Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  I do not know the final destination of the bus I was on, but that is where I would have gone had I not recognised a sign in a town we were passing through. It was for a café called Minnie Mao’s, which I had read was in Yanshu. How could I forget that? I showed my ticket to the driver and I think he said that, yes, this was Yanshu.

  On terra firma once more, I was immediately accosted by a young woman who showed me a piece of cardboard with room prices crudely drawn on it. I showed interest and was promptly kidnapped. Shouting, ‘Yes Yes!’ the young woman, her accomplice and several assorted attendant females dragged me by the hand through the bus station, across the road and a hundred yards up the street to dump me in the Youth Hostel. This wasn’t what I wanted. But it was now late afternoon and I had been travelling since four o’clock the previous morning.

  Although I no longer cared where I stayed, I certainly arrived there in style. My entourage of six females herded me, giggling and chattering loudly (them not me), through the hostel’s pavement café to make a grand entrance in reception. This seemed to greatly amuse a few westerners who sat outside. I felt a complete fool, but that was nothing new for me in China. The ladies deposited me with a gentleman who spoke excellent English and who graciously conducted me upstairs to inspect a room. It cost ten dollars and was the best bargain I had found so far. Clean and with no rodents in sight, the hostel seemed lovely after the last high-priced, rat-infested dump I had stayed in. By this time I was feeling extraordinarily jaded and all I wanted was to sit somewhere stationary and work on my fluid intake. I went down to the sidewalk café where twenty-six ounces of local, perfectly acceptable beer, cost me fifty cents.

  The hostel was hippie heaven; great value rooms and lots of good, extremely cheap food and beer. You could even get your washing done for a few cents a piece. The laundry did not run to modern appliances – the washing machine took the form of a small Chinese woman – but it was so good to wear clothes that had been dried in the sunshine again.

  Yanshu was a tourist village. In the time it took to imbibe my beer two charming ladies came to sit with me and try to induce me to take a tour with them. After the traumas of the rest of China, it was incredibly pleasing to find friendly people who spoke English, tried to help you, seemed to want you to be there and did not rip you off.

  Although Yanshu is situated among rivers and mountains in the countryside, a dirty grey haze of pollution hung between the nearby mountain peaks and sat low on the village. But it was nowhere near as bad as that of the cities and the temperature was just right. The rainy season had just finished and the cold would come next.

  In the morning I had an interesting ‘American breakfast’ outside on the pavement. It was alleged to consist of ‘ham, sausages, eggs fired’. I got two very runny duck eggs that had been barely ‘fired’ and were sliding around a huge plate that had been decorated with a few microscopic bits of tinned, processed ham and a couple of slices of those awful red sausages, also ‘fired’. Rock-hard toast kept this lot company. There was as much butter as you wanted (which was indeed a change, everywhere else it had been rationed like gold) and the coffee was good and strong, but I still decided that from then on it would be Chinese breakfast for me.

  Then, as this was Sunday, I declared it to be a day of rest and did nothing except clean myself and my belongings. But there was no rest for my ears. A hideous noise assaulted me. Alternating Oriental music and political harangue blared from a loudspeaker on one side of the next building and across the road the drivers and touts at the bus station yahooed as they competed for custom.

  In the evening I went for a walk. Yanshu was small enough to ramble all around and today was market day. From a large, under-cover market-place near the main street, stalls overflowed and spread out in lines that wound through the surrounding alleys and lanes. Most stalls sold clothing, fabrics and food. The lanes were lined with weathered grey or brown stone and mud-brick houses, many of them extremely old and tiny. Most of the houses were built around courtyards paved with ancient stones that had been polished smooth by hundreds of years of feet, or of earth packed to such a hard surface that it resembled terrazzo.

