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Asia Travelogue, part 8
(Home)
The day of our arrival in Yichang
also happened to be Jane’s birthday.
Actually, Jane has two birthdays. When she was born on August 21, some
mindless government gnome entered August 18 in her birth records. (I might
be off on the exact dates.) Her parents noticed the mistake immediately,
but government officials refused to change it. If the government says you
were born on August 18, then you were born on August 18. There is no
mistake. 2 + 2 = 5. War is peace. Since then, Jane’s citizen identity
card, passport, and every other official document has
shown her birth date
as August 18. On the positive side, Jane gets to celebrate two birthdays
every year -- her government birthday and her real birthday.
Because we arrived in Yichang on August 21, Jane was
unable to celebrate
either of her birthdays with her parents. Consequently, she was anxious to
get home the following morning where her parents were waiting with fresh
shrimp chilling on ice. However, Alan and I wanted to take time to visit
the
Alan had toured it a year earlier soon after it had opened and said it was
worth seeing. He couldn’t remember where it was, so we went to the ticket
office for the cruise line and asked a lady how to get to the museum.
Without pause, she told us there was no such museum. That was an obvious
lie. Rather then telling us she didn’t know, or making inquiries, she
thought it would be easier to tell us the museum didn’t exist. She then
told us that there was a bus we could take to see the dam itself. Oh, but
we would need to purchase a permit before being allowed within the dam
area. We had already seen the dam by boat and besides, we were tired of
playing the permit game; we weren’t going to buy any dam permits.
To get from Yichang to
long bus was cleaner, more comfortable, and would get us to
The short bus was cheaper. We took the short bus.
Returning to
was comparing it to
which made it seem like
At Mike’s apartment later that evening, I met Tom and Nancy, a young
married couple from
their main reason for being in
was there primarily in search of an interesting life. Tom had recently
graduated from the Sunset School of Preaching. He and Nancy had been in
the PRC for only a few months. When I met them, they had just returned
from an unplanned trip to
A couple of weeks earlier, Tom and Nancy had gone on a long train ride
similar to mine.
she endured the entire train ride without relieving herself. They think
that might have contributed to the pains
of days later. She became so ill that she had to be admitted to a
hospital. She had developed kidney stones, which had led to a kidney
infection. She had a temperature of 104 and her doctor said she was at
risk of slipping into a comma. If you decide to slip into a comma,
Mainland
the hospital and was starting to become frightened.
transported to a modern hospital in
spending the $300 it would cost. Tom decided his wife’s life was worth
more than $300 and insisted that she be taken to
the operation went well and
about dirty sheets and greedy monks were suddenly put into perspective.
I still had a few days to kill before I needed to be back in Hong Kong to
catch my flight home, so I just relaxed in
food and did a lot of bargain hunting. Gloria escorted me to the garment
district to help me find a tailor who could make me a suit. We must have
visited at least twenty shops before I found one with fabric I liked.
Using the finest wool cloth in the shop, the seamstress made me a beautiful
suit in only two days. It cost me approximately US$65. Some other
bargains included: several polo-style shirts (US$4 apiece), pair of Tommy
Hilfiger slacks (US$6), audio CD’s (US$1.75 apiece), paperback edition of
Anna Karenina (US$2.20), various candies and teas, and a sports bag
(US$2.00) to carry all this junk in.
On my last day in
town that served as a government center when the Guomindang
was still in
power. Because many of the original buildings are still standing --
although now utilized as banks and retail shops -- it is promoted as an
architectural attraction. While the buildings certainly have more
personality than the communist-inspired boxes found in the rest of
they don’t appear to date any further back than the 1920’s.
Jane once told Alan that she has no interest in living in
she’s never seen -- because it has no history or culture. Alan pointed out
to her that the People’s Republic of
there are historical artifacts worthy of attention such as the Great Wall
and the Terracotta Soldiers, but they have no more connection to the PRC
than do the Toltec
Mounds to the
suggestion for us to visit Hung Ko.
