For this entry I need to get a bit graphic
– I figure I may as well get it all off my chest in one hit – so if you are squeamish,
bad luck.
 |
| Kunming, China. |
Chinese people are gross, there’s really no
way around it. They’re decent and hard-working with a complex culture that
dates back thousands of years and anyway we’d better be nice to them, they’ll
be running the world in a few years – but on a flight from Mandalay in Burma to
Kunming in south west China, I struggled to come to grips with their attitude
towards bodily fluids. The plane was full of suited Chinese businessmen with
hacking coughs who hawked up litres of mucus from somewhere deep behind their
noses and spat into plastic sick bags. Throughout the one-hour border hop all I
could hear above the engine drone was a cack-ophony of rasping and gurgling. These
same men had elbowed me aside at the check-in counter and lit up cigarettes in
front of the no smoking signs in the waiting room. No one spoke to me or even
looked at me on the flight and the change from the friendly, curious Burmese
was complete.
I tried to block
out the snot concerto by looking out the window as we flew over green cloaked
mountains high and steep and remote. Far beyond the Eastern horizon, these
became the same mountains I had ridden over in Vietnam. To the east was Everest
and farther, much farther, was Afghanistan.
On the Burmese side I could see no sign of civilization in the undulating,
bottle-green carpet, but as we crested a spectacular ridge line the mountains
fell sharply into China
and immediately the jungle gave way to the lighter green of terraced rice
paddies. Dirt roads followed deforested ridgelines and drew thin brown loops as
they descended to a plateau and joined thicker ribbons of black highway. By a
green lake a town laid out in a twisted concrete grid spawned a larger highway
which fell away gently below us as the land lost elevation and the air became
hazy.
The
scale of China
is hard to imagine. There are 1.3 billion people in a country geographically
not much bigger than Australia,
which has a population of 23 million. Our puny human brains are not designed to
grasp big numbers so think of it like this. Imagine you had to shake hands with
everyone Australian and then every Chinese person, and say you could shake one
hand every second. If you didn’t sleep, eat or pee, it would take you a bit
under 44 years to shake every Australian’s hand. It would take over 2,480 years
for the Chinese. Either way you’d die of a burst bladder or a broken hand. With
a population of 6.5 million, Kunming is the 47th
(!) largest city in China,
although it is half as big again as the biggest city in Australia. As
we banked around a low hill, I could see hundreds of identikit concrete
apartment buildings rising skinny and white at the end of a large lake. We
aborted our first go at the airport and swung around in a loop to try again,
swooping low over more boxy buildings and touching down. While we were still
taxiing with the seatbelt light on my fellow passengers tied their soggy little
bags closed and threw them on the floor, before standing up all at once and
jamming the aisle. We were still minutes from disembarking but they elbowed
each other out of the way and stood awkwardly with their heads jammed under
overhead lockers. The flight attendants made some half-hearted attempts to reseat
them but were ignored. When the door opened the pack surged forward. I stayed
in my window seat and watched men elbow in front of women and squash each other
into seatbacks. It was all silent, no one apologized, no one protested, no one
made eye contact. The whole process took at least twice as long as it does in
any other country I’ve been to.
By
the time I got through immigration and claimed my bag it was early evening but
still light. The whole of China, despite spanning a fifth of the globe east to
west, runs on Beijing time so despite flying nearly straight north I had lost
two hours. I was the only non-Chinese at the airport and a friendly man with an
‘airport official’ badge approached me and offered to help me change money and
drive me to a hotel. I figured it was a bit of a scam but without a word of
Chinese or a guidebook I had little choice. He took a small commission on the
exchange and charged a little too much to drive to a hotel where they
overcharged me slightly but it was all done politely and as I chained my bags
to an exposed water pipe I remembered that these people had 3,000 years
practice at fooling foreigners – I never stood a chance.
Hungry I walked
through canyons of blocky buildings, weaving through a crush of pedestrians and
electric bikes. In scruffy old Burma
everyone had worn traditional long skirts and painted their faces with thanaka
and wanted to know where I was from but here girls in heels, short skirts and
thick make-up giggled into mobile phones while boys stood around in tight jeans
swinging their arms. People either stared or ignored me, no one returned my
smile. It felt good to stroll at random, anonymous in this busy city of
billboards and taxis. All around me I heard the now-familiar sound of snorting
and growling that proceeds the anticlimactically dribbly Chinese spit. Under my
feet great gobs of yellow-green mucus pockadotted the concrete. Most had been
turned into dull stains by footfalls but many were still fresh and bubbling.
In the morning I
walked along a six lane expressway into the middle of town and checked into The
Hump youth hostel where I celebrated my return to the world of banana pancakes
and two-for-one happy hours by jettisoning my digestive tract. It was obviously
a big job so my body decided that it needed to employ all available orifices to
complete the task as quickly as possible. I moped around the hostel eating
nothing and never straying beyond a desperate, bum-clenched, hand-over-mouth
scurry away from the toilet. After two days I felt slightly better and began
exploring Kunming,
happy that I could satisfy my craving for pizza and burgers. This is my body’s
usual reaction after a bout of travellers’ sickness and I could hardly have
been in a better place. The city centre was full of huge shopping malls selling
polo shirts with crocodiles on them and enormous handbags for the price of a
car, between them were pharmacies stocked with traditional medicine and stalls
selling pink mobile phone cases with bunny ears. And everywhere were western
fast food joints – Burger King, maccas, Pizza Hut, KFC, the whole gang was
there. From behind my Big Mac I could see the golden arches of the next
McDonald’s restaurant 200 metres away.
I may have
overdone it and on a long walk to the train station one afternoon I felt
familiar rumblings and stabs of cramp. The marks of civilization, I think, are
public rubbish bins and public toilets and Kunming has both in abundance so I ducked
into the next public convenience where a lady charged me a few cents and
pointed to the correct door. The smell of shit stopped me dead and I looked
around. Half a dozen cubicles lined each wall, their doors either open or
missing completely, a carpet of toilet paper squelched under foot. Inside each cubicle
was a tiled floor with a hole in the middle. There was no water and no way of
flushing so each cubicle was piled so high with shit that it rose above the
level of the floor, curling into little peaks like the McDonald’s soft serve
ice cream I suddenly remembered eating earlier. In two cubicles, men squatted,
pants around ankles and elbows resting on their knees, doors wide open. One
stared at me and the other chatted loudly into an iPhone. I chose the least
disgusting toilet with a door that closed. I hung my bag on the door handle
very carefully – I would have to burn it if it fell – and concentrated on not
toppling backwards as I added to the collection.
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