Long train runnin` / I can't stand the rain

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 18^th 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 20^th 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!

Tomorrow comes today

Tuesday, 13/11/2012 – 152 A.D.

Today it is five months since we got up at three in the morning, left a dark Southport and got on that aeroplane at Manchester. Five months??? You could have a baby in that time! Well, not quite. But it’s still a while. Are we drifting aimlessly without purpose, or are we focused on wisdom through purpose? You decide.

We’re getting up later and later, it was always bound to happen. Now the alarm tends to go off about 08:30, but it’s nearer 09:00 when we resign ourselves to rising and going to face the bathroom designed for Lilliputians. Soon it will be midday before we even bother to shake a leg. Oh, the sloth! Oh, the wallowing! Oh, the guilt! Give us a break – we’ve been on the road for five months. And when we did finally crawl out of our pits…we did a bit of admin. Groundhog Day!

[Can you tell what it is yet?]

[That's right, it's the top of the nearby mosque.]

Today we wanted to have a walk around Kowloon and see what it had to offer. Markets. Four of them actually. I was starting to get a bit twitchy about turning up in Shanghai and freezing my bits off, so was keen to check out which winter garments were currently in with Hong Kong market traders. Not many, as it happened. November isn’t winter as far as they’re concerned (is it technically Autumn in England as well?) so the stock was still mostly light clothing. Any of the kind of puffer jackets that Tim is after didn’t yet contain sleeves – apparently they’ll be coming a bit later.

[I do hope Tim is checking out the market stall's goods, rather than this woman's...]

We had lunch at a Chinese fast food chain known as the Café De Coral, and bloody good it was too, both for taste, value and size of portion. I had some kind of diced pork and sweetcorn with rice dish, but Tim’s spicy beef with a cheese sauce looked even better. If you ever find yourself over here and fancy some quick and convenient Cantonese cuisine, then check it out. After feeling really full, it was quite tough walking back through the fish market, where all kinds of marine life swim about in front of you, just waiting for you to tell the stall owner that you want fish X slaughtered for your tea that night. Plus the live frogs crammed together in a net was a bit of an unsettling sight.

After that came the “Goldfish Market”, which was basically just a street lined with pet shops. At least I think (make that hope) that the animals were meant for pets, rather than for any other purpose. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of the cute little kittens and ker-azy little puppies playing with each other because we were politely told no photos, but before that I was able to capture the sight of all tortoises great and small…

Further along in Kowloon, down Shanghai Street, which is known as one of the most traditional streets in the city, we saw that part of the road had been cordoned off by police and lots of people were looking up at one of the buildings. Was someone about to jump? Was a loose aircon about to fall from its precarious brackets? Was the Hong Kong police budget underspent and they needed to balance the books by using up expensive hazard tape? Dunno. We stayed and watched for a bit, but when you don't know what's going on it gets boring after a while.

At the end of Shanghai Street we came to Kowloon Park, which features all of the modern parky amenities you'd expect from a place like Hong Kong. And regular readers of this blog will know just how much Timbo and I lurve strolling through parks. Tim is also very much into his photography, but unfortunately while strolling through the park he was struck down by a very strong case of lens envy:

That’s just a ridiculous size, isn’t it? Speaking of size, my follicles were still getting a bit long and, as I hadn’t really done a great deal with the day, I decided I should mark it with a haircut. Rather than pick out a specific place, I simply headed for the nearest barber’s pole I could find. The place was several floors up and had “salon” in the name, but I figured they cut bloke’s hair as well. And they did, even though I was the only bloke in there, though all of the choppers were men. I managed to negotiate myself a price because I didn’t want a shampoo or blow dry, but even with the lesser amount I realised I probably should have got the locks cut in Vietnam as it would have costs me a fraction of the price. But to be fair to the lad who gamely snipped away, he worked to strict precision. Unfortunately though, he didn’t speak much English, and that had been the main reason I’d waited `til Hong Kong. Every time he asked me something and I replied, he shouted, “Vincent!” and senior-snipper Vincent  arrived to translate my requests for more off the top, not so spiky at the sides, etc. But all in all, I was pretty pleased with the end result.

Upon returning to Chungking Mansions I found the following burning slowly outside of the door to our section of the building:

A fire hazard? Possibly, so I blew it out. Then I realised it was part of the Indian festival of lights celebrations.

