Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (24 page)

‘RIGHT!’

Furious, I reached for my gun in the back pocket of my cycle shirt and waved it about, giving it my best Quentin Tarantino:

‘YOU WANNA PIECE OF ME,
MOTHERFUCKERS
!!’

The kids screamed in terror and tore off in different directions, some throwing themselves down the rocky embankment below. I pulled the hammer back and took aim.

POP!

A plastic pellet flecked skyward before rolling impotently onto the road then into the gutter.

Oh, come on! As if I would use a
real
gun!

Days later, the children had their own revenge. Sitting in a hotel room, replaying the event and laughing to myself, I stupidly aimed the BB gun at the wall and pulled the trigger. The pellet ricocheted and hit me squarely in the forehead. When I tried to reload it, it broke.

I was still some distance from Muree as the sun faded, so I camped on the lawn of Mullard’s uncle’s house. Mullard was a 17-year-old student who had approached me to stay with him. Just like Govinda in Nepal, Mullard waited until I had set up camp and got myself snuggled up in my sleeping bag before popping his head through to say, ‘You can sleep in my house if you like. Not safe here.’

I declined. I wasn’t going to pack this thing up in the dark. Everything would be all right. After all, my bike was locked up to the security bars on his garage window. And by now I was tired of having to return answers to the usual questions that were asked of me (‘Why are you cycling?’ ‘Where are you going?’ etc.) and wanted a night of peace.

However, I should’ve gone in with Mullard for I dreamed that night of a shadow behind a window staring at me. It scared me so much that I awoke briefly to the sound of clanging metal. I thought that a member of Mullard’s family must have been opening the gate … except there was no gate.

In the morning when I went to unlock the bike, I saw white flakes of paint scattered like dried leaves around the bike. The rubber had been cut off the D-lock and chisel marks had left dints in the casing. I was shocked. It was the first time on my trip that someone had tried to steal my bike. In their last desperate attempt to get the bike free, they had given the frame a good yanking, which had woken me up.

Mullard looked at the mess. ‘These are a simple people here. Some bad.’

Later that day I arrived in the small hill station of Nathiagali, some 2500 metres up, on the Karakoram Highway. I had noticed military jets flying around this area all day.

A Pakistani man in neat Western clothes approached me as I sat down at a
chai
stall. I asked him if he had heard any recent developments.

‘They have given the Taliban seventy-two hours to give up Bin Laden.’

‘What?’

‘They will start bombing after this time.’

There was no way I could reach the Chinese border before this happening. Panicking, I jumped on the bike and dashed down the mountain to the town of Abbottabad. (Now famous for where Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. I like to entertain the idea of him dyeing his beard in the mirror while my reflection cycled through in the background, startling him, thus spilling the dye all over himself. Alas, he apparently didn’t live here until 2005.)

When I checked my email that night, my inbox was again stacked with pleas for me to leave Pakistan. And news reports on the BBC only got worse: the border to Afghanistan was now closed.

I decided I would take the bus to Sost, which was as close as I could get to the Chinese border. So the next morning as I waited at the bus station (well, a restaurant with a broken chair out the front of it), a middle-aged German man slipped off a bus that had just arrived.

‘Ze Chinese border is closed,’ he told me. ‘Half an hour before I get zere zey close it! Zey stop everyzing – trucks, buses, car, cyclists … everybody.’ He looked at me through his big glasses and smiling face. ‘Are you going to ze Chinese border?’

We sat together in the dusty, rattling bus on the way back to Rawalpindi. Passengers fell asleep sideways on their seats; some chain-smoked, their arms going back and forth to their mouths like pumps. My new German friend was called Winfred.

‘Ze India–Pakistan border is ze only one open now and zis may close too,’ Winfred said. ‘I have to change my air ticket. It leaves from Beijing back to Germany. Ah! Zis is the third time zis has happened to me in zis country! In nineteen hundred and sixty-six with ze overthrow of ze king in Afghanistan, ze Indo–Pak war, and now zis. Ah, such a shame. So beautiful. You know, in ze sixties zhere were two places to go to on ze hippie trail: Kabul and Kathmandu. In Kabul zey would give you your hotel key and a block of hashish. Everywhere! It was amazing. Zose were ze days before ze king was overthrown.’

Winfred was a keen traveller and carried only a small briefcase with him.

‘Zis has thirty years of travel experience,’ he said, patting it. ‘I don’t take much. I have documents and one change of clothes. Only eight kilos.’

He opened it up and took out a lighter shirt to change into.

