a really nasty journey
The Japanese students in China always had really good guidebooks on how to get places no-one else really want to go. I went along with my Jap roomate from Chengdu to Ching Cheng Shan on a local bus. The worst thing wasn't the constant spit flying past your face every few seconds, or the the smell of unwashed bodies, or even the old man with a large sack of animal bones wedged up against my legs, but the snack and pit stops. It's standard that there were no walls and no doors in the toilet shacks, but not standard for any big nose to be there, so there was no way to pee unless you wanted to have a large audience. The snacks were bunches of rooster legs, which looked like a vast bunch of winter tree branches, and turnips which they ate raw, peeling off the muddy skin with their teeth. Back on the bus, you had to fight to get your seat back (we had paid for a seat!) and then rooster foot bones and skin were raining down past our ears from every direction. Fortunately those peasants gobble fast so that didn't last long. Ching Cheng Shan was beautiful. On another journey from Kunming to Xishuangbanna, the whole bus stopped for the night at a dormitory and I remember waking in the night to find the woman in the bunkbed overhead holding her baby out over the floor and whistling to encourage it to poop. Good thing I'd stuck my shoes under the bed, eh....Unbelievable that nowadays everything is made in China....that was only 19 yrs ago.
(cherrypie, Sat 9 Sep 2006, 10:20, Reply)