  The traffic on the streets of Yanshu was sparse and mostly bike, motor-bike or converted tractor. Several forms of transport were available for those not inclined to walk. The most common was a push-bike affair with a contraption like a miniature covered wagon on the back. Or there was motor-bike transport on which you either rode pillion, or sat in a two seater side-car topped by a canvas awning. Many of the pedi-cab and motor-bike transport riders were young slim females; I had not seen this elsewhere in China. The alternative to all the above was to hire a bike and pedal yourself around.

  The work-horses in the transport field were the modified tractors. They had a board at the front for the driver to sit on, another for his feet, and either half a van or a utility tray stuck on the back. A cross between the vehicles of Fred Flintstone and the Beverly Hill Billies, with a bit of lawn mower thrown in for good measure, they made more noise than the lot combined.

  In the main street I was thrilled to discover an optician and a film processor (although the latter’s produce proved dismal). A tourist inspired hair-dressing shop offered ‘Head and Face washing and Blow to Head!’ I hadn’t had my face washed in years and didn’t think I’d enjoy it any more now than I ever had. And as for the ‘Blow to Head’, they could forget that. What an offer. They wanted to scrub my face and then give me a clip over the ear to send me on my way. No thanks.

  There was a music shop that would obligingly copy cassette tapes for you. Here there were no worries about copyright like there are in Hong Kong, where I got the fish eye and a disapproving glare when I asked for this service. There were also several dressmakers and, as my favourite pair of pants were about to give up the ghost I arranged for one establishment to make a copy of them. Other attractions of the street were old men with air guns who let you shoot half-blown-up balloons off a wall and itinerant sugar-cane sellers who would hack off the amount of cane you wanted on the spot. A pet monkey on a chain played in an open shop-front and animals, including owls, were for sale as food in the market. Knitters abounded. Using wooden or bamboo needles, they clacked away everywhere. I gave in and joined them, buying some wool and a set of needles made of bamboo. I may be a mechanical illiterate, but I am a champion knitter – and I have silver cups and show ribbons to prove it.

  I noticed that the people of this district had darker skin and smiled more often than those of the north. And some of the old people were the smallest folk I had ever seen apart from pygmy Papua New Guinea Highlanders. Many were only the size of a ten-year-old. A few old people looked very poor and occasionally I saw an old soul in a patched pyjama suit wandering the streets. But I only saw one beggar; a leg-less young man who inched his way up the road on his hands and his stumps, pushing a money tin before him.

  The main street also had many cafés, all of them with outdoor tables and seats to take advantage of the lovely weather. The prices at the cafés were all the same, very cheap. Whenever I sat down at a table someone would join me. At one café, the owner and the cook came to have a bowl of noodles with me and eventually they convinced me that I should go to visit a friend who was said to have some antiques. The café owner and I hopped into the side-car of a motor-cycle taxi and sped off down to the riverside wharf. But here I was disappointed to find only a row of stalls that sold mostly tourist rubbish, reproductions and fake antiques. No real antiques are for sale to the uninitiated in China. It is illegal to sell anything older than 150 years and that does not get you out of the Ching dynasty. The sellers wanted a fortune for anything even remotely old.

  The stalls had sprung up on the river bank because this was where boats from up-market Guilin, eighty kilometres away up the River Li, off-loaded the hordes of package tourists who had made the trip down river to view the famous local scenery. The tourists were then returned to Guilin in the comfort of air-conditioned buses. For this priv
ilege they paid 500 yuan. We lesser mortals, who chose to stay in down-market Yanshu, did the same trip in the opposite direction. Except that we went both ways by boat and took much longer, we saw the same sights for forty yuan.

  Through Khai, the hostel manager, I arranged to go on this river trip one morning. After the usual hour’s wait, I was marched to the wharf by a guide/keeper and plonked into a narrow wooden boat with an outboard motor, a driver-cum-captain and six other travellers. Then we waited some more while extra trade was drummed up along the wharf. Finally, with a complement of eight passengers and the bikes of those who wanted to ride back from one of the villages tied on the rear of the boat, we chugged off up the river.