‘Zese documents here,’ he said, pulling out an IBM plastic pocket, ‘are details of ze highlights of ze day; what ze hotel was like, ze food. Very brief. Only one page. Every page counts, you know, with ze weight.’

‘Wow! How unGerman of you!’

‘Hah! Vot do you carry on ze bike?’

‘Well …’ and I told him, in great detail, every little thing I was carrying.

‘Zis …’ he looked at me as if I’d just loaded my entire luggage into his brief case. ‘Zis is too much. You need to have more discipline!’

In Islamabad, Wilfred took the next flight back to Germany whereas I took a very comfortable air-conditioned bus back to Lahore full of, I presumed, middle-class Pakistanis as some of the women wore jeans and didn’t wear the
hijab
.

While the movie ‘Independence Day’ played on multiple video screens above, a stubby American man in his 40s living in New Mexico, Todd, spoke at me in an endless monotone about the bombing being the worst since Pearl Harbour, that he couldn’t understand why anyone would attack the US of A, that people are so racist towards Americans, that Americans were the most law-abiding God-fearing people on the planet and that America never started a war that wasn’t right.

His concerns weren’t helped when there was an explosion of applause from passengers as they watched the White House being vaporised by an alien ship.

‘Now that is just not nice!’ he grumbled. To cheer him up I said, ‘Hey, Todd. What if the big windscreen of the bus suddenly became the movie itself so that the driver had to drive through the corny plot, huh?’

He grunted, then buried himself in a heavily censored Pakistani version of Newsweek.

After staying the night at the nearly deserted Regale Inn, Malik looking most forlorn, the next morning I cycled the 25 kilometres back to India from Lahore. At Immigration, the very same official that had processed my passport when I left India was now holding it again.

‘Ah … we have met before, no?’ he asked as I whisked the bags off my bike for a customs check.

I sighed heavily. ‘Yes.’

He smiled into his
chai
as he re-stamped my Indian visa. ‘You much enjoying India to come back again so soon, yes?’

‘Well …’

I crossed the border and that that ‘favourite thing’ happened – I got a puncture and within seconds I was swamped by hundreds of men. 

‘You’re going to fawkin’ China?’

‘Yes.’

‘On a fawkin’ bike?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ! Don’t talk to me about fawkin’ China!’ said the lanky Lancashire lad, Gavin, wiping sweat from his brow as we sat in the Beer Bar Restaurant in Amritsar, chewing on Tandoori chicken. He eyed his drunken mate, Trevor, who nodded heavily with his beer.

‘We’ve just spent three months there just to make sure we wouldn’t have to do it again. The people are rude. It’s expensive, polluted. They’ve nothing much to see, and if there’s anything of interest they’ve got Chinese tourists running all over it and you’ve got to pay all the time for everything. They could have a plastic dragon in a bucket and they’d make you pay 20 quid to see it, for fawk’s sake. They’re bas-tards! I went to a tourist office in Xian and asked the guy if he spoke English – and, mind you, there are signs everywhere in English – and he says, ‘
Méiyŏu
’ (don’t have). ‘
Méiyŏu
’ is all I fawkin’ hear in China, and this is a tourist office! So we started nicking signs after that, started acting like bas-tards back to them, pushin’ in lines. You can’t go somewhere else?’

‘No. Well … you see, I’m trying to write a book called Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle.’

‘So?’

‘It’s got to have the “B” in it.’

‘Oh … I know! What about Bombay to Birmingham! “You awwwright there, choock?”’

China wasn’t sounding promising. Not one foreigner I had met so far had had a good experience there. What’s more, Philippe, who had managed to get to Ürümqi in China’s far west before the Pakistan border closed, emailed me desperately with ‘They have no caaaaake!’

No cake … oh, hell.

Some books I had read had not exactly given a glowing report of China, either, claiming that the Chinese saw themselves as the centre of the world, did not accept refugees unless of Chinese blood, and maintained a dual pricing system for foreigners. And, finally, there was Douglas Adams of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
fame who had described his experience in China in
Last Chance To See
: ‘They just stare at you as if you were a dog food commercial’.

Staring. Not that again!

Why indeed was I going to China? It sounded just like India.

But the need to finish what I had started had sunk its teeth into me. I tried to console myself with the fact that, because I could only get a two-month visa, it would be a shortish trip. A train or bus would have to help me complete the journey in that time. Most of me felt relieved, some of me felt cheated.

