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| 627 miles approx |
As the snow began to fall in big thick blankets, I sadly left
Beijing. I went to the station a few hours early and sat in a waiting room with
around a squillion Chinese people, all heading off for Chinese New Year. I had
been warned not to travel by rail at this time of year, as it can be somewhat
frantic when 1.5 billion other people decide to visit their folks at exactly
the same time, by the exact same method of transportation. As I watched more and
more people pile into the station carrying bags and boxes and sticks and
children and food parcels and bikes and trolleys, I began to fear for my
life wonder if I’d get anywhere near the train in time to get on it. In a
fine example of Chinese efficiency, a bilingual announcement informed the
throng that the train would be leaving in ten minutes, so go to gate blag blah.
Within eight minutes, the squillions of Chinese people and all of the boxes,
bags, sticks, children, food parcels and me were all sitting in their spacious
aeroplane style seats on the bullet train, ready to go. The train pulled out
exactly on time with a serene tannoy greeting wishing us a ‘happyyyy twavel moooooood’.
The landscape was telling. Every single inch seemed to have
been turned over to farming or building. There were no forests or meadows or
waste land. There were fields and furrows and the ever-present backdrop of semi
built high rises and cranes. The legacy of Mao’s instructions to not waste
anything seemed to be going strong. It was dreary to look at. Hours and hours of
perfectly toiled land on a surprisingly flat landscape, with absolutely no variation other than how complete/incomplete
the distant misty grey high rises were. Cities seemed to have been plopped
randomly and in tiny, giant clumps throughout the land. Some were completely
abandoned and some were booming. All were utilitarian and ugly. Also, in all of
this heavily altered landscape, I didn’t see any people working, either farming
or building. Everything had a ghostly quality. The sun went down and we arrived
in Xi’an bang on time.
Xi’an is notable for several reasons, such as modern day
troglodytes, who live in caves around the edge of the city and can be seen
clearly from the road (an estimated 30 million Chinese people live in caves);
being the former capital of China and
the Xi’an Incident of 1936 with the
kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek, the first President of the Republic of China,
which led to the Nationalists and the Communists calling a truce so that the two
could form a united front against the increasing threat posed by Japan; but obviously
the big news, and the reason for my visit, is the Terracotta Army. Created in
210 BC, they were unearthed in 1974 when a farmer was digging a well and continues
today as an on-going archaeological project. The army depicts Emperor Qin’s
army and was created to protect him in the afterlife. The current estimate is
that there are 8000 warriors (each one unique and said to be modelled on a real person), 130 chariots and 700 horses plus non-military
including acrobats and musicians. Also found were animals, tools and jewellery.
The museum is situated around 40km from the city and is
accessible by bus, which leaves from the main train station. Naturally this has
created a shit storm of hustlers, harassing and shouting and moithering you as
soon as you walk within 200 yards of the station attempting to sell you private
tours for around £40. Being a ‘long-nose’ means that you stand out from the
predominantly Chinese crowd, and get pestered to death whether you like it or
not.
Crowds at the station
I stoically put on my set face and walk purposefully toward my chosen
destination, which was the regular bus station where I caught a bus for 7 Yuan
(70p) which took me to the museum/complex and also afforded me the luxury of
spending the day unaccompanied to peruse the site which turned out to be both a
treat and a horror show. There are three pits of Warriors that have been
excavated and they have been housed in large buildings that look a cross
between aircraft hangers and enormous university campus buildings. In order to
get to the site, you have to traverse what can only be described as an exact
copy of Merthyr Tydfil town centre. There are fast food shops, tacky trinket
sellers and stalls selling polyester tracksuits and whole wolf pelts (complete
with faces). I convinced myself that these were fake and marched on. The ticket
was £16, which was a pinch as I have a £20 per day budget, but the site
includes museums and coffee shops so I decided to make a day of it. Needless to
say, the Warriors were fascinating and I’m delighted to have seen them at close
quarters.
One of the chariots that was unearthed.
The pits are still a work in progress. No photos allowed here, but I had to take some to show what they initially find, and how they transform the pile of rubble by carefully repairing all of the fragments and recreating the army of Warriors.
I caught a bus back and was enthralled by the driver, who
was simultaneously shouting into his mobile and chain smoking under his No
Smoking sign, and his accomplice who was a stout little woman with the tenacity
of a bouncing bomb, who spent the entire journey dangling out of the bus,
screaming at passers-by to get on (this is how she captured me. I had no idea
of it was the right bus – I was just too scared to argue) as the driver wove
manically through the crazy traffic, mistakenly believing his bus to be a
moped.
The Chinese drive in a very special way. The roads are often
8 lanes wide, and I use the term ‘lane’ very
loosely. Buses, taxis, tuk tuks, bikes, cars, mopeds and lorries all weave like
some sort of hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of metal and potential bloodshed with
total impunity and no apparent accidents. As any of you who have had the
pleasure driving me anywhere know, I am as calm as a Hindu cow when sitting in any
passenger seat, so this style of traffic does not concern me in the slightest….
I had vowed never to get in a tuk tuk ever again (even though they are cheap
and more time-efficient than taxis on account of their apparent ability to
squish through the slightest of spaces between hulking buses and humans at 400
miles an hour) since I got in one being driven by a man who looked to be around
80, wearing a wool overcoat, a bin bag for a helmet and smoking a pipe took me
on a death ride that culminated in me splayed on the floor in the back,
clinging to the plastic flappy doors, sweating, cursing, hyperventilating and
praying that there wasn’t going to be an accident. And I don’t mean with the
tuk tuk. To add insult to injury, he charged me three times a taxi fare.