After five months on The Road around the world, I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Diwali from Hong Kong!

Wednesday, 14/11/2012 – 153 A.D.

The journey down the stairs in gorgeous Chungking Mansions…

We went back to one of the markets we hit yesterday. I had seen a jacket that fitted okay, but which I’d ummed and aaahed about. Tim wanted to buy some trinkets which I won’t mention in detail in case you find them presented to you in wrapping paper in a month and a half. And can I just mention that we are yet to see one advert for Christmas on television – bliss! As for the jacket, well, I tried it on again and it didn’t seem to fit quite as well as yesterday – must have slept at a funny angle. I wasn’t going to go any higher than 200 Hong Kong Dollars and the stall owner wouldn’t budge below 300 HKD (she even turned her back on me at one point – a sure sign I’d gone into the haggling far too low). In the markets here we’re constantly seeing stall owners chasing after people with lower prices, but this one was playing hard ball. Tim found several of his purchasing efforts frustrated as well. I guess this isn’t Cambodia and the Hong Kong traders don’t have to take as little as they can get!

It may sound like Tim is always buying trinkets and things – he is. This afternoon he sent a load of them back in a cardboard box, which I helped him pad out with a couple of things. That’s the third box now that we’ve sent back across the seas to Southport. May it arrive safely! What to do with the rest of the afternoon? Pick a museum, any museum…erm…let’s visit the Space Museum, as we haven’t visited one of those so far on our trip. Although we hadn’t known beforehand, the Space Museum turned out to be free on Wednesdays – great success! And very informative it was too.  

[A monolith from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey? Nah, just a skyscraper `neath the November sun.]

Come the evening we returned to the place where we started our Hong Kong journey – down by the harbour, looking out at the night time skyline. At 20:00 every day something takes place called A symphony of lights which features a light show from the tops of some of the skyscrapers backed by music. And it was a bit crap really! Well, it was okay, but there was no grand finale and the music was a bit cheesy. Plus when you’ve seen 4^th of July fireworks by the Mississippi in New Orleans then you set your standards a little higher than what we saw tonight. But the crowds didn’t seem too disappointed. And I wasn’t disappointed with Hong Kong in the slightest. It’s a place with something for everyone, where modern meets traditional, and you can get cheap electronics by the bucket load. And Chungking Mansions wasn’t that bad after all, but I will not miss being asked the following questions by dodgy-looking blokes at least ten times whenever I come and go from the building:

“Tailor-tailor-tailor?”

            Should have said, “Got a suit in Hoi An, mate. At least I think I did.”

“You want watches – genuine copies?”

            Should have said, “How can you have a “genuine copy”? Think about it…”

“Hello, Sir. Something special?”

            Shouldn’t have said anything…didin’t say anything!

That’s it for the Hong Kong Hustle, bring on the Shanghai Special!

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry (part 2)

Saturday, 10/11/2012 – 149 A.D.

So, we had arrived in the Chinese city of Nanning mid-morning after a night of broken sleep crossing the border from Vietnam. Our ultimate destination was Hong Kong, but we’d have to go via the city of Guangzhou and unfortunately we hadn’t been able to buy advance tickets while in Vietnam. One look at the queues for the ticket booths and we turned away in shock – they were out the door and we were still to properly wake up. The only way into the station is if you have a ticket, so we had little option but to drag our luggage to the top of the steps up to the building to get a bit of fresh air and plan our strategy. 

You see the guy at the bottom of the second picture looking at me as I am taking it? Imagine sitting on the steps as a large city’s Saturday morning rail users pass by and three out of four of them look out you in that way. Okay, so we were the only blondies, the only Caucasians, the only ones in shorts and the only ones sweating. And we’ve stood out in many countries, but in this place I was really aware of it. I’d read that people in China would be curious, but it got to the point where one young man took out his phone and slowly took a picture of us, fully aware that we were looking right at him as he did it. Now I know how animals at the zoo feel! We had to move off the steps and inside when the rain came, but we still couldn’t get inside the station proper without a ticket. And how were we going to get one of those? Well, first we needed money, and we’d seen a couple of ATMs nearby. We’d done our research and knew that Construction Bank of China was the one to use as it was part of the global alliance and we wouldn’t have to pay as many fees. But these cash machines were for a different bank – we figured what the hell, in these circumstances we’d take the hit. Not so, for the ATM wouldn’t take out cards.