But …

Who would have thought my first impressions of China would be formed while sitting with a beer in hand and enjoying a balmy night surrounded by limestone pinnacles and calm lakes? I was in Yangshuo, a small town in the Guangxi Province of southwest China. It was lush and green, and the air was clear. I soaked up the lazy days cycling through the old towns under sweeping roofs, climbing Moon Hill Mountain, which gave stupendous views of the valley, and gorging myself at the lively restaurant markets. Sometimes I would cycle further out of town and find myself on a farm sharing tea or a meal with farmers. Often I would go for a long swim in the Lijiang River in the midday heat. It was glorious. China was a godsend. Since I had arrived from Hong Kong everyone had been friendly and helpful, patiently listening to my faulty Chinese and giving me directions.

And I needed all the help I could get. Getting here over the past month had been hectic.

I had cycled from Amritsar to Delhi – a featureless experience along the flat Grand Trunk Road, clocking 150 kilometre days – then took the train to Calcutta (so jammed with cholesterol-coloured taxis that I was sure the city was going to have a heart attack) where the monsoonal rains were so heavy that I had to trudge waist-deep through the foyer of my hotel to get to my room.

Unable to get to China by land, I ended up securing a flight to Hong Kong, where I inadvertently got stuck. I had, en route, come up with the brilliant plan of shoving my tools and pedals down my bike shorts and wearing my trousers over the top, to avoid paying for excess luggage.

How could I have been so stupid?

I was caught by the metal detector, which binged excitedly as I went through it for the umpteenth time. I was forced to strip by two Calcuttan guards (one toting a machine gun), in front of other passengers. The guards confiscated tools, baulking at my clipless SPD pedals, stuffing them into envelopes and telling me I would be able to collect them in Hong Kong when my flight got in.

Seven days later
they arrived, me going spare over my lack of spares, and I took the next bus to Yangshuo.

Unlike India, this touristy spot was divine: it did not have touts strangling my arms and my attention; the streets were free from rubbish; the air had none of the ‘China grey’ I had been hearing about in big cities and I was left alone pretty much most of the time.

The days were bright and warm. People smiled. Cafés mushroomed with tourists dressed with bum bags and ill-fitting T-shirts. They gorged themselves on café mochas, fat banana pancakes and steaks and took guided tours.

With all the comforts of Western life, it didn’t seem quite China, and I didn’t mind that. Especially as I was chatting to a cheeky and attractive waitress, Fulong.

‘You are a stupid!’ she laughed.

‘Why?’

‘Because I say you are!’

Ah, how refreshing it was to be in a culture where women regularly insulted me. I had found it difficult in India, where it was nearly impossible to talk to women at any great length. Rather than the demure Chinese women I expected, they were quite the opposite. Women were out there driving taxis and rickshaws, farming, and running businesses rather than being shrouded and whisked away under the smoke of the nearest kitchen. They were pushy, mischievous, charming and sometimes violent to each other (in a village I had seen two women beating each other with sticks). What was all this business about not losing face?

As the nights progressed I got to know Fulong better. I liked her and soon we were spending warm nights together, her arms brushing mine as we strolled. She had flawless skin, beautiful brown eyes and a rapid wit.

‘I had a Belgian boyfriend. We lived together here for two years—’ she faltered. ‘Then he left.’

I entertained notions of staying here getting to know Fulong but stuffed it up after I asked an Israeli woman for a light of a cigarette and the next I thing she had annexed our conversation like it was the West Bank. Soon we were joined by other travellers, joking and laughing loudly until Fulong sunk under a sea of English words and disappeared. I never saw her again.

The next day I left for Guilin, where I was told I could find a bus to take me to the city of Kunming. Due to the limited time, I’d thought I’d try and see the best parts of China. As I read up and talked to more people about it, the Yunnan Province seemed idyllic for cycling.

It was away from the encroaching mess of urbanisation that had eaten away at the eastern seaboard of China; it was up in the hills; it was cooler; and there were numerous minority groups to see and old cities to explore.

And so the next day, I cycled out of Yangshou. It was muggy, hot, Karst mountains peeping through the monsoonal mist while farmers were bent over in their paddy fields burning the remnants of cornhusks. As I rode past, one stood up to answer his mobile phone.

Heading north along the Lijiang River, I took the east road, a dirt track, and already I was sweating profusely. I had set off at midday, not the best time in this weather. An hour later, I stopped for a bowl of hot noodle soup at Xingping, a small town by the Lijiang River. I enquired about taking a boat all the way to Guilin but was told by a group of forlorn travellers that boat operators had got themselves in trouble with the police for carrying foreigners. I hopped back on the bike and continued north out of town. Several well-meaning locals tried to get me to turn back even after I showed them where I wanted to go on my map.

