Lesson learned.
Six weeks later, back in London we realised that we had caught the travelling bug. Now the city seemed more claustrophobic than ever but no sooner had we returned to our working and student lives than Andrew was revisiting the travel sections of local bookstores and eagerly planning our next trip.
In the summer of 1988 Andrew passed his exams, New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ was back in the charts and Melanie Griffith, the ultimate eighties’ poster-girl, was outmanoeuvring male colleagues in Working Girl. We were off again. On a hot Saturday afternoon in June we caught the Tube to Trailfinders, the Holy Grail for travellers on London’s Kensington High Street, where we purchased air tickets into Hong Kong and out of Delhi. It was the journey we had been building up to: first Canada and Morocco, now Asia.
‘It’s my responsibility to show you this,’ said the travel agent, passing us a copy of a warning issued by the Foreign Office:
Customers have been advised of a volatile situation between arrival and departure points.
‘So, travelling between China and India isn’t officially recommended?’ asked Andrew.
‘Not officially,’ said the travel agent.
‘Oh well,’ I smiled.
Tickets in hand, we walked over to Holland Park for a celebration picnic, at which point Andrew turned into a magician. Instead of pulling rabbits out of a top hat, he produced from his rucksack a tablecloth, glasses, champagne and smoked salmon. It was the most ridiculously romantic gesture I’d ever seen and perfectly suited to the white-walled gardens, the sunshine and our elated mood.
Later that week Andrew came home with a shiny copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to China and we spent hours poring over photographs of the Great Wall of China and figuring out our route. First, though, we had to earn the fare. Earlier that year I had decided that I wanted to care for the terminally ill and had been offered a place at St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, Kent. I’d realised that the part of the oncology job that I found most rewarding was when the battle and stress of chemo-therapy and radiotherapy were over and palliative care was the way forward; it was a more positive and holistic way to be with the patients, I wanted to get to know them, to treat them as individuals and I was keen to learn how to do this type of specialist nursing in what was then the best place in the UK for palliative medicine.
I’d decided to defer my new challenge until Andrew had finished his BSc, so I went back to Guy’s. That spring was spent working as a nurse from 7.30 until 3pm before rushing across London to a smoky wine-bar near Price Waterhouse in the Embankment. There, I changed into a black dress and white apron, then popped champagne corks for pink-faced city boys, who gave me 10 per cent of their tabs – the tips were insane. I was there until 8pm every night. Otherwise days and nights off were spent working as an agency nurse in private hospitals all over London. Officially this was ‘moonlighting’ but there was such a shortage of nurses then that it was easy to get extra work and everyone did it. I worked hard that spring, but it was worth it.
Eventually, it was time to go. Sometimes when I look back on our trip through China, I wonder, how did we know which trains to catch? No one spoke English. We went prepared: we had the usual jabs – cholera, typhoid and Hepatitis B – and bought bags of malaria tablets. Also, we took our own chopsticks (a precaution because of the risk of Hepatitis B) and had rabies vaccines, which can buy you a bit of time if you’re bitten by a dog. In Tibet, if you fail as a monk then you come back as a dog, which accounts for the packs of wild dogs in the temples (nothing to do with the food left lying around, of course). Although we didn’t voice our hopes for fear of disappointment, secretly both of us harboured the same dream of seeing the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the former home of the Dalai Lama.
We woke up on the descent into Hong Kong after a night flight. The plane flew so close to the skyscrapers that you could see what people were eating for breakfast! Its wheels hit the ground, it braked before tipping into the sea, the doors opened and we were met by a wall of heat.
What a shock.
We found a room in Kowloon on the mainland. A fairly grotty place. We were kept up by the all-night chatter, doors slamming and general commotion. The next morning I woke up with 25 tick bites. Things improved when we found the Youth Hostel on top of the hill on Hong Kong Island. Its whitewashed buildings were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of downtown Hong Kong and there was a strong sea breeze.
We spent our first days wandering through the streets and stalls, marvelling at the strangeness of it all, in particular the food. I am fairly sure we accidentally ended up eating animal intestines but somehow survived. After securing our Chinese visas, we caught the overnight ferry to China’s mainland: to Guangzhou, as the City of Canton was then known. Everywhere we went the Chinese were fascinated by my blonde hair, which caused quite a sensation. Women would approach with outstretched arms to touch it and I’d usually oblige. Our rucksacks were also an innovation: they beat straw ropes, which was what the Chinese used to carry everything.
Certain things we figured out pretty quickly. When you arrive in a new place, buy a ticket out immediately (demand is high). We always went hard sleeper, too. Each carriage had 20 rows of three-tiered bunks – the secret was to go for middle and bottom. If you got the top bunk, you were squashed against the ceiling where tiny fans whirred day and night. On our first journey, I opened the window to let air in and a Chinese man shut it. I opened it again. Wrong! This was a steam train and the smoke and soot blew straight in our eyes; it was even worse going through a tunnel. Those 33-hour journeys were long, with people spitting and vendors offering fried food through open windows at the stations.
But there was plenty to marvel at: light flooded the valleys and the endless green paddy fields. In fact, there was a strange tranquillity in the knowledge that you couldn’t go anywhere but just had to sit there with all those people and the train jolting beneath you and take it all in. It’s amazing how the mind can release its normal grip on time when you allow it to do so.
Suddenly a group of Chinese women appeared and motioned for me to accompany them. I got up and followed them down the train, where I found Laura, an English girl, in floods of tears. She was going to Shanghai for her medical elective. Overwhelmed by the foreignness and loneliness of it all, as well as her predicament, she couldn’t stop weeping. Alarmed, her fellow passengers had gone in search of other foreigners known to be travelling on the train. Laura cheered up when she saw me and shared her fears. How lucky I was, I realised, to have Andrew. I sat comparing travel notes with Laura until we parted at Shanghai, by which stage she was once again looking forward to her adventure.
From Shanghai our journey took us up the Yangtze River in a decrepit old passenger boat. It was filthy, with squatting toilets and inedible food (if you were lucky enough to find any) and was as hot as a furnace. We’d booked second-class tickets and found ourselves stuffed into an airless, crowded dormitory but then we met a couple of English tourists who had cleverly booked a first-class cabin with curtains and a breeze. Instantly, we became best friends and took refuge in their cabin, playing cards and chatting.
We disembarked at Nanjing and then went on to Xian to see the newly discovered Terracotta Army. Standing in a vast cavern, looking at those mythical soldiers was a surprisingly moving experience.
It was becoming increasingly apparent that the authorities didn’t like independent travellers. We had to keep avoiding the CITS (Chinese International Travel Service), who were keen to bus everyone to the foreigners’ hotels, where they could keep tabs on us all. Instead we stayed at a student hostel in Beijing University, where everyone wanted to talk to us. Big things are going to happen, we were told. We had no idea what the students meant but the following year, 1989, came the Tiananmen Square massacre. You could see the curiosity and interest in the young people’s faces as they asked questions about the other side of the globe, places they could only dream of. We felt like early travellers coming back with reports of life in faraway countries: we were the lucky ones.
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