In the lead up to our first half term break, I was in
contact with a travel agent recommended by Senior School staff. His chosen English name happened to be ‘Peter
Pan’, which is obviously how he signed off all his emails and text
messages. After the expected comic
backlash—no his assistant’s name was not Tinkerbell, he helped us arrange a six
day sojourn from Shanghai to Xi’an, the once ancient capital of China, and then
onto Chengdu, home of the largest panda breeding centre in the country.
So five of our ragtag team of new teachers made our way to
an early airport visit in order to dash from tourist site to tourist site in
what I consider to be one of the more exhausting half term trips I’ve
taken.
We weren’t alone on our travels; October 1 is the founding
day of the People’s Republic of China and kicks off something called ‘Golden
Week’, a week where the Chinese travel, see family and enjoy state mandated
time off. I mean sort of. Because in this it-can-only-happen-in-China way,
the government gives people three days of paid holiday. The surrounding weekends are then
‘rearranged’ so that workers can have seven days of continuous holidays. What this means though is that on the weekend
after Golden Week, Chinese workers and students go back to the grind. Kids go to school on Saturday and Sunday and
no one bats an eyelid. So it’s holiday
but it’s kind of not holiday at the same time.
What’s crazy is that the 2007 estimate for the number of Chinese people
who travel during this time racks up to 120 million. Towards the middle of the week, we vied with
what felt like that number at every tourist site, metro station and restaurant
we encountered.
By China’s standards, Xi’an is a small city of only 8.5
million. Its city hosts an ancient city
wall, a drum and bell tower, various touches of modernity like a pretty
efficient rapid transit system and high rise mall upon high rise mall. It’s not that I wasn’t impressed, it’s just
that I wasn’t that impressed.
Possibly it started with our accommodation, 7 Sages Youth
Hostel, rated one of YHA’s top ten in the world. This rating relies mostly on the fact that
the hostel is housed in a 14th century monks’ residence. Curved archways dotted the landscape and the
lounge area was decked in ivy, dim lighting and low-slung couches. And that’s where it stopped being
fabulous—our room was reminiscent of an ashtray, musty with a lingering odour
of 300-years-of-cigarette smoke meets damp, peeling wallpaper just more than a
little bit yellowed around the edges.
Possibly it was our terrifying tuk tuk journey with the
driver from hell. On the way home from
dinner one night, Kim, Aine and I hopped into his plastic deathtrap. He ‘knew’ where he was going. Only he didn’t because as we gesticulated wildly
‘yougwai, yougwai’ (right, right) he zoomed past our street only to turn three
streets later down a darkened boulevard.
We thought he knew a shortcut home, he was doubling back on himself. He wasn’t.
He stopped, his battery was about to die, he was going to put us in a
tuk tuk with another driver who also ‘knew’ where he was going. We refused and paid him half the fare—take us
halfway home and receive half the money.
We started speed walking down the darkened street only to be chased by
him. He flaunted his lit cigarette, he
grabbed Kim and Aine by the wrist, he screamed in Mandarin. Local men just watched. Kim screamed, Aine screamed, we carried on
walking. He raced back and grabbed his
tuk tuk, cut us off with it and grabbed us again. On the third try, he grabbed a bicycle pump
and threatened to smash us over the head with it.
Aine, a kindergarten teacher with the patience of a saint
and whose daily mantra is to give people the benefit of the doubt, puffed
herself up and proceeded to scream:
‘You’re a bad man! This will come
back to you! Bad man! Bad man!’ before giving him the full fare.
With his ‘dead battery’ he zoomed off into the night and we
walked the 2k home. Upon arrival at the
hostel, we relayed our story to the reception staff. They looked blankly at us: ‘but you didn’t
have the address? He must have been upset. Maybe next time you should…’ I stopped listening.
And I guess I’ve travelled enough to know that bad things
can happen everywhere and you cannot connect with every place you go. But I’ve never had an experience quite like
that.
The next day we brushed ourselves off and made a good try of
connecting with the better things in Xi’an.
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