the eight floor), Chiang
Mai was fine at night (but not during the day), San Francisco was fine during
the day (but not during the night) and somewhere around the Queensland-New
South Wales border conditions were perfect. But here in Shanghai the skies were
grey and the rain was drizzling down. And things got worse when the customs
lady confiscated the four apples I’d bought in Kowloon – “They are forbidden,”
she quite rightly said. Man, I haven’t had a decent Golden Delicious in months!
Our first stop was
to the station’s ticket office where we really needed to book ourselves some
beds on the night train to Beijing in four day’s time. Should we go for hard
sleeper again, as opposed to soft? It was a case of price versus number of
bumps on my head. Yep, you guessed it – price wins every time. We located the
designated English-speaking counter, but were told that we could not book beds on that train until 18th November. Okay, whatever you say.
We’ll be back! With a vengeance.
The Shanghai
subway system is cheap, extensive and efficient, just like those in most major
Asian cities. And what do we know about Shanghai? For one thing, it’s
absolutely vast – 23 million people in the greater metropolitan area. It was
known as “The whore of the orient” in its early days before different segments
of the city were handed out to be run by various nations such as the British
and French at the turn of the 20th century. Anyone who’s seen the
film Empire of the sun will know what
happened when the city was taken by the Japanese in the 1930s and for the next
50 or so years Shanghai wasn’t really much to shout about. But since then it’s
turned itself into an Asian economic powerhouse that can rival, nay potentially
surpass, Hong Kong for financial clout. But for now we just wanted to get from
A to B on the underground, B being the Shanghai Celadon Theme Hotel.
Said hotel was
okay – very shabby reception area, room adequate, but set out on a nice little
veranda which would be fab in the spring or summer, but a bit crap under
doom-laden skies. To keep things simple we had one of our tactical lunches
(i.e. pot noodles filled from the kettle) and got ourselves settled in yet
another hotel room. But we simply had to do something with the day, so we
decided to head over to the nearby Old Town where I’d seen online that there
was a tourist information place where we could pick up a free map (the hotel
reception had run out). And speaking of going online, this country has certain
restrictions on plenty of websites, some of which are incredibly popular.
There’s always a back door to be found, but when that door’s left ajar you
never know who could be looking in at what you’re doing. I’ll say no more, lest
we get a sudden knock at the door (which will have been locked, not left ajar!)
The drizzle level
had risen a notch when we went outside, our secondary mission being “to explore
and get a feel for the area”, but who wants to do that when they’ve got wet
hair? After a walk that was longer than what we thought it would be, we found
the area where the tourist info place should be, only it wasn’t there. Instead
we did an about turn, pausing only for me to buy a couple of apples (not Golden
Delicious) from a nearby Tesco Express – any port in a storm!
Back at the hotel
room we dried out, the aircon system now generating hot air for a change. For
tea that night Tim looked up a restaurant a couple of stops along the subway,
as the immediate area doesn’t seem to cater to our kind of palettes, i.e. we
want our food to digest, not come straight back up. And with raincoats on, we
headed out to the area west of the hotel known as The French Concession, which
unsurprisingly was the bit of Shanghai run by the French all those years ago.
Try as we might, we couldn’t find the place, but that was typical for this day,
a day in which we’d tried to book train tickets, acquire a map, locate a
tourist info place, stay dry and find a particular restaurant, but achieved
none of those things. Instead we slipped into a nearby Thai place and wrote the
day off as, well, one of those days. Apparently it’s going to be dry the next
few days we’re here.
And after getting
the subway back and reaching the hotel room, we both changed into our tracksuit
bottoms…first time since New Zealand!
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