by Sally Hyder
A door had opened and we could see what lay ahead: the big wide world.
* * *
The only problem with Scotland in 1987 was unemployment. Although I’d qualified there as a nurse, in the end I had to move down to London to find a job. It wasn’t too much of a sacrifice, though, as Andrew was by then studying Estate Management in Reading. On 14 February, I reported for duty on the general medical ward at Guy’s, a big teaching hospital not far from London Bridge. I moved into a single room on site. It was a hovel – hot and noisy, with the sounds of trains and the pub and all the other resident nurses in their rooms. The kitchen was disgusting, but Andrew bought me a slow cooker, perfect for stews and soups. It’s still in use today.
I hated the smell of London in the summer: the metallic tang on your tongue, dog poo on the pavements and vegetables rotting in the sun, the sludge of the Thames. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long before I was moved to a shared flat, newly built and also on site. At my request I was transferred to the oncology unit, where I was responsible for caring for hundreds of patients in an L-shaped ward; men down one side and women down the other, bone-marrow transplants in the side rooms, chemotherapy everywhere. At weekends, Andrew would come up and we spent happy days together (when I was lucky enough to be off-duty) walking through the city, queuing for stand-by tickets at the Globe and going to West End musicals. We loved the musicals: our favourites then were Starlight Express and Les Misérables but we also enjoyed Cats and later on, The Phantom of the Opera (you might say we were suckers for anything Andrew Lloyd Webber cared to throw our way!). Memories of those productions have stayed with us. Andrew and Clara have also done the West End shows and being musical, sing the songs at the tops of their voices. It’s lovely to think we’ve managed to pass on our appreciation to the next generation.
For those brief, fun-packed months, London felt like our city.
Then I began to feel unwell.
The first acute symptom was a pain in my side. This was in the March, just after I’d arrived in the City and started work at Guy’s. At first, I’d felt lonely but now I also felt scared. The symptoms worsened: I needed pethi-dine to control the pain, breathing was difficult, my chest and abdomen began to ache and I was running a fever. Concerned, the doctors eventually diagnosed Bornholm Disease (named after the islands of Bornholm in Denmark) and caused by a coxsackie – group B common virus – that inflames the intercostal muscles. I was admitted to the hospital I worked in, a very strange experience indeed. Being new in town I knew hardly anyone but the staff that I worked with came to visit me and my new flatmates moved my stuff to the flat.
After a week I was discharged and went to recuperate at Uncle Andrew (my mother’s brother) and Aunty Pat’s home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. They were extremely kind and pulled me through. I remember watching the Zeebrugge disaster on the television: a car ferry capsized just outside the Belgian port killing hundreds, which added to my sense of mortality. I focused on getting back to work and making a full recovery.
Eventually, I arrived back in time for a hot London summer and the slog of working on the wards but I never seemed to improve, not properly: I felt dizzy and exhausted all the time. In the end, Andrew and I decided that I needed a proper break and so I took unpaid leave. That August, we flew to Vancouver for our next foreign adventure.
Aunty Margaret and Uncle Gary (family on my father’s side) had a beef ranch in Mayerthorpe, Alberta. They lived there with their three daughters (Helen, Jennifer and Sandra) and one son (Richard); one of my cousins and her husband has since taken over the farm. In 1966, Margaret went out to Canada on a government-sponsored scheme designed to attract more radiographers to the country. There, she met my Uncle Gary, whose pioneering family had created a farm out of the wilderness. On finding they were short of labour, we spent two very happy weeks working on the farm: Andrew drove the tractor and grew a beard while I helped to pickle dill from the garden, picked fruit and vegetables and took lunch to the men working in the fields in a pail. I was Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie! Tanned and restored by our outdoor life and with the chirping of crickets and fields of wheat blowing in the wind, we said our goodbyes and hitched our way across the Rockies to Montreal.
We took in the Niagara Falls, ate stacks of diner pancakes dripping with maple syrup (the coffee was undrinkable) and soaked up the sense of space offered by those monumental Canadian landscapes. At this point, we also learned the rules of hitch hiking.
