The Cusp of South East Asia

The Cusp of South East Asia
Kunming to the Laos border
December 14th- 21st, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”Confucius

KUNMING was beautiful, I felt very much at home.
Busy, warm, vibrant, large university population, very much a modern city, but with a distinctly Chinese twist- huge government buildings that could have come from the New York skyline, except they had subtly curved roofs, a little nod to a pagoda.
Walking back from watching the United-Liverpool game, at 2am on a Sunday night, the streets were still busy.
A little oasis of stalls around a street lamp, filled with fruits and foods I didn’t recognise. Dozens of people sitting out in the night, eating and chatting.
A patrol of policemen passed, about half a dozen all swinging long clubs as they sauntered by. The back two cops were arm-in-arm, laughing.

The cars were meant to arrive here and be shipped out to the border on Friday (December 14th). But the delivery company must have been infected by Trabbi Time, as the last car, Fez, didn’t arrive ‘till Wednesday and didn’t get shipped ‘till Thursday (December 20th)- another week long delay.
Carlos and I went down to the shipping company to pay them and check on the cars.
Ziggy was surrounded by a swarm of men. They had the windows down, the doors open. They were rifling the inside playing with walkie talkies, three men had the boot open and were going through the stuff inside, waving our 8mm camera about.
We approached by stealth and I shouted a loud English greeting in an attempt to scare them. But they just looked up, shameless, and waved our stuff at us.
I gave them a tour of the engine, to much laughter.

We got a night bus south to a town nearer the border to wait for the cars. There were three rows of double beds on the bus, which was nice, except Carlos, TP and I were in a five-person bed at the back, sandwiched between two Chinamen.
A sweaty and frustrating night. Sleeping with five men was everything I’d imagined it to be.


It is a shame not to have driven the length of China. It would have been some road trip alone, and a real missed opportunity, especially considering how much we paid to do it. Instead all our efforts were limited to the dull northern desert. It would have been interesting to watch that dry, dirty, grey landscape develop into the humid, lush, greenery that we’ve seen in the south.

Looking outside the window on our long journey south (65 hours of trains and buses) I had seen the usual ebb and flow of city to countryside. Rural wooden shacks and chocolate cake hills drifting to suburbs, mixing old thatched homes with light industrial, low-rise factories, then the neck craning city centres, thirty and forty story apartment blocks and offices, filthy decrepit estates near shining new glass and metal skyscrapers. The image would rebound as we left the centre, returned through the fading development and arrived back at hillsides carved into terraces, sweeping like grand colonial staircases down to sun-kissed green fields and heavy streams topped with a head of floating mist.

It is sad we couldn’t drive, but driving Trabbis is a two edged sword.
On the one hand, you never know when you are going to stop (i.e. breakdown). So the little cars take you to places you would never have normally visited, places that don’t make the guidebook, that aren’t even on the map, that few westerners have visited.
This is awesome: no guesthouses, no internet, not even any restaurants- you have to rely on the hospitality of locals, and they always come through.
On the other hand, you never know when you are going to stop. So the little cars take you to places you would never have normally visited, places that you don’t want to visit.
So you end up staying five days on the Turkmen-Uzbek border, instead of getting to know Ashgabat. You live a week in tiny Tajik villages, instead of exploring the Pamirs.
Here in China we spent a week in Xilinhaote, it’s a big city but not worth a visit, we could have used the time doing anything- Three Gorges Dam? Shanghai?
So we have seen China in a completely different manner to all the other countries we have visited. We have been on the tourist trial. Refreshing in some ways, but still, a missed opportunity.

Hopefully tomorrow, Friday December 21st, Fez will arrive and we will cross into Laos.
Of course, none of the cars work. We will be pushing all three of them across the border. Truly stumbling out of China. I don’t know how much no-man’s-land there is. On the Tajik-Kyrgyz crossing there was 22km of mountainous tracks between the countries.
Let’s hope China and Laos enjoy a closer relationship.
Either way, we will be limping in, struggling over the last few miles to the home straight, South East Asia.
I can already smell it in the food, see it in the foliage and feel it I the air- sticky and humid.
Six weeks late, but we’re nearly there.

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mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

The Train to Spring

The Train to Spring
Kunming, China
December 13th-17th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I’ve been clean for two weeks now.”
Tony P, team mechanic, on the joys of travelling without Trabants.

THE thing about long train journeys is the smell.
As is the way with odour, it builds up around you, slow, subtle and unnoticed, like carbon monoxide poisoning, senile dementia and Jack Johnson.
But you step off the train to fight over a satsuma with a bunch of passengers suffering cabin fever, return to your cot, and then it hits you.
Piss, eggs, wine, fart, sweat, rice, coke, beer, perfume, shit, bleach, noodles, effluent, chicken, hair, feet, feet, feet, feet and more feet- a heady brew of satanic spices concocted in a cauldron previously used as a dustpan when Beelzebub swept out hell’s charnel house.
Overpowering, stomach-turning revoltingness on a chemical weapon scale- expect pre-emptive action by a US-led multinational force acting under the auspices of the UN with a brief to destroy WMD and anyone affected.
There were no windows. I imagine we couldn’t be trusted to regulate our own temperature to aroma ratio, and the only draft came when someone opened the toilet door, wafting a port-a-loo breeze of acrid disinfectant and sewage through our carriage.
We didn’t have a cabin, just three stories of bunk beds arranged along an open and busy corridor. Every half hour a man with a trolley would dash through shouting in Chinese, but disappear before we could see what he was wheeling.
Thirty-five hours in these conditions was always likely to be testy.