Looking at the buildings that she
considers to be “historical”, I concluded that she
would relish any drive
through the town-square of any southern town in the
experience.
Hung Ko is also a major
shopping district. In-between the “historical”
buildings are modern retail outlets. By Chinese standards, they are mostly
high-dollar. Hung Ko is
where the well to do go shopping. Consequently,
the streets are clean and you never see people bathing themselves in
dishpans on the sidewalk. The quantity of merchandise and variety of
fashions make for an image in stark contrast to what I have always imagined
when I think of a third world communist economy. I’m sure that Hung Ko was
a very different place just a few years ago before economic liberalization,
and it is still a very different place from the countryside where peasants
continue to push plows by hand.
One of the reasons we went to Hung Ko
was to find me an original copy of
the little red book from the era of the Cultural Revolution, containing
quotations from Mao. I had found one in
assuming I could wait and purchase one in
Ko for a couple of hours, we returned to the
apartment empty-handed. On
the return bus ride, I at least managed to snap a picture of the soldier
standing under the McDonald’s umbrella. I thought about the umbrella and
all of the American brand names I had seen in the Hung Ko shopping district
and wondered how anyone can deny that
be a cellophane, mass-produced, consumerist culture, but it is powerful
enough and enticing enough to dominate the world and gradually snuff out
the “historical” district of Hung Ko. Resistance is
futile; you will be
assimilated.
I said goodbye to Alan, Jane, and Gloria and headed for
convinced me to save money by once again traveling by train. However, it
was nothing like the train to
economically advanced part of the mainland near
provides a much better quality train. It was clean, had fresh sheets, was
air-conditioned, and even had no-smoking signs (which some people ignored)
posted throughout the car. It also traveled at a faster rate of speed,
allowing it to complete the trip in a relatively brief 14 hours.
The final stop would be the city of
border from
in Shenzhen, which has benefited economically from its proximity to
Kong
or
the family sharing my bunk section was from
small children. This is uncommon in the PRC, where the one-child policy
has turned “brother” and “sister” into antiquated words.
From Shenzhen, I crossed the border into
overpass that was part of a large shopping complex, and going through an
immigration checkpoint. I then boarded the Kowloon-Canton Railway, a
commuter train that took me to the
Having recently graduated from the Alan School of Budget Traveling, I knew
not to return to the BP International House where I had previously paid
US$68 a night for a room. Instead, I went to the Chungking Mansions, where
I managed to get a private room for US$12. This is where Alan stays when
he is in
than the one found in my Lonely Planet guide:
The very mention of this name can strike
horror into some backpackers,
while others look back with a twisted sort of fondness. Creaking with the
weight of dozens of guesthouses, this enormous high-rise dump sits at
Nathan Rd.
s about the cheapest place to stay in
the Nathan Rd. entrance is the ever-present pack of shiftless indigents who
apparently have nothing better to do than eye you and your possessions
while scheming ways to score quick cash. Make your way past rows of tiny
shops -- selling everything from tailored suits to trashy novels -- to find
the lifts labeled for the block you’re headed to. This is the really fun
part. There are only two tiny overworked lifts for each 17 story block,
often giving you a choice between a long line or a sweaty walk up the fire
stairs. If the lift ever breaks down when full, God help you. . . Sooner
or later, the antiquated lifts will force you to use the fire stairs. This
could be your clearest memory of Chungking Mansions: the grime, grease and
trash that line some of these staircases seem to predate the building
itself. Adding to the fun are the occasional midnight raids by the police.
Mostly they are looking for illegal immigrants.
If your passport is at a
consulate getting visa stamps, this could create a problem . . . There have
been calls to raze Chungking Mansions because it’s an eyesore and a
firetrap. . . After a 1993 fire, there was a crackdown on safety
violations, and many guesthouses were shut down. Others survived by
raising their standards. Even so, the stairwells remain hellish and the
filth is almost surreal.
