It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  With Fred accompanying us to the police station, we waited as he talked to the paper-shuffling, noodle-eating, tea-drinking officials. Periodically, an officer would make a grotesque honking sound, as though to simultaneously relocate their lungs and transfer their sinuses to their bowels. They would then get up, walk to a pile of empty noodle pots in a shallow cardboard box and spit their phlegm out. And that was just the women. We were just beginning to learn how Chinese culture was completely alien to anywhere we had experienced so far.

  It was now time to do the test in the taxi. The lads stayed at the station and I went with a policewoman to get the car checked. I had been in the country for a few days and had picked up a few choice words; nee-how (hello), she-shia (thank you) and my proudest achievement, chaaay-un (diesel) – said with a focus on 'aaaaayyyy' and an abrupt 'un'. She could count to seven in English. Amazingly this limited shared vocabulary kept us going for 30 minutes.

  I think she was trying to remember how to say eight so much that she missed my absent-minded driving on the wrong side of the road.

  I was apprehensive about the vehicle-worthiness test. Our brakes were shot, we had a crack in the windscreen and our headlights, which had been reattached with duct tape and epoxy glue ten minutes before the test, pointed in different directions. I smiled and said my three words in various sequences to the test man. He looked at me, bored and confused at this Westerner grinning like an idiot and periodically shouting 'thank-you-diesel' and gave me a piece of paper.

  Hannah and I had passed.

  Apparently, there was no need to test Johno and Leigh's driving, so we returned for the theory test. These first two checks had been somewhat less than comprehensive, but the theory test was the bit we had been dreading.

  The head policeman, portly and smiling, invited us to sit on a long sofa and began to fire Mandarin at us. We smiled while Fred listened and translated.

  'In China, we drive on right.'

  We nodded yes. The policeman glared at us. There was an awkward pause.

  Fred intervened, 'That OK?'

  We realised that was the first question and it required an answer.

  'Um, yes,' we replied in unison.

  He broke into a broad grin – we had clearly answered correctly. He carried on while Fred translated: 'The speed limit is one-hundred kilometres, but forty in resident areas… or by school.'

  There was another awkward silence before we realised this was another test question.

  We again replied, 'Yes,' nodding and looking serious.

  'Tibet is very big place, you must use conscience and not break law because there not many police.'

  I had mastered this by now, nodding furiously, turning down my lower lip and creasing my brows to show I had harnessed the gravitas of the situation. 'Yes.'

  Johno and Leigh had also clearly mastered this skill.

  The policeman smiled and started speaking in Chinese. 'It must be time for the written test,' Leigh guessed. The basic rules of the road had been outlined, now things were going to get hard. We shot each other nervous glances.

  Fred translated, 'OK. You pass, collect licence from window in main room.'

  That night in the hotel, thanks to the slightly lower altitude, I slept properly for the first time since reaching Tibet. I also discovered that it is normal behaviour for Chinese men in their mid-50s, to strip to their white Y-fronts and wander around hotel rooms getting in uncomfortably close proximity while bending down to take things from their suitcase.

  Licences in our pockets and a laminated Chinese number plate on Hannah, we set off to Lhasa on one of the greatest days of driving I have ever experienced. The plateau transitioned into a large valley with snow-capped mountains rising to either side. The road wound around a large unnaturally blue lake, then climbed through the occasional 16,000-foot pass. Fish, hung on racks by locals, dried in the brisk wind.

  Occasionally, we'd pass someone lying on the side of the road. Dressed in a thick leather apron, and with wooden paddles attached to their hands, they would occasionally kneel up, slide their pads forward, and then return to a fully prostrated position a few feet further along. Over a period of months, the devotees would make the long pilgrimage to Lhasa (which is literally translated as 'place of gods') in this form with the purpose of praying at the Jokhang Temple, the holiest site in Tibetan Buddhism, and heading to bow at the tombs of former Dalai Lamas.

  I couldn't shake the impression that the approved-for-foreigneyes Folk Heritage Museum, set in an old feudal manor, might be slightly different to the rest of Tibet. Everything was just slightly too well ordered and picturesque. When we reached the servants' old quarters there were signs everywhere proclaiming how much the lives of the peasants had improved since China 'liberated' Tibet in the 1950s:

  Pintsochuochun used to receive only 16 kg grain a year. Since she stood up for liberation her family now have seven cows, one horse, one cart, one TV set and one plough! She need not worry for eat, live and use!

  Fred saw us studying the boards and mused, 'Ah, Chinese propaganda!'

  I was surprised at his frankness, but it turns out that his translation of the word 'propaganda' just meant literally 'government-provided information'. In its traditional English usage he would have been correct.

  The final pass yielded to a deep valley and the final descent to Lhasa. The oxygen-rich air provided a new lease of energy, not only for us, but for Hannah as well. After an hour of riding the brakes, they began to overheat and we worried they would eventually fail. Stopping to let them cool, we chattered energetically about what Lhasa would be like. Even Fred seemed happy, telling us about some of its history, explaining how it was the religious and political centre of old Tibet before the Chinese 'liberated' them.

