We got off and headed for the shacks, the icy wind whipping our faces. I was excited to pee in private for a change. Reaching them, I saw that they had no doors. In their place was a chicane of intersecting wooden walls that led, unceremoniously, to a large ditch dug out of the dirt floor. The sort of ditch where, had this been a Mafia movie, someone would bury a police informant.
The person in front of me walked up to it and swiftly began relieving himself into its centre. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to wait, or join him. I shifted back a step towards the entrance. The rest of the driver’s crew and some passengers arrived, knocking into my back, confused as to why I was blocking the non-door door. They nudged past me and crowded the edges of the hole. What followed was a lot like the dancing fountains you find in theme parks, only the liquid was a different colour, and had no discernible rhythm, and was accompanied by spit. I looked on but mostly down in a mixture of horror and disbelief. In normal life we’re pretty good at believing we’re highly evolved because we’ve invented things like laser eye surgery, crème brûlée, and Istanbul. But there are some experiences—getting stuck in traffic, giving birth, being hungry—when you realise how flimsy civilisation really is. That reveal us as the shaved monkeys we are. Watching eight men urinate into a hole is one of these experiences. I waited for all of them to leave, then took my spot at the edge of the pit, where I tried to pee, alone, confused, and mildly disoriented, only to remember I was dehydrated and had no spare fluid to offer it.
Outside, I found Annett crouched over, washing her hands in the snow.
“How was it in there?” I asked.
She looked haunted. “Let’s never talk about it.”
I stooped to wash my hands as well. “The men’s was just a big pit.”
She glanced back over her shoulder towards the women’s. “The sound was the worst.” She sighed, forgetting she wasn’t supposed to be talking about it. She had a strangely calm tone, as if it had happened to someone else who just happened to share her body. “They were doing multiple things, simultaneously. No bodily fluid was left behind. On the plus side I think all my inhibitions just died. I could go to the toilet right here now, in front of you, if you want?” She reached for the buckle of her jeans. “Just say the word, buster, and I’ll do it.”
I didn’t say the word. We returned to the warmth of the bus.
Seventeen hours had passed.
“We should have arrived ages ago,” I said, as we settled back into our bunks.
“I know, right. Do you think we’re going back to Tangkou?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t like we could ask anyone. Deflated, sore, I pulled the blanket up to my face. It too smelt of cigarettes. We knew that, broadly speaking, there was a no-public-affection rule in China, but we were feeling rebellious and so held hands across the aisle anyway. We didn’t say much, because there wasn’t much to say. We were stuck. But we were stuck together. The previous year we’d gone on an all-inclusive holiday to Mallorca. How quickly things changed. An easy thing to conclude in China. No other place on earth was changing faster. It’s easy to automatically think that progress must be positive. I wanted to progress too, didn’t I? To put myself in new situations, with the hope that how I behaved would surprise me, as it had in Istanbul. Perhaps this was a little too much change, too quickly.
Day two dusked, and we settled in for a second night of queuing—probably at the same bridge we’d queued at the previous night. Then we’d been at its front. Today we were at its back. We’d spent the day going less than nowhere. The atmosphere on the bus was calm. No one seemed in the slightest bit concerned that we’d all gotten on a vehicle one evening and instead of getting off it the next day, hadn’t. There was no mutiny, or even a hint of dissent. No one challenged the crew’s authority. Everyone just sat quietly in their bunks. China has only one political party: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It carefully controls, through its Propaganda Department, what people say about it and who gets to say anything at all. Fortunately, in Germany, Annett and I didn’t have to work within such strict margins, and had been raised to believe that our opinions were important. That our government owed us, not the other way round. In the UK or Germany, if one of the peoples’ buses had stopped moving, I don’t think that it would have been twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes before we rebelled, or cobbled together a passable mutiny.
The second night arrived.
“How hungry are you? Like on a scale from one to ten?” I asked Annett.