Actually, this Lonely Planet description is a bit overblown. It is true
that the trip to my guesthouse was unnerving, but the guesthouse itself was
quite nice. Through blind luck, I think I managed to pick one of the best
ones in Chungking Mansions. It was called the Park Guesthouse. The
owner/manager was an Indian lady who was cordial and seemed to take pride
in the quality of her operation. The parquet floor in the hallways
appeared to be well-scrubbed and the white-washed walls were clean and free
of marks. There was a laminated newspaper article about Chungking Mansions
tacked to the center wall. The writer of the piece was even more damning
of Chungking Mansions than Lonely Planet. I couldn’t understand why the
owner would display the article until, two-thirds of the way through the
article, I read that the only exception, the only clean spot in the toilet,
was the Park Guesthouse.
My room was just large enough to contain a bed and still allow the door to
swing all of the way open. There was a dilapidated dresser beside the bed,
but there was not enough room for a chair. There was a small TV on a shelf
above the bed. The bed was comfortable and had clean sheets. The
air-conditioner was broken, but it was a cloudy day, so I didn’t need it.
There was no shower in my room, but because most of the other rooms
contained showers, the only person I had to share the community shower with
was the owner/manager. Of course, she kept the bathroom spotless. Also,
right after checking in, she provided me with a free bottle of water and
offered to cook a package of dried noodles I had brought with me. That’s
better service than I received at the BP International House.
One good thing about Chungking Mansions was that it was directly across the
street from Shoestring Travel Agency. The only reason why I was staying a
night in Hong Kong rather than going directly to the airport to catch my
flight home was to give me an opportunity to collect my refund from
Shoestring for the lost plane ticket to
I checked into the Park Guesthouse, I decided to watch TV for a couple of
hours.
It was two o’clock when I went across the street to Shoestring. I retold
the story of the lost ticket to Helen, a Shoestring employee, and presented
her with the lost property report I had obtained from the police. Helen
told me that I should have come in before one o’clock, because that is what
time the airline closes on Saturdays. “Please come back on Monday.” When
I told her I was leaving for
she wanted to let loose a triumphant evil laugh, but she managed to keep it
suppressed. She said that as an alternative, she would fill out a refund
letter and keep it on file. When I got back to
with the reference number from the letter and ask her to process the
refund. It would then take three months to verify that the ticket was
never used and send me a check.
I’ll briefly flash forward to tell you how that turned out. After I got
back home, I called Shoestring. The woman who answered the phone told me
that it was a national holiday and that no one was in the office. The next
day, I was transferred to the Shoestring accountant. After I told my story
for the fourth time, she asked me to hold and I began hearing music. It
took me only a few seconds to recognize the tune. It was
I thought that was a peculiar choice of music, so I searched for some
meaning to it. In the South,
lost cause -- independence, the right to govern one’s self. Maybe
can identify with that. Although one does not typically describe a British
colony as “independent”, the people of
independence was lost when they were handed over to the PRC. Maybe they
now identify with the Confederate States of
remind them of what has been lost. After all, whenever you see pictures of
public rallies in eastern European countries celebrating their recently
acquired independence, it is not uncommon to spot a few people holding
aloft St. Andrew’s cross (the Confederate Battle Flag). They understand.
Okay, so maybe that theory is a bit of a stretch. More likely, the people
at Shoestring knew nothing more about
By playing it over their phone system, they thought they’d seem in touch with
American sensibilities. Maybe I
should have simply enjoyed the music and
thought about Stonewall Jackson’s bayonet defense at the battle of First
Manassas.
Actually,
the entire battle could probably have been re-fought in the amount of time I
was kept
on hold. When the accountant returned to the phone, she told me that the
airline would need to investigate the matter of the lost ticket and that
would take 18 months. Did she say 18 months? “Yes, please call back in 18
months.” She then laughed at me. I’ll go
out and buy a 2002 calendar just
so I can schedule that phone call, but I’m not all that hopeful that I’ll
ever see that refund check. [Update: I
never saw that refund check.]