The rain seemed to be stopping, so I sent Lieutenant Tim off on a daring mission to find a machine across town that liked Barclays connect cards. That left me leaning outside the wall of the small supermarket and guarding the bags as the people continued to pass and stare without any sort of discretion. Some of you regular readers may have worked out that the name of every post in this blog is taken from a (reasonably) popular song. Seeking solace from my iPod, the first tune that came on was Bob Dylan’s It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry – very apt, I thought! That was easy, but sometimes I spend hours lying awake at night trying to decide what to call the latest post.

After 45 minutes of me thinking he might have been picked up by the Nanning police for jaywalking, Tim returned with 100 yuan for each of us. Great – now we can buy the tickets…but what if the dude behind the desk speaks no English, as is quite a likely scenario from the research we’ve done? Before she’d left, bless her, Nina had pointed out to us on the timetable which train was the one to Nanning, so I figured that if I wrote out the characters in my best Mandarin script then at least ticket officer might respect me for trying before sending me away empty handed.

[James makes sense of this...]

 [...by writing this.]

Do you like the little piccy of the bloke lying down? That was to show we wanted beds, rather than seats. However, I had no idea how to differentiate between soft and hard sleepers! Leave that one up to Fate. Fortunately the queues for tickets were now greatly reduced since an hour ago and we didn't have to wait in line for long. We chose a bloke who for some strange reason we figured might have a smattering of English. To be fair, the transaction ended up going a lot smoother than we thought, but when I made the universal symbol for sleep (hands together, head to one side) he laughed and indicated there was no way that was going to happen, instead touching his seat to indicate that's exactly what we'd get. Fair enough, we knew these trains could sell out and bookings should be made as early as possible. Still, we'd slept on Greyhound buses many a time, so this shouldn't be too different. And with job done, I left Tim with the bags and went for a well-earned wander.

Our train was at 17:25, but come 14:00 we'd had enough of what Nanning had to offer, which wasn't much. As far as we could see it was a concrete jungle with no real charms to its centre. Therefore we held our tickets high and went into the station per se, first passing through baggage scanning, then personal scanning, and showing our tickets to about four different people. One railway worker rushed up to ask us, in pretty good English, where we were going. She pointed us to the right waiting room, as if she was the token foreign assistance person, but it was refreshing to hear someone speaking my mother tongue so well in a place like this. And waiting room 3 was a place choc full of people. There were no seats available, but there was hot water on tap, so at least I could eat the pot noodle I'd brought with me - hot food! Makes a change from crisps and dounts! 

Both of us dozed on and off as people came and went around us. Come 17:00 the crush for the platform began and we showed our tickets for the umpteenth times, just wanting to get on that train, sit back in our seats and chill the hell out, safe in the knowledge we were on the way to Guangzhou. Then we got on the train…it was bad…it was very, very bad. It wasn’t exactly third class, i.e. the seats were not rough wooden benches, but it was like a carriage out of a circus train. There were too many people, not enough room and far too much noise. After inching our way down the narrow aisle we found our seats – sofa-like chairs with three people on either side of a tiny table, no arm rests to divide seats and vertical backs that provided minimal comfort. There was no space on the overhead racking so we had to shove our big bags under the chairs, our sofa seat mates taking a while to realise that’s what we were trying to do. I thanked The Road that it was my turn for the window seat, but I did feel sympathy for Tim sandwiched between me and an old woman who stared blankly into space as chaos reigned around her.

[Brave faces, pain behind the eyes.]

The train starts up and somehow the carriage comes even more to life. I get the feeling that everyone else knows each other, though this is surely impossible. The chattering is constant and there are plenty of babies strategically positioned here and there who will certainly cry at some point on the journey. Maybe for the whole journey? Some guy a couple of tables down who looks like he’s toiled hard in the paddy fields all his life plays an mp3 at high volume – some kind of live comedy show with screeching woman and canned laughter, yet not one person tells him to turn it down. Every table has a small silver tin upon it. We put our heads together and work out it must be a bin, but the kind of bin where the rubbish just sits there looking up at you, rather than tidied away nicely within the all-concealing black sides of a bin liner. If the older generation start using them as spitting trays them I’m sleeping in the restaurant car! You may by now have guessed that we are the only westerners on the whole train. 