“I was hungry, about six hours ago. Then I was an eleven. Now I’m just kind of… five?”
“I feel the same. It’s like because my body knows there’s no food, it’s stopped bothering to bug me for it.”
She began cycling her legs in the air to keep her blood flowing, “Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it? I thought you got hungrier and hungrier until you could think about nothing else and then went out hunting and gathering, or whatever.”
“Back home I used to think I’d get a headache if I didn’t eat some mid-morning chocolate. Doing a trip like this does remind you you’re much more flexible than you imagine. That’s something I’ve learned.” I wasn’t cycling anything anywhere.
She considered this. Squinted. Sucked in her cheeks. She wanted to agree. Was trying hard to, even. “Yeah… well… given the choice I’d pick to be inflexible, but in possession of coffee and cake.”
“Do you regret this trip?”
She chewed her lip. “Yes. At least at this moment. Which is not a good moment really, all in all, I find.”
“Do you blame me?”
“Of course! Yes! Entirely! We could have been in Italy. Okay, it was my idea to go to China, but for you, not me, and I was busy with work and so I didn’t do the research I would normally have done about why it’s a really, really bad idea to do China in January. But let’s not get distracted from who’s at fault here, which is you. You would not want to know what I’ve been doing to you in my imagination lately. It’s ugly in here. And murdery.”
“Murdery is not—”
“Shut up. I will hurt you.”
I turned back towards the window. If there really was a new me, maybe it wasn’t too late to return him for a refund?
Twenty-four hours had passed.
I spent the second night rotating like kebab meat, trying to find some part of my body that wasn’t sore and a position that would allow me a few minutes of precious, glorious sleep. My tongue was swollen from dehydration. I’d eaten only half a croissant and drunk only half a bottle of water. One solitary tear trickled down my cheek from frustration. I was miserable. HWWKKWKKWKKW TTCHCHC, said the man in the bunk above Annett.
It was the most sensible thing anyone had said in hours.
The next morning we found the crew conspiring once more. It was still snowing, albeit a little less than the day before. The flashing yellow X was a public scoreboard testifying to our continued defeat at the sport of travel. There was a mad glint in John Wang’s eyes. Sure, Project Spend-the-first-night-queuing-in-front-of-a-bridge-give-up-drive-all-day-and-end-up-back-at-the-same-bridge hadn’t proved a master stroke. But his bow had many strings, which made it closer to a harp. Upon that harp he planned to play a tune of great ingenuity, I just knew it. An elderly lady in the bunk in front of mine coughed furiously, perhaps in encouragement, perhaps in resignation.
Even if John Wang had wanted to, we couldn’t just abandon this queue as we had the day before because the road’s hard shoulder was now blocked with cars. We were boxed in. The queue stretched far behind us, far further than we could see. Another hour passed. “Shit,” said Annett, kicking the end of her bunk in frustration. She’d abandoned forming actual sentences, I guess in order to conserve energy. I punched my pillow.
A sudden whoosh of cold air rushed in; the front door was open. Two of John’s crack team were outside. Why? What? When? Action. We had action!
One of the crew walked to the vehicle in front of us. He asked that vehicle’s driv
er to squish up close to the next car. The second crew member got the vehicle on our right to drive into the new space before us. This freed up further space on our right, for the vehicle behind us to take. Which created a space for us to reverse into, which created space in front of us, and the whole glorious process repeated. It truly was a master stroke. John thumped the steering wheel in existential delight as he slowly reversed the bus back through the queue and away from the closed bridge. Car by car, by car, we were moving. For the first time in a long time, we were moving. The sullen atmosphere lifted. People began chatting with their bunkmates. Annett and I celebrated with the last half a croissant, and a few swigs of water. It was a good time, the best of times.
Thirty-six hours had passed.
We neared the back of the queue, which was crowded with vehicles waiting for the bridge to reopen, the fools. I could see empty road behind us. We were nearly out. The bus began a three-point turn to freedom. We could almost taste it. Then, in the distance, approaching quickly, was a set of flashing blue lights.
