alisaurus

So, my plans for my first few days in Kunming didn’t go at all to plan. Never mind. Now I was off to Macau for a Bahá’í event. I’d been worrying about getting to Macau for weeks. Maybe even months? I’m pretty sure I’d been driving Rory (and everyone else I know) crazy by going on about how I had no idea how I was going to get there. At any rate, he’d been driving me crazy by insisting I just figure it out when I got to China, or hitch. (That had to be a joke. The girl who can’t find her way out of Aberdeen train station is NOT going to hitchhike through China.) Anyhow, I did indeed leave it ’till I got to China.

I got up early and went to the internet cafe to copy down the information I’d need to get to Macau, and a supermarket to get some food to eat on the way. It’s hard to imagine how much you might eat on a journey, but I think I’m capable of imagining a little better than I did that day. I checked out of the hotel and got a taxi to the train station. The station was kind of scary. There were loads of people, and queueing seems a totally foreign concept (I guess it could quite literally be a totally foreign concept). I found what I thought was the right mass of people that bore a vague resemblance to a queue and asked someone if it was the right one. That method seems to work everywhere, and all you need to do is point to your ticket and shrug. In Britain, people travelling on trains have luggage. Cases and bags, sometimes carrier bags, and if they’re taking a newly bought electrical appliance, maybe a carboard box holding said appliance. I don’t know what kind of things people here were taking with them, but they were all in carrier bags, those huge bag-for-life type things, and cardboard boxes, tied together with string. In terms of cultural differences, I think that made the biggest impression on me so far.

I got on the train, and found my seat. I’m not sure how tickets work here. I know you can get a soft sleeper, a hard sleeper or a hard seat. I’d only bought my ticket the day before so all that was left were hard seats, so that’s what I had. There were way more people than seats in the carriage so I don’t know if they sell space after all the seats have gone, or what. Some people in the carriage looked well off, like the lady sat beside me, with the fancy mobile, and expensive-looking luggage, and some looked pretty poor, wearing shabby clothes. On the negative side, although there were signs saying “no smoking” and “no spitting” there were large amounts of both throughout the journey. I also discovered that the Chinese aren’t big on nappies, dressing their babies in bottomless trousers, and letting them wee on the floor or wherever, and, in this case, over their parents. And the boy next to them, who didn’t appear to know them, or mind all that much. The floor was a foul mixture of urine, spit, cigarette butts and sunflower seed cases by the end of the journey. Lovely. On the positive side, the people (all Chinese apart from me) didn’t know each other, and were from different social classes, but they all chatted, shared food, and gave up their seats for each other as if they were family. If I had been feeling more confident, I would have chatted away to them too.

I spend the first few hours looking out of the windows and taking photos. The scenery was amazing. I think we must have gone through Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi. The outskirts of Kunming were a surprise, they looked very poor and run-down, then we got into countryside with beautiful hills, little villages, terraced fields, and farmers working in those straw hats that look like lampshades. I didn’t expect things to be as Chinese as they were. I came here with the expectation that I wouldn’t see any of the things you see in films or guide books. Once the sun set and I couldn’t see outside, things got a bit boring. I hadn’t taken much food, and didn’t fancy any of the things they were selling on the train, and my stomach started hurting again. Some of the people around me tried to speak to me, asking me questions, but I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. I think they were Guangdong people, who apparently have a reputation for speaking incomprehensible Mandarin. And they laughed at me when I didn’t understand, which, because of the way I was feeling at the time, upset me. I felt like saying “If you’d speak properly, I’d be able to understand you fine“, but that’s unlikely to help matters, and I’m sure they weren’t doing it to be mean.

I had been told to be really careful about keeping an eye on my posessions, and not to go to sleep, under any circumstances. I put my purse, passport, camera, iPod and everything valuable into my handbag, and put it where on one could get to it without me noticing, but the latter was easier said than done. The journey was 25 hours. I was too scared to get up and walk about in case anyone took my things, or my seat, so I stayed sitting for the whole journey. “Hard seats” aren’t really hard, they’re a lot like seats on British trains, but after a while, they get uncomfortable. I’d packed my bag in a hurry, and not taken everything I needed (like my pyjamas), but I had thrown in my travel pillow (which Johan’s mum bought me in Ikea, thank you!!) and alternately sitting on it, leaning my back on it, and putting it between my head and the window made the journey a lot more comfortable. Like in Beijing airport, I kept nodding off and jerking awake again, which wasn’t too nice.
Passangers had gotten on and off the train along the way, and people had switched seats. In the morning there was a little girl sitting next to me. I brushed my hair, so some of it had come out and was on the seat, and she picked strands up, and laid them on the table, saying, “金色的头发” (golden hair), and stuck transfers on my nails. She was cute.