After leaving the Shoestring office, I went shopping for a cheap, plastic,
digital watch. In
stamped on the back, so I thought I would find them everywhere in
Kong
Instead, all I could find were watches made in Japan. I went into a watch
store and asked for the cheapest watch they sell. They showed me a Casio
that was still out of my price range. The manager then asked me how much I
wanted to spend. When I told him, he said, “Thankyougoodbye.”
At another shop, I bought some silk ties for US$1 each. I still had some
daylight left, so I took the subway and then a mini-bus to Chuk Lam
Sim Yuen,
also known as the Bamboo Forest Monastery. Founded in 1927, it “boasts”
three of the largest Buddha statues in
something worth boasting about, unless big Buddhas
bring in big dollars.
Unfortunately, the monastery closed its doors for the day just before I
arrived. It’s just as well, because I spotted a sign that appeared to list
admission prices next to the entrance. I took a picture of a ghastly gold
statue with multiple faces and arms in the courtyard and then headed back.
The next morning, I caught a bus to the airport two hours before my
departure time. I was determined, for once, to catch my flight without a
crisis-fueled, last-minute dash for the gate. The bus ride made a ride on
a Tibetan bus seem like clinging to a boulder rolling down a mountainside --
a boulder somehow enshrouded in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. The
double-decker bus looked like it had just arrived from the factory. There
was no smoking, eating, or drinking allowed. I sat in a cushioned
high-back seat on the upper deck where I had my own adjustable
air-conditioning vents and a video monitor that allowed me to keep an eye
on my luggage left on the first level. There was a video screen that would
flash the name of each approaching stop in both English and Chinese. There
was also an accompanying audio announcement.
As I approached the airline check-in counter at the airport, I noticed that
there were no lines whatsoever. I heaved a sigh of relief and thought,
“Yes, this is what it’s like to arrive
on-time.” I laid my ticket on the
counter and the attendant said, “I’m sorry, sir. That flight has been
canceled.” I looked at the video screen
above my head. It still said
“Canceled Due to Pilot Coverage Problem”. I think that is the airline’s
way of saying the pilot has a hang-over. The attendant asked if I’d like
for them to try to get me to
through _____________. She named a place that I had never heard of and
could not pronounce. It could have been an island or the fictional name of
a planet from Star Trek. I nodded my head and said that would be fine. At
that point, she could have told me that I would be routed through
and I would have given the same response.
She gave me a slip of paper with a number on it and told me that numbers
would be called in the order of passengers checking-in. I looked down at
the paper and saw that I was number 41. Things looked bleak; I doubted
there would be 41 empty seats on the next flight to ______________. I was
asked to wait in the open area in front of the check-in counter until I
heard my number called. There were no chairs and I saw
that passengers
numbered 1 through 40 were already sitting on the floor. None of them
looked upset, so I assumed that they were either content with their numbers
or they had resigned themselves to their fate, whatever that may be.
After an hour of waiting, my number was called. They could not get me on
the flight to ________________, but they could put me on another flight to
at the other airline. I waited for another 15 minutes while she filled out
the paperwork. There were so many forms to be completed,
you would have
thought I was exporting a panda. By the time she gave me my boarding
pass, it was seven minutes until take-off time and I still had to be
processed through immigration. She had a worried look on her face and
asked, “Can you please run?” So I found myself once again sprinting for
the gate. All the other times, perhaps I was partially to blame. This
time, however, I couldn’t see how I was responsible. It’s not like I took
the pilot out bar-hopping the night before.
When I got to the gate, all the other passengers had already boarded, but
the plane had not pulled away. I gave the attendant my paperwork and he
said it was all wrong. He called the check-in counter to tell them they
had screwed up, but then told me I could board.
There was a benefit that came from all the chaos, however. For the flight
to
leather seat that reclined like a La-Z-Boy. I could fully extend my legs
and still not be able to touch the seat in front of me with my toes. I
wished I could stay in that seat all the way across the Pacific.
The
modern art gallery. The terminal which my flight was assigned to must have
only recently been put into operation because it contained little activity.