Granted it only came to three pounds instead of one, but still…!
Driving or crossing the road is a battle of wills. Yes there
are lines and lights and rules, but pah! Why bother with those?! You may cross the road at the zebra crossing
when the little green man is flashing, but this means nothing other than, you
have marginally better odds of not dying for no other reason that drivers may
have stopped to grab the opportunity of gobbing out of the window. But then
again, they probably have not and will continue to weave around anyway, so most
people cross anywhere and do so one vehicle at a time. It’s a sight to behold –
all of these vehicles and humans all weaving amongst each other, in no
discernible direction and yet with nobody even brushing up against anyone else.
In a country with a fifth of the world population, you’d expect at least one
scrape, but no – everyone seems to have developed an amplified sense of spatial
awareness. It’s extraordinary and seems peculiar to any cities beyond the oh-so
refined EU and their pansy highway codes and traffic police.
Most views disappear into the smog
A carved chair
Tea garden oasis, in the middle of a grey concrete housing area
Xi’an has a city wall; built in 194 BCE is one of the oldest
surviving city walls in the world. Feeling hugely underwhelmed by the city,
and overwhelmed by the traffic chaos I decided to walk around the entire wall (which
is an unexpected haven with little speakers every few yards piping out
traditional Chinese music, and very few people) and learn to count to ten in
Mandarin. I achieved the latter with the help of some very accommodating
Chinese tourists I met along the way and who helped with my pronunciation in
return for some English coaching. I also discovered that I can actually count
to a squillion as you only need to learn the first ten numbers. There are words
for 1 to 10, and then any number thereafter is a combination of these, so
eighteen is ten-eight; thirty seven is three-ten-seven; seventy six is
seven-ten-six etc. Job done – now I know when I’m being ripped off by a mental
tuk tuk driver with a death wish.
Speakers playing music as you walk the wall
On my five
hour walk/numbers lesson along the top of the wall, I fully realised the
catastrophic extent of the Chinese architectural march forwards. There seem to
be hundreds of buildings being thrown up in every direction. This in itself
isn’t bad, but the style in which they are building them is. I can imagine the
meetings at the architect’s office prior to building commencing:
‘Let’s make it
BIG and SQUARE!’
‘Yes, and
let’s make it grey!’
‘Yes, and
let’s put loads of tiny prison-windows all over it!’
‘Yes! And
let’s half build hundreds of them in tight clusters all over the land!’
‘Yes!
Excellent! Lunch?’
My hostel was at the end of this road, in the misty distance
I was
beginning to despair of Xi’an and its ugly grey buildings and apparent lack of
character, and wishing I didn’t have another day to fill when I chanced upon
the Muslim Quarter. It’s like I died and went to Jo- heaven! Every imaginable food
being cooked, piled, chopped, poured and slurped before my very big and shiny
eyes.
I spent a few
hours wandering around, eating, talking to the Chinese stall-holders in
numerical form with my now highly advanced Mandarin that consists of ‘hello’,
‘how are you?’, ‘how much?’, ‘thank you’ and any given number up to a
squillion. It’s amazing how many leading questions you can ask by mime that
requires a numerical answer, that you can then work out and translate in your
head to make yourself feel clever.
Noodle soup stop
China is predominantly atheist. During the cultural revolution a policy of elimination of religions was enforced; a massive number of places of worship were destroyed and this means that minority groups created pockets like this Muslim Quarter. Today, the state and religion are kept separate, which in my opinion is a sensible and evolved way of operating. However the desecration of religious buildings and communities was a travesty and one that the PRC government is still attempting to rectify with a program of rebuilding and restoring.
Cumin infused bread bunyumyums
They looked like potatoes goddamit!
Having eaten
things that both delighted (cumin infused bread buns, fruit kebabs, nuts,
noodle soup, dried kiwi, spinach and chilli filled nans) and disgusted me (I’m
trying to erase the memory of the cubes of animal fat that I thought were
potatoes. I couldn’t leave – the crazy old lady sat me down so all of her crazy
old friends could swarm around her long-nose guest saying ‘haAllo!’ haAlloooo!’
over and over again and laughing, until I’d finished eating her vile concoction)
I wandered back to my hostel, sated and slightly delirious. The girl with the
MASSIVE glasses and teeny tiny head at reception asked me to pay for the extra
night….. ‘Hmm?!’
‘You told us
you’d be checking out today, but you have not. You are still here. 90 Yuan
please’
Cold panic
crept up my spine as I realised that I was indeed supposed to have left for
Chongqing today. In the reverie of learning numbers like a rainbow headed three
year old and eating my bodyweight in snacks, I’d totally forgotten what day it
was. Never have you seen a person vacate a room as quickly as I did that
evening. Sparks flew from the soles of my feet. It was six thirty and I was
booked onto the eight fifteen train. I shoved everything
into/around/on/attached to my bags and raced out, unshowered, unprepared,
sweating and flapping, getting stuck in automatic doors and dropping things
every two seconds, only to be confronted with nose-to-tail rush hour traffic.
The only hope I had of getting to the station on time was to accept the offer
from the wild eyed tuk tuk driver who was smiling a crooked, knowing,
death-wish-smile at me from across the road…