Opposite us are three young guys, and the one directly opposite me has his head in his hands. After a while he gets up, then after a couple of minutes returns to grab his things and is never seen again. I notice other people walking down to the end of the carriage with all of their luggage and not returning. Somewhere there must be a few available beds going, but I cannot face the language barrier to try and negotiate one. Besides, with bloke opposite me having gone, Tim nips across to take his seat. This gives me more room on my side and he gets the window. Plus as brothers we’re happy to partake in legroom battles, whereas me and the guy who just left were already off to a tricky start. It’s not long into the journey before the train manager walks down the carriage taking the details of peoples' tickets. But when Tim and I reach for ours, he waves us away – does he think we’re no trouble, or does he have some more worrying surprise planned for us?

As you can from the above shot, people became interested when we started playing cards, even sneakily looking over the back of the seat to see what Tim had in his hand. Some people stopped walking up and down the carriage to watch us take part in our 52 card wizardry. I did at one point wonder if they thought we were gambling – illegal in China – but there was no money on the table, so I figured we were okay. Just as we were finishing our third game of “spit-speed-slam”, the train pulled up at some anonymous station and a stern-looking member of the police got on. This guy wasn’t interested in tickets, he wanted to see everyone’s passports. Once he reached us, we both breathed a collective sigh of, “Not again, we’ve just put them in our bags which are stored away!” and he picked up on this. “Where you from?” he bellowed. “England,” we replied. “Okay,” and onward he went, once again not bothered. Either we weren’t considered a threat and had free passage, or the secret police were already watching us.

Upon finishing cards it was only about 8 o`clock and we’d be on this train for nearly another ten hours! Neither of us fancied cracking open the laptops in this pressure cooker environment, which left us with iPods and books. There was also the option of going to sleep, but things were still a little lively, even though we were both pretty knackered. And besides, there were uniformed young women going up and down the train shouting about the various products they were selling, an example being shoe shine wax, which they were happy to demonstrate for free, though they got few takers. But despite that, it wasn’t long before my eyes became hazy over Elmore Leonard’s words and I had to fold up the book and blow into the inflatable pillow. 

I slept the kind of crappy, broken sleep that you always sleep when you’re on public transport and unable to relax to the state of REM. Every now and then I’d twitch awake as one person shouted or someone else sneezed. Eventually I worked out that it was easier to get some kip with my head on my arms as they were folded over on the small table. At various points I awoke to find that others had gone to the land of shuteye, that every now and then there was someone else new asleep next to me as people shuffled around in their seats for gawd knows whatever reason. At one point there was a young child laid out horizontally with the mother nowhere to be seen. Call me paranoid, but I made sure my hand was firmly on my wallet as I drifted off again, and every time I awoke I looked up to see that my day bag was still above me in the overhead storage.

At about 03:00 I remember waking up for the zillionth time and realising that for the first time ever since leaving Nanning not one person was speaking. Yep, everyone was either sleeping or attempting to, and some opposite me were getting quite sleepy indeed…

Awwww! Night-night!

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry (part 1)

Friday, 09/11/2012 - 148 A.D.

It was finally time to leave Hanoi. Never again would we stay five nights in a city, as our remaining time quickly starts to diminish we’ll be getting by on two and three nights in some places. But, if you read the last post in which I moaned about being in Hanoi too long, you’ll agree that in some cases less is definitely more!

Above is the typical just-about-to-pack-up-and-leave-hotel shot, but in this case it would be more than 48 hours before we’d have hotel beds again. Ahead of us lay an epic journey across 543 miles and three separate countries (sort of). But as usual we had to spend the afternoon wandering around waiting for the moment to leave. Using the GPS on Tim’s phone, we picked out any bits of greenery that we hadn’t visited and were within walking distance, then checked them out. We even paid 4,000 dong each to enter one park, but as parks go it was pretty damn good. During recent times like this when we sit down on a bench to take in the scene, we often find ourselves discussing what we plan on doing when we return to “normality” – the type of conversation we’d never have entertained in June, July, maybe even August.

["What will you do when you go back?"

"Probably open a bakery. And raise some kids."

"You need a girlfriend first."

"Oh yeah."]