  Our guide spoke no English, which was a real help, but she had the happiest face I had seen in China. We sat two across in the boat on wooden chairs that looked like kindergarten escapees –microscopic pygmy seats for two-year-olds that were somehow reasonably comfortable.

  Despite the clouds of pollution that hung around, it was a superb morning. The river was wide and, except in places where there was an eddy, its clear green water flowed placidly. In many spots the river-bank was lined by huge, but delicate, feathery bamboos. Small fish were jumping and, looking down, I saw that the water was shallow enough to see the stones on the river bottom– and the odd plastic container or bag that reposed among them.

  The river and its edges were astir with life and activity. People fished from boats or the bank using big nets or small hand-held scoops. Sampans and houseboats went about their business, but the most common water transport were simple raft boats that were made by tying six thick bamboo poles with turned-up ends together. Boatmen did not sit on these flimsy-looking craft, they stood up and poled along. Cormorants tethered on wooden perches in the shallows waited for their night’s fishing. Cormorants cost 1000 yuan and are very valuable servants. They are taken fishing after dark each night, and perch on one end of a raft boat while a woven basket for the fish sits on the other. The cormorant catches large quantities of fish, but a ring on his neck stops him swallowing them. Poor bird.

  Water buffalo were being brought to the water’s edge for their morning baths. Later, in the warm afternoon, we saw them standing contentedly with just their heads and necks sticking out of the river. Now and then a baby buffalo, too small to stand in the water, lay draped across his mother’s back. Great flocks of village ducks roamed free and returned home under their own steam at night.

  My fellow passengers included an interesting English couple who were working in Hong Kong, and their two well-behaved children. The boat’s engine made a hell of an uproar, so all conversation was shouted. Everyone commented on the Chinese habit of spitting. I said, ‘The day I get the urge to spit, that’s the day I go home.’ But I felt it was coming. All the pollution gave you a funny nose and throat.

  We travelled a distance and then came to the mountains that make the scenery of this area of south China famous. I was now in the world of classical Chinese landscape paintings. The strangely shaped limestone peaks did not rise gently, there were no foothills or slopes leading up to them. They leaped long and thin straight out of the flat earth and sat alone, pointing to the clear blue sky. The unique formation of these moody mountains goes back several hundreds of million years to when this area was under the sea and an upheaval raised its status to that of dry land. Later it was flooded, then lifted again in more cataclysmic events. The alternating sea water and air created karst limestone formations that, vulnerable to erosion, evolved into pinnacles and caverns. Local people call them fascinating names – ‘elephant trunk’ and ‘moon hill’. Thanks to the mountains’ caves, Guilin and the surrounding district became the headquarters of those Chinese who resisted the Japanese during the second world war.

  Our boat plodded on. We seemed to be the only one going in this direction, but after three hours we began passing boats that came from the opposite direction of Guilin. The trip up-river against the flow was slower than coming downstream, which was why the jet setters stayed in Guilin and did the trip vice versa.

  The tourist boats were floating palaces compared to ours. They were loaded with fat cats dripping cameras, some of whom began photographing us. I thought this was weird, but then some tourists feel obliged to photograph everything in sight, even other tourists. Perhaps we looked colourful to them. The fat cats had, however, been fed. The hostel cook had offered me a sandwich to take with me. It had cost twice the regular price because it contained cheese. Kraft Cheddar, in fact. I was shown the label and told proudly, ‘From Australia’. The slices of cheese tasted quite elderly and had been shaved off with a razor and put between thick old bread with no butter. Thank heavens I had not allowed the cook to toast it, as he had been determined to do, or it would have been a piece of rock.

  Another hour later we turned around to come back. This was our first mistake. Our driver saw a mate on the shore who offered him some grapefruit. He took the boat in close to the shore to collect them and on the way back out we ran aground on some rocks. When I saw our captain start to take off his shoes I thought he was abandoning ship. No going down bravely with the vessel for him! But then he made us also take off our shoes and jump into a couple of feet of water to help him push the boat off. At last we freed the boat, but then it wouldn’t steer straight. The rudder was bent. Back into the water we went again to push the boat to the shore. The captain got out the repair kit – consisting of one large hammer – and started to bang hell out of the rudder, which was merely a flat piece of cast iron. Then once again the passengers pushed the boat off.

