What are you Looking at?

  Guiyang, China
Saturday, September 18, 2004

A traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing
- Thomas Nash

Overnight Busses. Use them only if you have to
I arrived in Guiyang, in Guizhou province, very early in the morning. It was about 6am and I was tired. The overnight

01 Looks comfy, doesn't it?

sleeper bus from Guilin was horrible. Even if the 'seats' in such busses are supposed to mimic beds they don't. They are cramped and generally uncomfortable, and while it may be a novel idea to travel via sleeper bus in a country where long distance travel is dominated by the train, it is not something I would recommend. Sure, give it a go. I'm glad I did, but I've learnt my lesson and I'll be sticking with the trains from here on out.

Killing Time
There's not much to do or see in Guiyang, the provincial capital of Guizhou province. It's a typical

02 The Pig, most definitely, gets it

Chinese city and even with my limited time in the country I know what to expect from such places; at the very least they are going to be big, crowded, busy, impersonal and polluted. What's not to like? The reason most people come here, assuming like me they are not just passing through, is to take a trip west to see the Huangguoshu waterfalls which, at 74m high and 81m wide, hold the title of the largest waterfall in Asia. While a visit there was part of my original, pre-trip itinerary, I had by now decided against visiting because I had spent longer than planned in both Yangshuo and Ping An. So I decided to

03 Chinese Checkers

leave on the next available overnight train north to Chongqing, in Chongqing Shi province, a ticket for which I purchased soon after arriving in Guiyang. That meant I had to wait around for over 12 hours, a long time in a place like Guiyang where there is, as I have already alluded to, nothing of real interest to the average traveller. After putting my bags into storage at the train station I got breakfast in a small dumpling café in one of the many lanes that spread out from the station forecourt, a typical feature of many, if not all, Chinese train stations. That was fun, trying to communicate with locals via my phrase book. I spent some time walking around watching early morning Thai Chi in a city park (a very common sight all over China), butting in on a game of badminton in the same park, walking the riverside promenade (a nice stroll but one that can only keep you busy for so long) and snooping around a few shops, 99% of which seem to be mobile/cell phone shops. But wait, there's also a Wal-Mart here, the first one I've seen in China. What a revelation that was, made all the more exciting by the fact that it was underground, complete with a Louvre style glass pyramid! How exciting. Leave it up to the Yanks to enlighten my time when strolling around a Chinese city.

I'm Human, Just Like You
As you can probably tell I was generally trying, as best I could, to kill time, something I seemed to failing miserably at, the excitement of finding an underground Wal-Mart aside. To boot I was quite tired, mainly due to the lack of sleep on the overnight bus from Guilin and

04 Passing time

partly due to the fact that I was up and about so God damn early. As a result I was more than happy to spend quite a bit of the day just sprawling on the grass in a local park by the Nanming river, and it was here where I really noticed for the first time how curious a foreigner like me can be to the Chinese not used to seeing such alien looking creatures. I had been forewarned that China was a place where foreigners are regularly viewed as exotic objects of intense curiosity, but it wasn't until I was here in Guiyang, 4 weeks into my time in China, that I really noticed this. I guess that means it was really the first place I had visited that could be classed as off the tourist trail. While I'll admit it was very annoying at first I learnt to live with it once I realised it wasn't going to stop, and that the Chinese were just satisfying their curiosity, something I would probably do if I were in their situation.

Mercifully my time in Guiyang came to an end and I boarded the train for the 400km overnight trip north to Chongqing. It was from here that I planned on embarking on a 3 day, 2 night, cruise east towards Yichang on the Yangtze River. But that was looking a week or so down the line. Before that I planned on heading west from Chongqing to Leshan (to see the Giant Buddha), Emei Shan (to trek up one of Chinas holy Buddhist peaks) and Chengdu (to ogle at the cute Pandas). Plenty to look forward to including, hopefully in there somewhere, a decent night's sleep.