If there is one enduring image that I shall miss of Vietnam then it's the little plastic furniture out on the street. They just love to sit on those tiny chairs and stools to drink their preservative-free gutrot beer. While walking to the park I accidentally kicked one of these stools over, which ricocheted into a another on which a guy's beer was balanced. It spilled over the top a little, but not enough to require my buying him another one. He may have been too drunk to notice me doing it anyway. Switching from drink to food, we took a late lunch at Gecko, the small cafe that we've been to three times during our time here - leaving aside the KFC's, etc., that's a record for anywhere on the whole trip.

After a trip to the supermarket to stock up (gonna be eating crap for the next two days!), it was time to order a taxi for 18:00. Trains heading for China don't go out of the main Hanoi station, they leave from a small station six kilometres to the north east called Gia Lam. The slow crawl through the rush hour traffic was made all the more exciting by the tremendous flashes of lightning in the distance. However, there’s something not so tremendous about flashes of lightning in the distance, i.e. they stop being in the distance and start flashing where you are, along with the thunder and rain! But no, Hanoi held out yet again and, to be fair to this city, our stay here was the driest we’d had since arriving in Singapore.

Gia Lam station was a yucky little place with the kind of waiting room that could challenge the serotonin levels of even the happiest of clowns. We had only been in it for about ten minutes when the power cut off and the disgruntled sighs of various passengers could be heard from somewhere within the darkness. Second time Vietnam has done this to me – good job the trains are diesel and not electric! At least in this case we could blame the storm, though it wouldn’t have surprised me if a cockroach had nibbled a fusebox somewhere. After a couple of minutes some emergency lighting came on behind the ticket counter, but it did nothing to illuminate me right at the other end of the room, so I went for a walk and used up the last of my dong on some deodorant spray that may have come with a government health warning that I couldn’t read. Tim wasn’t impressed with the stench – he may not have been able to see me when I returned, but he could sure as heckfire smell me!

Gradually lights came back on here and there, before we were told to go and wait in the next room by one of the railway staff. It was here that we met Yoshi, a fellow traveller from Japan who was equalling our record by travelling for six months, though he was only going around Asia at this point. He’s done lots of travelling in his time, his job as a freelance pianist allowing him to up sticks and go when he wants to. And, at 38, he’s even older than me! Sorry, but it’s kinda refreshing after constantly running into the early 20-something party crowd. 

Yoshi was heading to Nanning, as we were, and as was the lady in the above shot. She was Chinese, very friendly and enthusiastic about chatting, but because of her iffy-level of English (though fair play to her for trying), I never quite worked out where she was from. But we had a lot of fun getting our passports out and comparing visas, a pastime that us travellers never get tired of. And then there was a cry from railway staff and passengers alike as a light in the corner of the ceiling suddenly sparked, accompanied by the strong smell of burning. So much for the electrics being correctly restored! 

Come 21:15 and it was time to board the train. As per usual, Tim and I had booked ourselves into a sleeping berth, but the sleeper berth with four beds is known as a "soft sleeper". Yoshi had booked a "hard sleeper", which is essentially the same design, but with six beds instead of four. Naturally, the price is a bit cheaper, but if you're on one of the top bunks there ain't much room between your nose and the ceiling. Just before we went to board the train, our little group was joined by Nina, a young Chinese lady from Beijing who had just done a week's travelling in Vietnam. She was also booked into our soft sleeper berth, and I'm sure she was initially thrilled to bits to be sharing it with two English lads who looked like they'd been dragged through a hedge backwards, then forwards, then backwards again. But, with no fourth person to mix things up, it was a really nice atmosphere in our little berth. Nina has a job with the World Bank and she speaks excellent English, so no communication barrier got in the way. It was extremely useful to learn all about the country we were heading to from someone who actually lives there, rather than relying on The Rough Guide or Wikitravel. In fact, I think we fired far too many questions poor Nina's way, but she seemed more than happy to converse. 

Given that we were due to be woken at 2 a.m. to go through the Vietnamese exit process, we decided after a while to stop yapping and try and get some sleep. This Chinese sleeper train was far superior to those of Vietnam. Sure, it could have used a lick of paint or a bit of modernisation here and there, but the overall feel was cleaner, plus there were nice touches like carpeted floors and flasks for hot water provided. There was overall reassurance that we wouldn’t have to go rat or roach spotting in the night! And somehow the three of us did manage to sleep, and boy could we have kept our eyes closed when that knock at the door came dead on 02:00. We only had to take our valuables and leave the train to go and sit in the catchily-named station of Dong Dang. All of our passports were surrended to be stamped collectively, then names were called out to come and collect them individually. Given that Tim and I were the only Westerners around, Nina offered to help out if the border guard struggled to read our English names. She had a point, because he did, and I’ve no idea what he called me, but I could tell it was my passport he held from the big smudge on the front.

