Tuesday, July 08, 2014

The Vulture

I'm in Luang Prabang having dinner alone. That's the usual routine. People often think that's odd. I think it's odd that people think so.

It's dusk and I'm gazing across the colonnaded patio out the open timber shutter doors to the street from my small table in an old villa-cum-restaurant. The dark wooden furniture is lit with coloured-paper lampshades hanging from the ceiling and the steamy air is chilled with some downtempo electronica. Locals and tourists stroll up and down. A tuk-tuk has just pulled up.

Anyway, I'm just slowly eating my pesto linguine and I always use this quiet time for some writing, so let me tell you about some kayaking I did in Vang Vieng.

I was working my way up here, to Luang Prabang, which, by the way, is a charming town—French colonial buildings and Buddhist temples set between two rivers, the Mekong and the Nam Khan, in the lush inland of Laos. It's ten or twelve hours by road to get here from the capital, Vientiane.

I caught a minitruck—the snub-nosed local "chicken buses" of Laos, trays fitted out with roofed cages and side benches—as far as Vang Vieng. A frame at the rear of the truck's tray was crated high with boxes of fruits for transportation somewhere. It was the real local experience. A lady climbed aboard with bags of something bloody, perhaps fish or offal, and tucked them under the benches unrefrigerated in the thirty degree heat. A young boy, fascinated with me, tugged gently at my arm hair and pulled my board shorts back from my knee to see if the same pale-coloured skin continued up my leg.

After several hours of dusty roads, I.... Eventually, I...

Sorry... this guy leaning on his tuk-tuk parked across the road is staring at me. It's distracting.

Anyway, at Vang Vieng I was met by Meng, a guide I had arranged to take me kayaking on the Nam Lik river. Sadly, the once crystal river waters turned muddy brown three years ago when the single-party communist government built a new hydroelectric dam upstream to sell power to Thailand. Worse, we were to pass another dam under construction which will soon end completely all whitewater kayaking on this verdant and bouldered stretch of the river.

There were two sets of rapids ahead of us, classes two and one. Rapids are classed one through six, with one being tame and six impassable. I have rafted white water several times but have never taken a kayak through it... and this one... this kayak, I mean....

This tuk-tuk driver just waved at me. I just lifted my head and looked out the door absently, and he's right in my line of sight, staring at me fixedly. Now he has smiled and given me a half wave like I was looking up at him. Jeez. Maybe he's just being friendly.

Okay, I've smiled politely and have dropped my gaze. Back to my story.

We hit that first set of rapids, the class two, and capsized instantly. This was an ocean kayak. It was too narrow; it should be broader and sit lower for white water, and when we edged a whirlpool we tipped.

Meng kept a hold on the craft, but I was pulled into the rapids. "Feet up!" he called to me.

You have to keep your legs up when swept into white water to clear underwater hazards. Lean back into your life vest and go downriver feet first. I knew this and did so, but I have never been a strong swimmer and my breathing got panicky when a rapid dumped me. I inhaled water and came back up spluttering, heart racing, hyperventilating.

Control your breathing. It's the first rule of being in the water, and the first that went out the window, followed by the feet-up technique. On land I fancy myself a minor survivalist. In the water I am an embarrassing disaster and my own biggest threat. Flailing, I turned around and looked for Meng.

What the fuck? I have one line of sight out the door and this tuk-tuk driver is in it, watching me. Isn't staring impolite in Laos? Now I'm keenly aware of him, and every time I look up I have to avoid looking at him, which is to look at the wall or a pillar. This is giving me the shits.

Okay. On the other side of the rapids Meng pulled me panting and coughing back onto the kayak. "Relax, relax!" he counselled me. It's a funny thing with hyperventilation. You lose your common sense. I can so easily see how people drown.

We paddled on, and the second set of rapids, the class one, loomed. Class one is defined as requiring "little or no skill to navigate". I've rafted class four rapids fearlessly before but now I'm spooked like a cat about to have a bath. I'd never been thrown in the water before. Or kayaked rapids. On a sea kayak! As we were drawn in I looked wide-eyed for some calm water between the whirlpools to run. I couldn't see any. We hit the white water. I braced!