When we got to the station, I got thoroughly confused trying to find my way out, then even more confused trying to find my way back in again to buy a return ticket. I asked several people where to go to get a ticket to Kunming, and when I got to the desk, I was told I couldn’t. No explanation given. It didn’t make sense, as I’d just come from there, but I was too tired to persue it, so I left. My instructions said to go to the bus station and get a ticket to Zhuhai, so I left the train station, and walked to the area with all the busses (that’s a bus station, right?) Apparently not. I asked lots of people and they all told me I couldn’t get a bus to Zhuhai. Or at least I tried to ask a lot of people. I didn’t encounter many people who spoke good Mandarin, and my Cantonese consists of a few words from Kelly Chen songs. As Kelly doesn’t often sing about getting busses to Zhuhai, those words weren’t a lot of use. I remembered I’d gotten a text from Tim on the way, that mentioned someone getting a bus from the… China Hotel? I can’t remeber the name any more. So I tried to get a taxi there. Not only did the taxi drivers all speak Cantonese, but I had great trouble in finding a legitimate taxi. (I’d decided to stick to the ones that were the same as the ones I’d used in Kunming.) Someone took me down to a carpark, and to a car that had no sign of a meter, or a license. I eventually found a regular looking one, and the driver told me how much it would be to the hotel, and I agreed, and he took me there. Unless the fares are 10 times the price per mile than in Kunming, I got ripped off, but never mind, I’ll know better next time.

There was indeed a bus stop opposite the hotel, so I went there and tried to find Zhuhai on the timetable, and asked someone else waiting there, and they told me it was the other bus stop, and directed me across the road. That wasn’t it either. The I found another one around the corner, and it turned out to be the right one, and I bought the last ticket to Zhuhai. Oh, I forgot to mention, Guangzhou is reeeeeeeeeeeeeally hot and humid in August and I’m not used to that kind of weather at all. I thought I might pass out if I had to take much more of it. The bus was a breath of fresh air. Or a breath of cool air. It had air conditioning, as well as comfy padded seats and loads of legroom. I lay back, listened to my iPod, and became aware, for the first time, or just how awful I smelled. It had been a good 30 hours since I’d had a shower, I’d been sweating like a badger, and picked up all the aforementioned foul smells from the train. I felt extremely sorry for the fashionable young lady sat next to me. The bus took several hours but it was a nice, relaxing journey, and the scenery was quite nice. A lot more tropical than Kunming, cleaner and more modern. We went alongside the sea and I saw little islands (I think) and some quite Chinese looking boats that I wish I’d taken a picture of for my dad. So then we went into a tunnel, and the bus stopped, and I got off.

It wasn’t quite what I expected. I entered a shopping mall type place, and stumbled around asking people where the customs hall was. I found it, and stumbled around inside, and eventually wound up in the right queue inside. The people working there seemed really different to the ones in Beijing. Maybe it’s the climate? Maybe it’s the culture? Maybe they get paid more? I got through customs and left the building on the Macau side. I’ve never entered a country over a land border. It was quite an experience! (Macau isn’t really a separate country, though.) Macau uses Patacas (and Hong Kong dollars), not RMB, so I tried to find a place to change money, or a cash machine, but couldn’t find one. I went to the taxi rank, and the driver was happy to accept RMB, so I gave him the address, and we set off.

Here’s where my sheer stupidity comes into play. I’d coppied down the address, in Chinese and Portuguese, but I’d coppied the wrong address, so I ended up at the Macau Bahá’í Centre. If I was to get lost in a city, I’d be quite thankful to find myself there, but there was no one there, so it wasn’t much use. I wandered round the street telling people the bits of the correct address that I could remember, but no one had a clue where I was talking about, and I didn’t even know what island it was on. My phone was nearly out of credit and I couldn’t figure out what to add on to phone numbers to make a call, so I sent Tim a text along the lines of “I’m lost. HELP!” Someone from where I should have been phoned me, and arranged for a guy who lives about the centre to meet me and give me the correct address. After maybe half an hour, he came home from work, took me to his home, gave me dinner (which I couldn’t eat as I was feeling really ill again) and put me in a taxi and gave me some patacas in case my RMB didn’t cover the fair. I was quite overwhelmed by his hospitality.