Back on the top bunk, there was only time to get a donut down me (don’t ask!) before lying back and getting 15 minutes of slumbers. That was the time it took the train to get from Vietnam and into China. Pingxiang is where Chinese immigration facilities are situated and now we had to bring all of our luggage out with us. Not only were all bags scanned, they were also physically searched by border guards, which really slowed down the process. Still, the Chinese have been thorough so far, so why stop now? I was a bit gutted because my rucksack was packed up very tightly and if the guard went rummaging around amongst everything it was going to take me a while to get it zipped up again. Fortunately he spent most of his search patting it down, rather than going through my dirty grundies. Tim later confessed that he’d suddenly realised he had washing powder in his bag and considered rushing to the toilets to get rid of it, but then realised how suspicious that would look. Gone was the laissez-faire attitude he displayed when crossing the Singapore-Malaysia border all those weeks ago!

Come 05:45 (having jumped forward a time zone), we were back on our train and off to sleep for the third time. Shortly before arriving at Nanning we were awoken by some very loud, brutally-authentic music, probably played to make sure we were up and ready to alight the train so that it could continue running to schedule. Nanning is a city that I knew nothing about up to a few weeks ago. In fact, even when arriving here, I still knew next-to-nothing about it, yet the greater area of the city boasts over six million people! Essentially, all we had to do here was book ourselves onto a train for Guangzhou. Nina had come here for a friend’s wedding and, although she would be out all day, she offered to let us dump our gear at her hotel room where we could at least take a shower. And we politely turned down her kind offer. I remember five minutes after she’d walked away (with the hope of meeting up again in Beijing later in the month) and thinking why did we just refuse her offer? Now that we'd lost our native support, we were two English lads alone again. But we'd been alright before, hadn't we? Sure, but this was no longer the tourist zone of Hanoi, this was deepest China, and it wasn’t to be messed with. Here they didn't just have a different language, they had a different alphabet and to our nasty surprise we saw that they weren't in the habit of writing timetables in English.  

We were going to have to work harder than normal to get on that train...because if we didn't get on that train...we were in big trouble in little China!

Time out of mind

Wednesday, 07/11/2012 – 146 A.D.

Neither of us had much of a hangover from the previous evening, but we still started the day slowly. Again. A lot of my time that morning was spent reading up on China and all that we need to be aware of. Already we are about to enter another country! Two, if you count Hong Kong (which we do).

Come the afternoon we went down to the market just north east of the hotel. My mission was to by some more moody shades, and to see whatever else was on offer. It was an odd place, with 90% of the stalls over the three levels selling material and clothing. Not much room to walk between stalls either – maybe they like it that way so it’s easy for you to break something and buy it by default. The oddest thing of all was that not one person encouraged us to have a look at their wares. Normally we can’t move for the cries of, “Hello, buy something?” but at this place they just weren’t interested. Maybe it was a locals-only market and we’d brought ill fortune by setting our foreign feet inside? Don’t they know I’m the Good Luck Jimmy???

I bought some shades with ‘Porsche’ written in the corner of one of the lenses. The guy on the stall was a real piece of work and didn’t want to haggle with me…he didn’t want to look at me either, lest Bad Luck Jimmy cast the evil eye upon him! I managed to get a measly 10,000 dong off the price. We then went across town to book our tickets for the water puppet show that evening. Yes, after the disappointment in Saigon, we were finally getting to go!

There was an amusing moment across the road by the entrance to some kind of temple that sits out on the lake. A couple of Japanese tourists approached Tim with camera in hand. He assumed they wanted him to take a picture of them, but no, they wanted to have their picture taken with him! First the girl posed with him, giving it the thumbs-up to the camera, then the guy. Unfortunately I was staring off into space at that point, so I missed it. Our theory is that they thought he was some famous celebrity, but we can’t for the life of us think who!