We drifted through, and the kayak rocked a little bit.

I'm losing it. Sorry, this tuk-tuk driver is ruining both my dinner and my concentration. I'm paying the bill and packing up.

I'm leaving the restaurant, and he's approaching me!

"Hello, sir. Do you want a...?" I can't distinguish what he says. I'm already pissed off at him. It's common for an idle driver to ask if you need a tuk-tuk, but not for one to stalk you.

"What?"

"Do you want a lady?"

"What?"

"Do you need a tuk-tuk or... maybe you want a lady?"

I shift from pissed off to furious. Now I know why he was watching me. I was sitting at dinner alone.

"Do you know what a vulture is?" I ask him.

He is taken aback. "What?"

"Do you know what a vulture is?"

"Yes? Uh...."

He is looking confused. In a clear and indiscreet voice in the street I say to him: "You sit here staring at me for half an hour while I have my dinner, and then you come over and ask me if I want a lady. Now, do you know what a vulture is?"

He's looking away flustered and laughing softly in embarrassment.

I just walked off.

Saturday, July 05, 2014

Swindlers and the universal formula

I am a jaded traveller.

I have been approached by more touts, swindlers and con artists in countries around the world than I can recollect, sometimes avoiding treachery, sometimes being taken in, and I have learned to recognise them. They will try to steer the conversation, but if you pre-empt the answers they want then you control the encounter. After some practise, you can even have fun with it.

There is a formula.

1: They approach you.

You're always a target, as there's no avoiding looking like a tourist.

In Beijing, I needed to get to the Canon service centre to fix a jammed zoom lens. The building happened to be located in a touristy area with numerous high-rise hotels. A tubby Pekingese man standing on the side of the footpath like a bird plucking insects around a light addressed me as I walked past him: "Hello!"

2: They engage you.

A typical opening involves complementing or commenting on something you're wearing.

For me, it is always my distinctive hat. In Mérida, Mexico, one guy immediately recognised it as Aussie. "Hey," he called, arresting himself mid-stride from crossing the street. "You are from Australia, ? Sydney? Melbourne?"

I took off my hat in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. One merchant pointed at my hiking runners, which are hopelessly stained from years of wilderness trekking, and called out in sudden eye-bulging admiration, "Nice shoes!"

My Pekingese friend's opening was: "You look like a cowboy."

3: They always ask you where you are from.

And be it Australia, Brazil or Singapore, the good ones will find something common to talk about.

Once, three months after a certain unpopular Australian prime minister was ousted by party machinations, an Ethiopian taxi driver asked me: "Is Julia still in power?" I laughed so loud at his adroit grasp of foreign domestic politics that I didn't mind him charging me double the usual rate.

The stupid and unimaginative ones, like my new Chinese friend, will say: "Ah, Australia! Kangaroos! Koalas!" attempting to conjure a camaraderie of trust by reciting a charm of the bleeding familiar.

"Earthworms! Ants!" I said to him.

He looked perplexed.

4: They are inordinately friendly.

Anybody might be friendly, but swindlers will offer help when you haven't asked for it.

A gypsy man standing near the entrance to the alcázar, the Moorish palace in Seville, approached me when I was loitering, looking for camera angles. To him I looked uncertain, which, to a swindler, is like blood in the water to a shark.

"That is the alcázar," he said, gesturing with a sweeping hand. "This is the entrance. Come, I will tell you a bit about it." It's a common ploy; they give you some generic history as they walk with you and then ask to be paid for their services as a tour guide.

In Beijing I had a piece of paper with the address of the Canon repair building written on it in Chinese by the hotel receptionist. He told me to ask someone on the street which building it is. I showed it to my new Pekingese friend. "Why, it's this one right here!" he said, pointing to the next building. "But why? There's nothing in there." I told him I needed to repair my camera. He almost jumped with glee. "I will come with you and help you!"

5: They will try to latch onto you.

In Istanbul, the carpet sellers always ask: "What are you looking for?" with an immediately ready response of: "Oh, I will take you there! Come on!" and stepping away quickly so you are instinctively compelled to keep up with them. The Turks are particularly good at this business and are hard to repel without some eventual element of arsehole-ness coming into it, either on your part or theirs.