‘Never throw your bags in the boot,’ warned the driver of a truck complete with double bed and fridge who took pity on us and feared for our safety after I climbed into the front seat, leaving Andrew to do the bags. ‘I could have driven off with the bags and left you behind!’
Lesson learned.
Six weeks later, back in London we realised that we had caught the travelling bug. Now the city seemed more claustrophobic than ever but no sooner had we returned to our working and student lives than Andrew was revisiting the travel sections of local bookstores and eagerly planning our next trip.
Chapter 2
Surprise on Everest
In the summer of 1988 Andrew passed his exams, New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ was back in the charts and Melanie Griffith, the ultimate eighties’ poster-girl, was outmanoeuvring male colleagues in Working Girl. We were off again. On a hot Saturday afternoon in June we caught the Tube to Trailfinders, the Holy Grail for travellers on London’s Kensington High Street, where we purchased air tickets into Hong Kong and out of Delhi. It was the journey we had been building up to: first Canada and Morocco, now Asia.
‘It’s my responsibility to show you this,’ said the travel agent, passing us a copy of a warning issued by the Foreign Office:
Customers have been advised of a volatile situation between arrival and departure points.
‘So, travelling between China and India isn’t officially recommended?’ asked Andrew.
‘Not officially,’ said the travel agent.
‘Oh well,’ I smiled.
Tickets in hand, we walked over to Holland Park for a celebration picnic, at which point Andrew turned into a magician. Instead of pulling rabbits out of a top hat, he produced from his rucksack a tablecloth, glasses, champagne and smoked salmon. It was the most ridiculously romantic gesture I’d ever seen and perfectly suited to the white-walled gardens, the sunshine and our elated mood.
Later that week Andrew came home with a shiny copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to China and we spent hours poring over photographs of the Great Wall of China and figuring out our route. First, though, we had to earn the fare. Earlier that year I had decided that I wanted to care for the terminally ill and had been offered a place at St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, Kent. I’d realised that the part of the oncology job that I found most rewarding was when the battle and stress of chemo-therapy and radiotherapy were over and palliative care was the way forward; it was a more positive and holistic way to be with the patients, I wanted to get to know them, to treat them as individuals and I was keen to learn how to do this type of specialist nursing in what was then the best place in the UK for palliative medicine.
I’d decided to defer my new challenge until Andrew had finished his BSc, so I went back to Guy’s. That spring was spent working as a nurse from 7.30 until 3pm before rushing across London to a smoky wine-bar near Price Waterhouse in the Embankment. There, I changed into a black dress and white apron, then popped champagne corks for pink-faced city boys, who gave me 10 per cent of their tabs – the tips were insane. I was there until 8pm every night. Otherwise days and nights off were spent working as an agency nurse in private hospitals all over London. Officially this was ‘moonlighting’ but there was such a shortage of nurses then that it was easy to get extra work and everyone did it. I worked hard that spring, but it was worth it.
Eventually, it was time to go. Sometimes when I look back on our trip through China, I wonder, how did we know which trains to catch? No one spoke English. We went
prepared: we had the usual jabs – cholera, typhoid and Hepatitis B – and bought bags of malaria tablets. Also, we took our own chopsticks (a precaution because of the risk of Hepatitis B) and had rabies vaccines, which can buy you a bit of time if you’re bitten by a dog. In Tibet, if you fail as a monk then you come back as a dog, which accounts for the packs of wild dogs in the temples (nothing to do with the food left lying around, of course). Although we didn’t voice our hopes for fear of disappointment, secretly both of us harboured the same dream of seeing the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the former home of the Dalai Lama.
We woke up on the descent into Hong Kong after a night flight. The plane flew so close to the skyscrapers that you could see what people were eating for breakfast! Its wheels hit the ground, it braked before tipping into the sea, the doors opened and we were met by a wall of heat.
What a shock.