  Reaching the bottom of the valley, we were now in rich farmland. Sheaves of corn had been bunched for collection in the fields and orchards lined the side of the road. One could have mistaken it for somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  Lhasa, a broad and sunny city with a heavy Chinese influence and designer shops on every corner, could not have been more different from the rest of the country. Finding a hostel, we parked and headed out for a beer or two.

  At first, decked out in our cleanest clothes and ready to party, we were highly disappointed. Every bar we hit was overpriced and under-occupied and it looked like a quiet and short night lay ahead. So naturally we started asking the bar staff where was best to go and after a short while we found ourselves bundled into a taxi (a strange sensation given our mode of transport for the past few months), destination unknown.

  Ten minutes later we pulled up at what was possibly the most exclusive club I have ever seen. The queue that snaked away from the door was populated by hip young things clad in expensive-looking designer clothes. High-end 4x4s and sports cars surrounded the building. Even the bouncers looked like fashionistas and the doorway into the club was made up of a row of green lasers.

  I immediately felt out of place in my shorts, sandals and T-shirt.

  Inside, banging house music mixed with clouds of smoke and flashing lights. Every table had stacks and stacks of unopened beer bottles on it and people in various stages of drunkenness waltzed around.

  The only thing on my mind was money; this place was going to be cripplingly expensive. However, I had a plan.

  I walked up to a table near the bar that was covered in full bottles of Budweiser and put on my best stupid-foreigner routine. 'Excuse me, do you know if we just, er, order beers from the bar, or is there a waiter?'

  A guy at the table smiled and without a word opened a bottle and passed it to me.

  'Thanks! Uh… my friends are also…'

  He opened three more and passed them around.

  Here we learnt that in Chinese culture, if you get bought a beer, you lose face. We also learnt we had no real affection for our faces and started losing them on a regular basis.

  CHAPTER 35

  RECORD-BREAKING HIGHS

  When we fi
rst conceived the idea of the expedition, one of our mutual friends had drunkenly confided what he thought our reasons were for going on the trip.

  'Leigh is all about the world record and the charity aspect, whereas you just want to tick as many countries off your list as possible,' he told me, 'and Paul, he just wants to be able to use the stories to chat up girls.'

  In a way he was right; whereas Leigh saw the world record as by far and away the most important aspect of the trip, I saw the record as more of a means to an end, a way of helping to secure the corporate sponsorship that was bankrolling some of the journey. Our first passenger, Chops, had left us with the parting words, 'Even if it's not written in some book or verified by some organisation, you still know that you have the record in your hearts and you will still have had an absolutely amazing adventure along the way,' and this summed up exactly how I felt. However, when we woke up on the morning of the 194th day I couldn't deny that I was at least a little bit excited about what lay just around the corner.

  Earlier that week we had crested a pass on the highest road of the trip, a staggering 17,162 feet, and we were talking about whether we would also qualify for the record for the highest ever journey by taxi when I realised we were approaching the previous record point. I had won a coin toss, officiated by Craig before we left him back in Nepal, which meant I was to be the one driving when the record was broken. I had been keeping an eagle-eye on the GPS.

  After over half a year of driving along some of the world's most exciting and picturesque roads, we broke the record on an utterly dull, if beautiful and deserted, section of highway in an obscure province north of Tibet. As the meter ticked over to 21,691 miles, Paul, Leigh, Matt and I erupted into cheers and jubilant shouting, while Fred sat sandwiched in the back a little bemused; the concept of a world record was still not fully making sense in his head.

  At an unremarkable milepost, 1,996 miles from Beijing, on the China National Highway 109, surrounded as far as the eye could see by rolling steppe and distant mountains, we jumped out to slap each other on the back and take a photo to commemorate the moment. Matt grabbed the camera out of my hand, and said 'You three get on top of the car, Fred and I will take some photos.'

  We clambered on to the roof rack and Matt arranged Fred in place with the camera, whispered a few words to him, stepped behind the car for a moment and reached down.

  'Congratulations!' he shouted, as he ran forwards spraying a bottle of champagne over us. He must have had it hidden in his luggage the entire time. Most of it covered the car, but at that altitude it was probably best that we didn't drink more than a mouthful anyway.

  When we had calmed down I clambered off the roof and retrieved the camera from Fred, and eagerly looked at the photos. He had completely missed the shot.

  Eventually we reached the edge of the huge elevated Himalayan plateau and descended for many thousands of feet down the edge of the immense mountain range. The towering peaks gave way to fields of rolling sand dunes as we approached the fringes of the Gobi Desert.

  We were all staggered by the Chinese infrastructure; ever since we had left Lhasa we had been following the seemingly never-ending railroad and almost all of our time in China had been on smooth, wide and well-built roads. Often they were clearly just finished; some hadn't even had the road markings painted on yet and most were almost completely empty of traffic. It was impressive forward-planning on behalf of the Chinese government, meaning that the burgeoning middle classes of the next 20 years would have somewhere to spread out to.