There were a few other inconveniences.
The freak show fame attached to being Westerners in the east: aren’t we funny, aren’t we strange, come and have a look. Fair’s fair- we’re only here because they’re funny and strange and we wanted a look.
But we don’t watch them crapping.
The Chinese have a penchant for the art of throat clearing. Never have I seen a nation attack the issue of phlegm with such vehemence. True connoisseurs of the clearance- huge, racketing, barking, choking hocks that are enough to make innocent bystanders gag and dogs howl at the moon. I sometimes expect cranium chunks or nasal cavity to come roaring out with the gob: oh look, that’s his frontal lobe, that was a good spit.
And it isn’t just the men, communism is non-discriminatory, a truly equal form of suppression, so woman too can hurl vile slime balls down as they adjust their make-up. Nor is the practice restricted to the outdoors, our train was something of a haven for spitters, the beat to our journey the rhythmic expulsion of snot.
What could make this paradise of sight and smell complete?
Throw in the tantruming youngster. A perfect wake up call for day two on the Nifkin Express. She must have been nine or ten, not the screaming baby who knows no other way to express her wants, but a young girl with command of language taking out a vehement yet unknown grievance on a train full of folk who were not her tormentors.
Little brat. Hours of it, lung-bursting, head in hands shrieks- not even crying, just wailing. And her guardian, in what I imagine was an attempt to discipline the little bitch, sat stony, silent and impassive.
Just give her what she wants, I thought, we shouldn’t all have to be involved in this terrible lesson. But on it went, ‘till she seemed to forget what she was screaming about.
Time decided to relax and spread out, the only punctuation to its mindless passing the decision to have a pot of instant noodles. A little treat for having coped with another six hours, and a rare chance to do something gratifying and rewarding.
I got hot water. I made noodles.
The red wine we brought as our valium went too quickly and the night was restless, sleep hindered by the jagged progress of our driver, who had a sixth sense for passengers nodding off and gleefully hit the breaks to put a stop to such weakness. Isn’t sleep deprivation a form of torture? Can I call the Red Cross? No? So it’s true what they say: China is a country piled high with repressive jobsworths bent on punishment and suppression.
I hope that sentence never comes back to haunt me.

In the morning everyone was ratty, but the mood lifted when we pealed back the curtains.
Outside all was green and yellow.
True, vibrant, healthy, vegetable green dowsed in a wash of eastern yellow from a heavenly body long lost to us, but now reintroduced.
The Sun.
Rolling fields bathed in sunshine.
We cast our collective minds back for the last time we’d seen such simple glory. Tajikistan? Mountains. Turkmenistan? Desert.
We placed it in Azerbaijan, the long drive to Baku, August 25th. Nearly four months ago.
I greedily absorbed the view, and tried to snatch a look at what the farmers where wearing as they flew past my little screen. Is it sandal weather? Shorts?

Kunming means the City of Eternal Spring, and we stepped off the train into a beautiful spring day.
T-shirt weather.
It seems strange to hark on about the weather. I am English, and in a country with such an unpredictable climate commenting on the clouds is an understandable national pastime.
But for us it’s more than that.
Back in Bishkek we had to make the choice between going south to Bangkok (quick, warm, easy) or heading north through Siberia (long, cold, difficult).
We plumped for north and the six and a half weeks it has taken us to escape sub zero temperatures have been the most testing yet.
Even in west Tajikistan, where we broke down relentlessly, it felt like a bit of a holiday because you could always relax in the sun.
But when you have to slide under the car at night time in two feet of snow it really doesn’t feel like a vacation. When two of the cars need to be push started every time, and it is so cold that even touching the back windows with gloved hands freezes your fingers so they hurt.
Seven weeks of wearing thermal underwear, three pairs of socks, huge jackets, scarves, gloves, layer after layer giving me a Jo Brand physique. Having to take everything off when you get in somewhere, and putting literally everything on in the evening to spend another night in a Tupperware box with no heating and doors that don’t close so that the outside is very much inside.
Our lowest ebb must have been in the Gobi when we (Carlos) burned out Fez’s clutch plate. All our water was frozen so we had to make a fire out of dried camel shit and fence posts that we sawed down from along the railway line. The coldest experience of my life.
It has been a real test of endurance.
And now its over.
We made it. We did the northern route. We beat the Kazakh steppe, the Siberian winter, the Gobi Fucking Desert, and now we’re safe. Whatever happens, the threat of exposure and frostbite is over.

Our hostel has a terrace, no, a SUN terrace. From it I can see palm trees.
South East Asia here we come.



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mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org