We found a room in Kowloon on the mainland. A fairly grotty place. We were kept up by the all-night chatter, doors slamming and general commotion. The next morning I woke up with 25 tick bites. Things improved when we found the Youth Hostel on top of the hill on Hong Kong Island. Its whitewashed buildings were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of downtown Hong Kong and there was a strong sea breeze.
We spent our first days wandering through the streets and stalls, marvelling at the strangeness of it all, in particular the food. I am fairly sure we accidentally ended up eating animal intestines but somehow survived. After securing our Chinese visas, we caught the overnight ferry to China’s mainland: to Guangzhou, as the City of Canton was then known. Everywhere we went the Chinese were fascinated by my blonde hair, which caused quite a sensation. Women would approach with outstretched arms to touch it and I’d usually oblige. Our rucksacks were also an innovation: they beat straw ropes, which was what the Chinese used to carry everything.
Certain things we figured out pretty quickly. When you arrive in a new place, buy a ticket out immediately (demand is high). We always went hard sleeper, too. Each carriage had 20 rows of three-tiered bunks – the secret was to go for middle and bottom. If you got the top bunk, you were squashed against the ceiling where tiny fans whirred day and night. On our first journey, I opened the window to let air in and a Chinese man shut it. I opened it again. Wrong! This was a steam train and the smoke and soot blew straight in our eyes; it was even worse going through a tunnel. Those 33-hour journeys were long, with people spitting and vendors offering fried food through open windows at the stations.
But there was plenty to marvel at: light flooded the valleys and the endless green paddy fields. In fact, there was a strange tranquillity in the knowledge that you couldn’t go anywhere but just had to sit there with all those people and the train jolting beneath you and take it all in. It’s amazing how the mind can release its normal grip on time when you allow it to do so.
Suddenly a group of Chinese women appeared and motioned for me to accompany them. I got up and followed them down the train, where I found Laura, an English girl, in floods of tears. She was going to Shanghai for her medical elective. Overwhelmed by the foreignness and loneliness of it all, as well as her predicament, she couldn’t stop weeping. Alarmed, her fellow passengers had gone in search of other foreigners known to be travelling on the train. Laura cheered up when she saw me and shared her fears. How lucky I was, I realised, to have Andrew. I sat comparing travel notes with Laura until we parted at Shanghai, by which stage she was once again looking forward to her adventure.
From Shanghai our journey took us up the Yangtze River in a decrepit old passenger boat. It was filthy, with squatting toilets and inedible food (if you were lucky enough to find any) and was as hot as a furnace. We’d booked second-class tickets and found ourselves stuffed into an airless, crowded dormitory but then we met a couple of English tourists who had cleverly booked a first-class cabin with curtains and a breeze. Instantly, we became best friends and took refuge in their cabin, playing cards and chatting.
We disembarked at Nanjing and then went on to Xian to see the newly discovered Terracotta Army. Standing in a vast cavern, looking at those mythical soldiers was a surprisingly moving experience.
It was becoming increasingly apparent that the authorities didn’t like independent travellers. We had to keep avoiding the CITS (Chinese International Travel Service), who were keen to bus everyone to the foreigners’ hotels, where they could keep tabs on us all. Instead we stayed at a student hostel in Beijing University, where everyone wanted to talk to us. Big things are going to happen, we were told. We had no idea what the students meant but the following year, 1989, came the Tiananmen Square massacre. You could see the curiosity and interest in the young people’s faces as they asked questions about the other side of the globe, places they could only dream of. We felt like early travellers coming back with reports of life in faraway countries: we were the lucky ones.
From Beijing we travelled out to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall of China. Within moments of walking, we found ourselves alone, gazing out at mountains that seemed to be forever rolling on; the scale was incredible. The Great Wall snakes into the distance and I can well believe that it can be seen from space.
And all the time we dreamed of Tibet.