  Our impression of lots of countries tended to become coloured by service stations and truck stops, and in China this meant communal squat toilets, which left something to be desired, and small roadside shops that baffled us with their lack of any recognisable Western-style food.

  When we arrived at Dunhuang, home to what we were told was 'the largest Buddha in the world… in China', we were pleasantly surprised to find an attractive little city with a bustling night market selling all different types of food and drink (but still no McDonald's). After checking into a virtually empty youth hostel, we left Fred recuperating on his own and went to explore the markets.

  Even though we had some disagreements with Fred we couldn't deny that he had been excellent at ordering us brilliant local meals at bargain prices and we quickly found out that without him things wouldn't go so smoothly. After looking around the stalls and seeing what I thought was some kind of prawn or shrimp stir-fry with vegetables I asked the price and ordered a dish. When it arrived I got stuck in, trying to look like a natural with the chopsticks. I soon discovered my mistake.

  'Erm, why have these prawns got claws?' I asked anyone who was listening.

  Leigh peered at the dish and burst out laughing, his mirth spurred on by my earlier scorn for his safer order of something Western. 'You've ordered chicken feet!'

  I looked closely at the prawns and saw he was right – each was a fleshy leg ending in three long talons. I was determined to follow Fred's example of not losing face and so forced as many down as I could, lying to a smug Leigh that they tasted just like chicken wings.

  When the bill arrived my second slap in the face hit me: the price was not 15 yuan as I had confirmed four times but 50 yuan. This called for a beer.

  That evening we had a Chinese lock-in; somehow we had acquired the keys to a bar and climbed on to a roof where we stared up at the clear desert sky and chatted about the crazy chain of events that had led us here.

  Waking the next day and feeling somewhat precious, we pored over the route plan. We were about 60 miles from the Mongolian border and none of us had any idea why we were so far north. Letting someone else plan our China section of the trip without checking the route properly had been a bad idea, but we were now at the furthest point and would just have to carry on with it.

  To meet our schedule, we would have to drive for six days a week, which meant that our main viewings of China were through a windscreen. In India we had encountered the most atrocious driving skills, but at least the quality of the roads meant that people couldn't drive at speeds of more than 20 mph. Here, on the road to Xi'an, the smooth new roads meant that expensive BMWs and Land Cruisers would hurtle along at 90 mph, side by side with the donkey carts and pedestrians who continued to use the highways. This didn't seem to be too much of a problem, though, until it rained.

  A weather front caused by a typhoon in the South China Sea had moved in and, although the full force of it had exhausted itself by the time it reached us inland, the rain was incessant. It literally drove down non-stop for four days, flooding fields, roads and black cabs.

  I had already been terrified that I would hit somebody as they wandered out into the road, or I would try to avoid a ditch without looking for fast-moving cars, but as soon as the rain started to fall an accident became almost inevitable. We saw six major accidents that day, including a brand new BMW that had rolled over and been crushed like a concertina. Every bit of it was smashed, yet luckily the passenger compartment was still secure and the driver and his family walked out with little more than a few bruises. It was a triumph of modern safety engineering – and also a sobering reminder that if we crashed, we would not be so lucky in our 20-year-old taxi. The over-laden roof rack, the homemade roll bar and excessive weight in a car without even an airbag would mean a completely different story if we so much as slid a little bit.

  The rain didn't seem to dampen Leigh's determination to get to Xi'an, home of the famous Terracotta Army, as quickly as possible, and for the second time that day we asked him to reduce his speed a little. His nonchalant reply wasn't the most comforting: 'If we hit something today we're dead anyway, the speed doesn't matter.'

  CHAPTER 36

  THE ABDUCTION OF FRED JIN

  Xi'an was the first proper city we had visited since Mumbai: it had Starbucks and KFC and, finally, a McDonald's! The running joke with Fred had been weeks in the pipeline, so regardless of whether any of us were fans of the golden arches, we felt
obliged to get a Big Mac. But, as I finally dug into the familiar flavour of a lukewarm beef-flavoured patty with soggy fries and a watered-down Coke, it dawned on me that the roadside fare Fred had been ordering for us was some of the best food I'd ever had.

  The next morning, when Johno, Leigh and Matt went in search of an Egg McMuffin, Fred and I dug into a piping hot batch of steamed pork dumplings with chilli and soy dipping sauce.

  After we'd had our fill of the Terracotta Army's pottery soldiers, archers and horsemen, Fred, Leigh and I set out to find some flesh-and-blood mechanics. Despite the impressive infrastructure, the 2,500 miles we had covered in China over the previous fortnight had caused another of our long-suffering frontsuspension spring brackets to snap off.

  We parked outside the first in a line of garages and showed them the shattered plate and bent shock absorber. Fred spoke to the teenage mechanics at length, explaining our problem while occasionally referring back to the broken parts Leigh and I stood holding.