My return to China was flooded with a kind of reverse culture shock. The dirty, run down city of Kathmandu had cows shitting in the street; the rivers ran full of rubbish; chaotic traffic spilled in all directions around every corner and intersection. The tangled cars often sang in a symphony of horns. In contrast, I landed smack in the middle of modern commercial China, where avenues were wide, swept clean and lined with brand new shrink wrapped mature saplings, planted with exact precision, wedged into a small square in the footpath, shackled with iron stakes to the ground and cut, prodded and pushed to grow perfectly tall, straight and mind numbingly homogeneous. Traffic and people flowed in a very carefully controlled fashion. Cars stopped at traffic lights and commerce reigned. It brought about mixed feelings.
It was a place I was familiar with, but not well adjusted too. I think I was ready to leave the Indian subcontinent. It had been both breathtakingly beautiful – full of extreme feelings and emotions – and incredibly difficult, but I knew someday I would have to return. India was like that. I still hadn’t fully recovered from the double bout of dysentery but felt well enough to cycle. I was looking forward to making some headway west after the roundabout tour of India.
I landed in Chengdu and had to make my way back to Tibet. Almost a year before, in a dusty remote outpost on the Tibetan Plateau, I stopped cycling west and followed the road south to Lhasa with a small group of cyclists. I wanted to get back to that same spot, high on the Tibetan Plateau. In keeping with the essence of the expedition, I wanted to follow the thread of the adventure and maintain a continuous journey from east to west – to keep the line unbroken and stretching all the way from Singapore to Europe.
The small amount of Chinese I could speak came back quickly, as did the appetite for Chinese food. It felt different moving among the Chinese. Unlike India, couples showed affection on the streets, which made me smile. The cultural inhibitions I’d seen in India quite literally disappeared overnight. Women were allowed to dress how they pleased and live how they liked. Common folk respected personal space and privacy. In some ways it actually felt more free somehow – but I knew that was an illusion.
Unlike India, the trains in China were clean. The beds had clean white sheets on them; blankets were provided, as were pillows. Even the aisle had a rug running down the centre! The ride was smooth; inside it was quiet. Sounds of Chinese harps and flutes introduced a lady announcing every station in a clear crisp voice that was easily understood. There were few bumps in the rail track; the carriages were air conditioned; everything felt modern. Despite the all too easy comparisons I instantly made with Indian trains, it felt sad in a way that there were no people around lying in the walkways; nobody eager to find out everything about you; no open windows to stick my head out of and feel the hot breeze; no ‘clickety clack’ moving along; nobody to welcome you with a curious warm smile; nobody to share peanuts with. Something uniquely human in experience was no longer there.
I think I previously judged China far too harshly. It’s actually kinda fun to return to a familiar place. People are friendly but distant; traffic flows but without the use of loud horns – in fact it feels like stuff seems to work as it should – a world away from where I’d just come! I sat watching fat men in shorts with large round shaved heads unload the luggage from a nearby train. Some were wearing a navy worker’s apron, others with their shirts simply unbuttoned, bellies busting over their belts. Sweat ran down their faces. After the short amount of hard work was over and the trains were empty, they sat around smiling together – something as common to anyone who’d shared a hard day’s work across the globe.
See the latest pics on Far Western China here: https://picasaweb.google.com/CycleStrongman/FarWestChina?authuser=0&feat=directlink