But we weren’t the only ones. The closer we got to the border, the more Westerners we met, all intent on making the same journey. ‘Have you noticed beer is cheaper than bottled water?’ was a common greeting. There was a sense of camaraderie among the Europeans which meant we operated as one: we were tourists from the same place – the West. We arrived in Xinning and then went onto Golmud, the end of the railway line, which resembled a film-set of dusty nothingness. It was an eerie place. Behind us the sun disappeared in clouds of dust and I fell horribly ill after eating a yak burger. Lying in the hotel bed, thinking I was about to die, I became obsessed with a need for apple juice.
‘I want apple juice!’ I moaned.
When Andrew appeared through the door, hours later, with a tin can of fizzy apple juice, I thought I was hallucinating. Gulping it down thirstily, I felt instantly better.
By the time we arrived in Golmud we were among a group of 10 Westerners from Canada, USA, Switzerland and the UK – a big bunch of backpackers. We were herded into a hotel by the notorious CITS, who told us we would have to pay £200 each for a three-day trip into Tibet – ‘guided’, of course. As we wanted to travel through Tibet and on into Nepal this represented a bit of an issue, never mind the cost. After discovering one of our group spoke Tibetan, we could scarcely believe our luck. Now we could improvise: we could smuggle ourselves over the border, which was exactly what we did.
Serendipity has a funny way of taking over in situations like this. You just need to know roughly where to look and be prepared to pay for it. Before long, we had found a local bus driver who was driving the scheduled bus long distance into Tibet. We were smuggled out of the hotel in the middle of night when it was pitch-black. At the Chinese checkpoint where we left Golmud, the driver turned off the bus lights.
No one spoke English.
It was real cloak-and-dagger stuff: we were disguised in cowboy hats and cloaks provided by the Tibetans. The biggest problem was my blonde hair, which I had to stuff inside my hat. When the bus stopped we were herded out to walk around potholes too deep for it to be driven across, some stretching 20 feet long. We were conscious of passengers being beaten by Chinese soldiers but no one asked why.
Then we passed into Lhasa.
‘Not in China now, no passports,’ the hostel keeper informed us.
Grinning from ear to ear, we dumped our bags on the floor. We’d made it, though we weren’t entirely sure how it had happened.
The next morning – a crystal-clear day – we woke up in Lhasa and gazed up at the Palace, which sits on a ridge and was framed by the mountain range with slopes of snow and rock. It was as if we’d stepped back in time. We got dressed, had some tea and went for a walk. In silence, we gazed up at the stupas containing the bodies of all the Dalai Llamas.
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‘Psssst!’
We turned to find a young monk behind a pillar.
‘You speak English?’ he asked (it was illegal for Tibetans to learn English).
‘Yes.’
He showed us a book.
‘AD,’ he said. ‘What does this mean?’
‘Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Have you heard of Christ?’
His face lit up: ‘Ah, the Pope!’
Although we always hoped to get to Tibet, the prospect of climbing the Everest Foothills had been a distant reality. It only began to sink in as we packed our rucksacks with supplies for the trip. I’ve got a photo of Andrew sitting on the bed in the guesthouse studying the guidebook. Beside him on a wooden table is a pile of cans and packets, the tallest stack being noodles. (In the high altitude, the water wouldn’t boil and we had to eat them still crunchy.) Next to the noodles are cans of spam, lychees, peas, a jar of redcurrant jam, powdered baby milk that we drank with melted chocolate squares on top (delicious!), sampa (barley rolled in yak milk to make little balls of dough like a solid porridge) and loo rolls. We had to buy it all from the Friendship Store (a store only foreigners can use) as nothing was available locally. It meant playing along with the Chinese, using their currency rather than the local Tibetan Riminbi and pretending we were just tourists there for the day.
It’s amazing to think this is what got us up 5,208 metres, along with Andrew’s quiet insistence.
‘Come on, Sally. Just a little bit further!’
After a few days in Lhasa, during which time the big Nepal earthquake had injured more than 16,000 people – and we ourselves felt the tremors – we caught the local bus to Gyantse. When the driver tried to overtake a lorry on a hairpin bend, I found myself sitting above the rear wheel as it spun over emptiness. I let out a loud scream.