It was so quiet that it was a bit unsettling. It reminded me of Stephen
King’s novel, The Langoliers. It was a huge terminal
consisting of three
levels, but I never saw more than thirty passengers, other than those
gathering at my gate. The passengers were outnumbered by the sales clerks
working in the duty-free shops. They stood motionless in front of pyramids
of Belgian chocolates and Crown Royal, with Stepford
smiles painted on
their faces. There were no boarding announcements, so the only sounds were
of the air conditioners whirling overhead and the crunching of the new
carpet beneath my feet. Keep in mind that it was mid-afternoon.
My flight out of
checked all of the way through to
have to check my bag through customs in
I would not need to pick up my bag in
indicated that the bag was checked through to
in
my bag. When a Canadian customs agent saw me trying to leave the
international terminal with only one small carry-on bag, a red flag must
have gone up. She pulled me aside and started questioning me. She told me
that I was required to check my bag through customs there in
She asked to see my passport. When she saw how many different countries I?
d visited in the past three months, she must have
decided I fit the type of
profile usually fit by guys named Carlos. She was particularly interested
in the visa stamp from
response to her questioning about my occupation, I told her I was
unemployed. That was the final straw. “Let’s go get your bag. We’re
going to go through it.”
She escorted me to the luggage carousel and stood beside me while we waited
for my bag to appear. The luggage from the
to come off the conveyer, so it was going to be a long wait. After a
while, I took out a magazine and started reading. Soon thereafter, she
gave me back my passport and told me to forget it. Patience: the secret
weapon of any successful smuggler.
By the time my bag appeared and I made it to the domestic flight check-in
counter, my flight to
transferred to another airline and placed on a stand-by list. My name was
one of the last ones to be called, but I made it onto the flight to
It was after midnight when the plane landed. My flight to
leave until three o’clock in the afternoon. As a well-trained budget
traveler, I knew that I should find a clean spot on the carpet somewhere to
spend the night, but it had been 36 hours since I had slept and I had no
desire to spend the next fifteen in an airport. However, I did go to the
trouble of finding the number of a backpackers hotel
that had beds for
CAN$25 a night. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any empty beds. I called
a couple of hotels near the airport, but they wanted to charge me CAN$5 for
a shuttle ride. The city bus had stopped running, so I ended up walking
with two bags for over a mile along the edge of a freeway at 12:30 AM
before reaching the Travelodge. I was feeling proud of myself for saving
$5, but then I ended up paying CAN$110 for a room. With one night’s stay
in
previous month by going without showers and haggling over each bottle of
Pepsi. If Alan knew, he would turn from me in disgust.
The next morning, I took a ride on a city bus to get a look at
then I headed for the airport. When I reached
my travel agent was going to get me. I had to once again pick up my
luggage and check in with another airline, this time with a stand-by
ticket. Although it was still twenty minutes until departure time, the
woman at the American Airlines check-in counter told me it was too late to
check in baggage and that I would have to wait for the next flight. I
asked if I could take the current flight and have my bag put on the
following flight, but she said they could not separate a passenger from his
bag. Huh? That airline has separated thousands of people from their bags
without even being asked. In fact, the previous time I flew to
of DFW, they put my bag on a plane to
that I am WANTING to be separated from my bag, it couldn’t
be done.
I went to the departure gate for the next
name to be called. While waiting, I met another stand-by passenger who
told me he had been trying to get on a
morning; it was now 7:00 PM. The flights had been full all day and hordes
of stand-by passengers had been bumped forward time and again. They had
finally managed to get on an evening flight, but there was a gate change
while the man was getting a hamburger, so he wasn’t present when his name
was called. So, once again I saw that as bad as things had been for me,
they could have been worse.
My name was called and I was even given a free upgrade to first class. The
man who had been waiting since early that morning had to fly coach. Less
than an hour later, my plane touched down in
to be home.
Bonus Material!
Closing Thoughts
(a few additional observations from my trip)
Nuns (a news article giving
an account of human rights abuses in
Dalai Lama (comments by the
Dalai Lama concerning the Chinese occupation)