Annett had gone to the back of the bus for a better view. “It’s the police.”
“Shit,” I said, mirroring her newly constrained language. The police car pulled up behind us as we were at a forty-five-degree angle, poking out from the bottom of the queue. John opened the door and leapt out to talk to the policeman, who was calm, and wearing sunglasses. This was absurd. John would not be reasoned with by a man wearing sunglasses in a blizzard. Who was this chump? Did he not understand that people on this bus were suffering?
Thirty-seven completed hours of suffering.
John spat theatrically at the ground. With a mixture of loud grunts and flailing arms he gestured towards the queue, and to the bus, and back out behind us—to the empty road. The policeman smoked, watched, but remained unmoved. Fifty thousand cigarettes are smoked every second in China. That’s a remarkable statistic. While you read that, another hundred thousand were smoked. There goes another hundred thousand.
The policeman shook his head. John spat once more and climbed gingerly back into the bus, his head sloped forward. He’d been outside only a few minutes, but as he retook his seat at the wheel, and brushed the snow off himself, it looked as if he’d aged five years. Instead of continuing the three-point turn, he was forced to steer, dejectedly, back into the queue. We’d been near the front. Now we were at the very, very rear.
Somewhere up in the distance, a big yellow X continued to flash.
“Is there any water left?” Annett asked. Two sips later there wasn’t.
The mood was sombre over the next three hours. We went to dark places, mentally. Annett and I avoided eye contact with each other. There was nothing to say, nothing to do. We tried to sleep, mostly. I did a little quiet seething.
Thirty-eight hours had passed.
Suddenly, there was a murmur of something a few bunks over; a game of cards paused. The crew grew suddenly animated. Then, the most beautiful sound of all: the engine spluttered into life. A space had opened up in front of us.
Could it mean?
Surely not?
Yes.
We edged forward.
Then again.
Really?
Yes. The bridge had reopened. The snow had stopped. Hallelujah. It took an hour before we passed the barrier onto the bridge. A loud cheer broke out as we crossed it. I looked down at the frozen river below.
“Do you think it’s nearly over?” I dared to ask.
Annett squinted. “I don’t know. I don’t want to let myself think that it might be.”
“If we end up queuing for another bridge, I’m going to throw myself off of it.”
We did get across that bridge, a bridge that we’d been queuing in front of for forty hours. The next few hours we were able to drive unhindered, breaking twenty kilometres per hour on several occasions, an almost dizzying speed. Annett found a small container of Pringles hidden at the bottom of her bag. We celebrated like (carbohydrate) lottery winners.
We saw the first road sign for Wuhan. The end was not exactly in sight, but certainly within the day’s driving distance. The bus sighed with collective relief. We threw off the stress we’d all been carrying and took turns stamping on it.
Then, as innocuously as it had begun, the ordeal was over. We breached the city limits of Wuhan. Shacks rose into tall towers of concrete rigidity. Single-lane roads multiplied outwards until they were eight wide and scarred with bright advertising boards for tablets and smartphones. The bus shuddered to a halt in front of a garage displaying the bus firm’s logo. We grabbed our stuff and skipped to the front of the vehicle. As we reached it, one of the crew waved us back.
“What?” I said. “We’re here, right? W-U-H-A-N?”
He shook his head, and continued to wave us back towards our bunks.
No one else was getting off. Annett looked both disappointed and pale at a ratio of ten to one.
“Well, we waited this long,” I said, turning around. Annett put her face in her hands. Solemnly, we trudged back down the aisle to our bunks. I felt like a death-row prisoner told I’d been released only to be rearrested in the car park on a misdemeanour driving charge and returned to my cell.
The crew disembarked and began changing tyres and removing the heavy chains that had helped us through the snow. Why the tyre change couldn’t have waited until after they’d dropped us off, I didn’t know, and they couldn’t explain.
