Loco

I sat back and looked on in awe as Vicki performed a strange and macabre performance of farmyard animal noises while gesticulating wildly at the menu. People were staring. What are these strange white girls doing at a backstreet noodle house barking like dogs? I studied the menu more carefully and dug out the trusty phrase book; fried greed, beauty frog porridge and lamb placenta didn’t feature in the scant glossary so we decided to leave it up to fate. Mystery meat for me, and um… well, mystery meat for the vegetarian too, her Old Macdonald routine would be honed to perfection before the month was up.

We had arrived in China the day before after being unceremoniously dumped into no-man’s land by the Vietnamese border guards. We waited nervously on the Chinese side as the guard ruthlessly scrutinised our passports; he looked at me, then at my picture, then back to me, then back to the picture, then at my bag, then me, then Vicki, then back to me. All this took around a minute, which isn’t long in the scheme of things, but if you were walk outside right now and lock eyes with a total stranger, let me tell you, a minute holding their gaze would feel like an awfully long time, especially if that stranger had a machine gun. “Aliens are permitted” said the delightful Chinglish sign, so why on earth was it taking so long?

I tried to ease the tension with a little nǐ hǎo, but he continued to stare me down, so I let my attention wander to the evaluation machine on the counter. These are a pretty common appearance at border controls now; a how am I driving sticker for passport authorities if you will. Curiously, this one appeared to be broken and the only button available to press was “very good”; ah Communism, you’re on to a winner there. Pleased that I had evaluated him so well – and so fairly – I was allowed to pass, but could still feel his eyes boring into the back of my head as I walked away. Little did I know that staring would be a key feature of my time in China.

We took ourselves to the nearest noodle house and took a seat by the window, all the better for people watching we thought. After all, as a backpacker, watching the world go by becomes a favourite pastime. What we hadn’t realised was that in China we were interesting to look at, really really interesting. “Moo, mooo, quack, quack”, Vicki had another bash at avoiding mystery meat in her lunch while I did a little chicken dance to hammer the point home. The waitress smiled awkwardly, then began nodding furiously before bringing poor Vic a bowl of mixed carcass. Vegetarianism really is a foreign concept here. While all this was going on we failed to notice the small crowd of locals gathering outside the window for a good old stare. I kid you not, one man literally held his small child up to the window for a better view, and this was just the beginning.

Minutes later we were running across a car park in a desperate bid to catch the only bus to Kunming, a town that looks to be close to the border, but is in fact a 12 hour bus ride away. This is something I would learn quickly about China; it is massive, like really, really big, (insert some sort of comparison to Wales here), big enough so that every place we wanted to visit was at least 12 hours away. Gratefully we made it onto the bus, and began the first of many journeys we would make on a Chinese sleeper bus.

The sleeper bus is a fantastic invention, and one that is yet to make its debut in Europe. In fact, consider this the beginning of my campaign to get some loco2 sleeper buses on the Continent. Granted they ain’t great if you’re tall – I think my 5ft 6” was pushing it a bit – but being able to lay horizontal on a long journey isn’t something that should be sniffed at. And if you’re really lucky you’ll get the added bonus of watching Chinese love songs on video all night long, and a couple of crates of ducks strapped to the roof rack above your head. While not the great sleep you get on a night train, it sure beats a night in a seat on a coach.

I tucked myself into my Vietnamese silk sleeping bag, pad-locked my backpack and tied it to my ankle, ipod in ears, eye patches on. I know it doesn’t sound too glamorous but believe me, when you’ve done a 17-hour coach trip across Mexico with the air conditioning on full pelt, these buses seem like heaven, ducks and all. With that in mind I drifted off to sleep, dreaming of paradise: in the morning we’d be in Shangri-La…

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