  In the meantime I had been ashore to avail myself of a bush. The riverbank was covered with tonnes of round weathered stones, a truck-load of which I would love to have taken home to build a garden wall. Several small, naked village boys approached me tentatively and stood at varying distances depending on their timidity. They looked ready to bolt at a second’s notice, except for one – he was not afraid to come up and inspect me closely. Eventually the rest crept nearer, utterly engrossed with me, but none could be induced to smile. They were too busy absorbing my peculiarities.

  Near the villages on the riverbanks, gangs of up to ten naked boys played in the water. We did not see one girl. Either they were all at home with their mothers learning how to cook, or there weren’t any –maybe they had been drowned at birth. This is said to be still a common practice. There could be a problem in a few years time. Who would all these little boys marry?

  Some of the small boys played chicken with the boats. This was very dangerous, as now and then they got caught between ours and a bigger boat going the other way. At one stage the captain indicated that the passengers who were sitting outside on the deck should throw their bags under cover. He knew what was coming. A pack of the little villains splashed waves of water at us. We all got wet, but the people out the front were soaked.

  We approached Yanshu towards evening. Rows of sampans were moored on the banks near the village and on the deck of one I spied a man raising a hatchet to chop off his squawking dinner’s head.

  It was dusk when we alighted at the wharf. Strolling along winding lanes paved with rough cobblestones and lined with small shops, we made our way back to the hostel. By this time I was ravenous. I was thinking that I felt famished enough to eat a horse when I suddenly remembered, Oh Lord! this was the night I had ordered a snake. Crikey, I muttered, not a horse, but I am going to have to eat a snake. Just as well I was hungry.

  I had told a couple of people about this culinary adventure and when I came down to the street café an audience had gathered. They said that they had eaten early as they did not want to watch the horrible spectacle of me devouring a reptile while they had dinner. The cook asked me if I was ready for my snake and it was duly sent for. I imagined it would arrive already cooked and on a plate, but the snake was pedalled up to the curb, alive and kicking, in a flour bag in the front basket of an old lady’s bike. The snake lady wore the old-fashioned, black, wide-legged trou
sers and side-buttoned jacket that old ladies still affected and her grey hair was neatly pinned in a bun. She felt around the outside of the flour bag for the business end of the snake, pinned it down, then put her other hand in the bag and, swapping hands, pulled the snake out and put in down on the ground in front of me.

  My snake was about five feet long and it wriggled like mad, objecting strongly to this treatment. If it had known it was for dinner, it would have objected all the more. Grandma adroitly picked it up again by its head and offered it to me to play with. Not today thanks. Mother always told me not to play with my food and for once I was listening to her. The snake lady then produced a large pair of big handled scissors, took the snake to the gutter and – to the applause of the crowd of locals who had gathered – slowly cut off its head.

  She bled the snake into the gutter, stripped out its entrails and skinned it. Then, holding it firmly – for the snake was still writhing and moving as strongly as it had done when alive – she put this twisting pinkish-grey, bare-fleshed thing under my nose and asked me how I wanted it cooked. Averting my eyes and keeping a firm grip on my stomach, I mumbled that steamed would be fine, with lots of garlic.

  Half an hour later my snake dinner appeared. The entire reptile, cleavered into two inch long bits, bones and all, lay on my plate. It was possibly only the thought of eating snake that was off-putting – the taste wasn’t that bad. It was like chewy fish-cum-chicken. The only bad thing about the meal was trying to navigate safely around the splintered vertebra and rib bones. I had fortified myself for this test of my gastronomical courage with a large bottle of beer and I managed to eat the whole snake. I know the lot was on my plate because I found the little tail bit that didn’t have any bones.