Further down the road, behind the statue of someone called Ly Thaito, we found a flat, paved area where we could have a reasonably quiet game of licky-kicky. We managed about three minutes before a couple of young lads joined us for the craic. I’d say their skill level was a bit better than us, but a few metres away were some proper courts marked out and with nets where the real experts were playing. Honestly, these guys were good! Their rallies went on for ages and I finally realised that it’s all in the flick of the leg, none of this ridiculous all over body posturing that I do is needed to get it right. I contemplated this as I sat down knackered and sweaty afterwards.

On the way back alongside the lake, we heard sirens ringing out. The road was clear and policemen were everywhere. Along came motorbikes, security-style vans and long cars that rich folks get driven around in. Even an ambulance was tagging along, just in case. Whose motorcade was this?  Later that evening at the water puppet show, I found myself sitting next to a couple of Americans, who were keen to hear who had won the result of their election. They then told me that the motorcade was for Russian prime minister and ex-president, Dimitri Medvedev. Kind of ironic really, because we were at a puppet show, and it is often remarked that Medvedev was a puppet president for Putin.

So yes, at 20:00 that evening we went to take in the infamous water puppet show, which has been performed for generations upon generations and requires a minimum of three years training for each puppeteer. I was surprised to discover that you don’t actually get to see the puppeteers themselves, well not until the end when they come out for their round of applause. It was quite ingenious the way they operated them, though the themes of traditional courtship and rice cultivation, backed by some almost-Celtic sounding music was at times a little tough to stick with. Especially when it’s warm, dark and you’ve just had a large Tiger beer. But all in all it was a good little show and I’m glad I finally got to see it.

Thursday, 08/11/2012 – 147 A.D.

Fifth day in Hanoi, and I’ve run out of things to do! Sure, there are museums, but I can’t really be bothered at this point. Tim and I had agreed well in advance that this would be a What Carcass Day, but with him hanging out at the hotel if he fancied it and me going on my wanderings. But where to wander?

I was asked whether we were going to do some Couchsurfing in Asia and, while it’s still a possibility, it may be a bit difficult to arrange. That said, I figured I might be able to meet up with someone on the Couchsurfing website and just hang out with them for a while, buy them lunch or whatever, and get to see the bits of Hanoi that aren’t listed in the guidebooks. And so I sent a few emails out a couple of days ago and got some interest. I picked the first person who replied and thought the day was sorted. Then the night before she emailed to say she had the caught the flu, didn’t want to infect me, etc. Ha – you can’t kid a kidder! She probably bottled it, and who can blame her? Thing is, I’d had to blow out three other people because I’d decided to hook up with her and there was no time to arrange anything else. Cheers, luv! (And apologies if you really did have the flu!)

And so I spent the afternoon wandering and writing, taking the odd snap here and there. I walked around the whole of Truch Bach lake, said a little prayer at the Temple of Literature and went by the Red River which runs through the city (not the most picturesque body of water ever visited!) It was a shame there wasn’t much more to do, but even if there was, I probably wouldn’t have been up for it anyway. Maybe it’s because we’ve been here five days, or maybe it’s because we’ve been on the road nearly five months, but I think I’ve crossed a spiritual marker since we’ve been in the capital of Vietnam. When I first started this trip, the thought of returning home was alien to me – a million metaphorical miles away. But now…now we’re into November and, given what we’ve been through, lasting a month and a bit is nothing for us. Don’t get me wrong, there are things I’m looking forward to back home…some things that I am REALLY looking forward to…but now that the clock is properly ticking, I feel like I need to do more. But of what, I don’t know!

Maybe I just had a great time in Vietnam and I’m sad to leave? Before coming here it wasn’t at the top of my countries-to-visit list, but I’ve had a ball, despite cockroaches, bug spray, mini migraine and the odd power cut. The prices are great, the weather is decent, the communism isn’t a problem, the women are the prettiest I’ve encountered in all of Indochina and it’s easy to have fun and a laugh here. Cambodia was good, but Vietnam was even better, and I’m sure it’s got a fine future ahead of it. And what about my future? Nyeargh, I’ll be fine, just need to move on and keep myself focused on the present. The future can wait for a while! It is unwritten, after all.

And coming up we have two sleeper trains in a row as we cross the border into China and head for Hong Kong. Bring it on, baby! Let’s go Grayboys!