After forty-five minutes, they were finished. This must be it? The end of the saga? But then, out of nowhere, a small puppy ran out from the restaurant opposite us and took refuge under the bus. The dog’s owner ran out after it, brandishing a stick. This had to be a metaphor: the bus was life, the stick was fate, we were all the puppy.
The sight of a man in a dirty apron running around the sides of the bus and lunging with a stick at a hiding, yapping puppy was just too much for me. I began thumping and kicking at my bunk in frustration. The levy that held all my usual indifference and self-control cracked and split. Before long I was crying tears of frustration. I hadn’t cried in years. I don’t know where I found the water. Annett got caught up in it as well. It morphed at some point, and without our knowing, into a new form of extremely aggressive, angry laughter. It was, in many ways, a beautiful moment. The sort of moment, I imagine, that people go travelling for. One of complete presence. A moment that will play longer in the theatre of the mind than a hundred nights of Netflix on the couch, a thousand boring business meetings, ten thousand uneventful commutes. A moment that you sense, while in it, will become one of your stories. A track on your anecdote Greatest Hits playlist. Part of your identity.
Did I tell you the one about the blizzard? No, well, sit down…
Forty-two hours had passed.
John and his crew, fresh from the success of their tyre change, waved the stick-wielding maniac away. They huddled in a corner of the garage and strategised how to get the puppy out.
“Oh, this is going to be good,” Annett said, having joined me at my bunk to watch.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if their plan is just to wait until the puppy becomes an adult, and no longer fits under there,” I said.
She puffed out her chest. “No way. That’s way too practical for these goons.”
One of them went to a different corner and rummaged in some boxes. He returned with a large cloth sack and several fishing poles. He gave the bag to John Wang. The group walked back towards the bus. John moved near to its door. The rest split up around the bus and lowered their poles beneath it. Their new plan—perhaps an annex to the currently failing one—was to use the poles to drive the dog into one corner of the undercarriage, where, finding itself with no other way to avoid all the poles people kept thrusting at it, it would enter the cement bag of its own youthful volition.
John crouched and shook the bag. The others thrashed with their sticks.
Every time a pole went under the bus, the dog barked furiously and tried to bite it. Being poked with lar
ge poles by strange men didn’t seem to reinforce in him that all was well and he should probably come out of hiding to enter a dark cloth bag.
Several minutes passed. John stood up and wiped the snow from his face.
A girl looked on from the pavement. She was in her mid-twenties, and wrapped snuggly in a puffy white jacket, white bobble hat, and red scarf. Her arms were clamped so tightly around her middle it looked as though she were attempting to hug herself. I could see a lot of sympathy for the dog in her face. She told the men off and waved them away from the bus. Then she crouched under it and said what I’m sure was the mandarin equivalent of here boy, here boy, cute little doggy, aren’t you a good boy, you’re a little cutie, oh yes you are.
The dog ran straight out and into her open arms. The long-rumoured female touch? She scooped him up, stood, turned, and handed him back to the restaurant owner in the dirty apron. And then she walked away. The dog had been double-crossed. Classic femme fatale. The poor dog would never trust another woman for as long as it lived, which would be a fortnight, at most. The owner pinched it by the back of its neck, swinging it left and right like a conductor’s baton as he walked back across the road to the restaurant.
The crew climbed back aboard. The engine turned over. The new, chainless tyres simply turned. We were on the move once more. Annett and I hugged in relief.
We trundled further into Wuhan. It looked like every other Chinese city we’d seen; a maze of high-rise and nondescript; a tribute to right angles; as if designed for practicality and haste, not style and longevity; as if aiming to inflict as much visual shock as possible on the millions swapping their lives in the countryside for its promise of shiny, neon, urban progress.
We arrived in what we assumed to be its centre. Everyone rushed up from their bunks and towards the door.
All except two people: Annett and I.
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 4