‘
Bu yao
(Bad),’ they said.

I assumed they must have thought I was a lost tourist, so I kept going, my Chinese/English map leading the way. I rarely found myself lost in China as after a while I started to recognise the Chinese characters.

As I cycled along these quiet farming roads, the karst mountains seemed to dance in the distance. They obviously toyed with the minds of the locals too: on my Yangshuo tourist map, the mountains were given names that really stretched the imagination: ‘Tortoise Climbing Up Hill’, ‘Fish Tail Peak’, ‘Glove Hill’, ‘Lion Watching Nine Horses’, ‘Lonely Lady Rock’ and ‘Happy Marriage at Biya Hill’. It was somewhere near ‘Something I Made Up While On Opium’, that I found myself climbing up a road that disappeared behind brown hills.

Below me sat a lake and a small typical Chinese village – sweeping roofs and tiled beams. Remarkably, this style has changed little over thousands of years.

Above me, the faint sound of a motorbike struggling through its gears whispered through the mist. It was already dusk and I knew I would not make it to the top before the light was gone. I headed back down, bouncing on the gravel road, past a square-tiled school and several houses. The town appeared to have no centre, no place to buy groceries, not even a noodle shack. I followed a track and ended up at a double-storey house where a bald old man stood out the front, smoking the stub of his cigarette.

I pointed to ‘hotel’ in my pocket dictionary. The old man looked over then waved his hand.

‘
Méiyŏu
!’ He could not read, it seemed.

He pointed to his house, offering, I presumed, a place for me to stay. On a couch in the living room sat another man; round, grey and slurping rice.

‘
Chī fān
!
Chī fān
! (Eat! Eat!),’ old man urged. He whisked over a bowl and chopsticks and ordered me to eat what was in the wok on the coffee table. He clumsily funnelled a strong-smelling white liquid from a 20-gallon container into my glass.

‘
Compai
!’ The three of us clinked glasses and drank. It burned my throat and I winced. They both laughed. It was rice wine.

‘
Chī fān
!
Chī fān
!!’ the old man urged again and I did, shovelling the Chinese cabbage and pork into my mouth. This ritual continued – drinking quickly, eating quickly, the old man shouting and spitting rice and an hour later I was well and truly pissed. Somehow the three of us ended up singing some garbled mush like wailing dogs.

When his friend departed, the old man and I were left staring at each other until he interrupted the silence by shouting and spitting rice at me again. He must have been at least sixty-five and had deep-set eyes, tanned skin and a face that was set in a deep scowl. To be honest, he looked bit like the bald villain, The Hood,
xxv
out of the 1960s TV puppet show, ‘
The Thunderbirds’
.

His bachelor farming life pervaded the living room – hoes, buckets, baskets, boots, bags of rice, tarpaulin on the walls and to my surprise – a wide-screen television and a DVD player.

The old man pointed to the television, then poked the remote, indicating that it didn’t work and that perhaps I could have a go at fixing it. I got up, looked behind the television and saw the problem – it wasn’t plugged in! I hesitated for a second, thinking that maybe someone had unplugged it for a reason and if I did plug it in now maybe it might blow the television up and then God knows what would happen.

I did it anyway. The television instantly flickered to life causing the man’s eyes to burst wide and embrace me with a big laugh.

With the babble of the television, his relatives and friends piled into the house from next door, some wearing trousers and no shirts. They stared at me for a brief while but then, bored with this, fixated their attention on the screen.

After they left, the old man pointed to the bathroom, indicating that this was where I could wash. He turned the taps on and stripped to his white boxer shorts. He motioned me to wash with him but I stepped back and left him to it.

When I yawned, he showed me my room, which was large and had a double bed. I had a wash and retired to my room. Stretching out on the big bed, I was dreaming of the beautiful countryside I had experienced – the karst mountains, the paddy fields, the Lijiang River, the quiet roads and sparseness – when there was an almighty BOOM!

The door exploded. The old man charged in shouting and then sat on the edge of the bed in his white boxer shorts. He leant over me and I curled away further up the bed, wondering what he wanted.

He sat back, barking in the dark. I pretended to sleep as I waited tensely for his next move. He then did nothing but yawn loudly for the next half-hour before he eventually left.

I got up and shut the door behind him. Two hours later …

BOOM!

He was in my room and again sat at the edge of the bed and yawned. This time he only stayed for ten minutes and then went back to his room. At three a.m. I was woken up again, but not by him – by Sylvester Stallone.