Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [121]
All right, I thought. Perhaps he forgot to turn it off. I watched as he had a long conversation. Then he fiddled with his phone contraption. I do not understand modern telecommunications. Once a telephone was simply a telephone; now it is invariably some sort of entertainment device. In the darkness, I listened as the grating sounds of Chinese pop music began emanating from his phone. Nice, I thought. Very considerate. Prick.
We are never more culturally primal than at breakfast. Instead of coffee, there was warm bean-curd milk. Instead of a bagel, it was braised cucumber. Instead of a bowl of cereal, there were shredded peppers with peanuts.
I had awoken to the sun on the shores of Lake Qinghai, the largest freshwater lake in China. What a vast country this was. The altitude monitor indicated that we remained above 9,000 feet, but the landscape was profoundly different from the unearthly sights of the Tibetan Plateau. It was like Vermont with Chinese characteristics: a hilly, wooded expanse with terraced fields and tall, thin poplar trees turning golden orange amid villages of stone farmhouses.
How idyllic, I thought. This was the land of the epic Chinese films, an old land of heroes and beauty, a place that was both majestic and humble. This was nice. True, a polluted haze had settled in the valleys, but if you ignored it—and you must ignore the blighted air if you are to feel anything but despair for China—this pristine landscape with the picturesque villages was like a pastoral antidote to urban China. I felt happy here, pleased to be traveling through such an alluring scene.
And then, inside the train, I looked into the bathroom. I was no longer happy. It was simply vile. Clearly, the people on this train car were not well. They were sick. Perhaps it was the altitude. Or possibly the spicy beef. It was the most repellent toilet I’d yet come across in China, and I cannot begin to express what an accomplishment that was. Public squat toilets in China are nasty, and here—on this most high-tech of trains, a train that had been written about in newspapers across the globe—I’d somehow managed to find the worst one yet.
Right, I thought. I would rather paralyze my bowels than use this toilet. And so that is what I did. I rifled through my bag and found my supply of just-in-case stuff and popped an Imodium. And so my happiness was restored. Medicated and numb, I had escaped from a perilous encounter with the most revolting squat toilet in China.
Feeling cheerful, I decided to share a peace offering with my nemesis, my traveling companion with the fondness for noise. I gave him an apple, which he gratefully accepted, and by lunch we were the best of friends. True, we didn’t actually talk to each other, but still we were karmic friends. He had pulled out a can of warm Budweiser from his bag, offered it to me, together with some pickled meat he kept. Xie xie.
As we descended from the Tibetan plateau, China proper began to reassert itself. We continued to roll through rugged, forested hills shrouded in the haze of industrial pollution. We passed through Xining, an odious city, where every house seemed to come with a stack of coal in back.
I don’t want to go back to this, I thought. Not yet. It had been weeks since I’d last set foot in urban China, and I was in no hurry to return. I liked western China. I wasn’t ready to leave it yet. True, I’d read the stories about the foreigners who are forever disappearing there. But what’s a little banditry? And so, as we rumbled into Lanzhou, a city hundreds of miles from Chengdu, my original destination, I bade farewell to my companions and jumped off the train.
It’s a good feeling, hoping off a train in a city in the very middle of China. Actually, it’s a good feeling hopping off any train you’ve been riding for thirty-six hours. And, as I breathed a thick whiff of coal, it