I told the tubby Pekingese that it wasn't necessary for him to accompany me.

"But they don't speak English!" he protested (an untruth, but he was desperate not to lose a fish he thought he had caught).

"Maybe not, but they understand a broken camera."

6: They reveal their agenda.

If, like Bruce Lee fighting back Han's men, you manage to deflect all of these advances, you are ready for the reveal.

In Istanbul: "In Turkey it is our tradition to offer a cup of tea. I have a shop just over here, very close. I invite you for some tea." (It is a carpet shop. Prepare for some pressure selling trapped in the spider's lair.)

In Havana: "I know the best place to eat! I take you there!" (Havana has an extraordinary number of "best" places. These guys get a kickback for soliciting customers. On arrival they'll often ask you, if you'll buy them a drink for taking you there: "One mojito for me?")

In Beijing: "I am an art student. We have an exhibition at a gallery over here, and today is the last day. Come have a look. Just a few minutes."

I was blunt with my tubby Pekingese friend. "I'm not interested in art. I am here to get my camera fixed. Thanks for your help."

I was later approached by two art students in the same area who delivered all of the same lines. The following day in the Forbidden City I was helped by yet another art student. I subsequently saw a notice at a hostel that the "art student" scam is a common one, with warnings not to buy into it.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

The Trans-Mongolian Express to Beijing

It takes more than 33 hours to get from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian Express, and the food is lousy.

The set menu in the dining car—where the barman smokes beneath the non-smoking sign—costs US$25 for salad, soup, a main and dessert. The salad is shredded carrot in a radioactively garlicky sauce topped with a triangle of processed cheese. The soup is cream-of-something. And the main is a few small slices of beef in gravy with three sides: rice with corn in it, a kind of ratatouille (my polite interpretation of indistinguishable vegetables in an unknown sauce), and sauerkraut that tastes like feet. Dessert is a packaged chocolate roll-up cake, served to me as the last in the plastic tray of six. I don't care to eat it, so the waiter does.

I have a "hard-sleeper" berth, a second-class, four-bunk cabin, which I share with a pleasant young Norwegian couple. There are TVs in each bunk, but I dare not turn on the single channel of what will invariably be a looped screening of the Russian circus, replete with fat old women dressed in tutus performing tired magic tricks involving scarves and wands and pigeons. Mercifully, when curiosity gets the better of me and I turn it on, it doesn't work.

I chat to a fellow Aussie in the next cabin. He's been on the train since Moscow, doing the full Trans-Siberian. It had been three days so far. He's happy staring out the window at the endless plains of the Gobi desert because through Russia it had been endless silver birch.

At the border of Mongolia and China we spend four-and-a-half hours between Mongolian immigration, Chinese immigration, and changing the trucks on the Mongolian train to fit the Chinese rail gauge. Once we finally get under way again it is 1am. I kill a solid eight hours to the gentle rocking of the train. When I wake up I'm still here, so I kill off another two.

I love train travel, and I enjoy the overnight sleepers, but honestly, I don't understand the romance of the Trans-Mongolian (and less so the Trans-Siberian). It's long and boring. I can only recommend to bring several books, your own pot noodles, and consider a flight instead.

So it is a relief, in the mid-afternoon of the second day, to finally reach Beijing. The Norwegians' hotel is apparently close to mine so we agree to share a taxi, but we first need to withdraw some Chinese yuan as we have only Mongolian tugrik. After twenty minutes of hunting for ATMs and failing to find any that will accept our Visa cards, we finally turn to a tourism office for help (as did everyone else on the train, it turns out) and are directed to the Construction Bank.

Yuan in pocket, we look for a taxi. There is no shortage, but not one will take us. They are parked at the taxi rank or pull up without fares but wave us away when we approach. We can't figure it. Just one driver is willing, but only through extortion: "Three people, three luggage... one hundred yuan." We scoff and walk away. My new friends have been advised by their hotel that it shouldn't cost more than twenty.

A fellow traveller from the train who speaks fluent Mandarin is having the same difficulty. "It's impossible," she says to us. "No one will take you!"

Such is the strange situation with Beijing taxis. Yet pedicabs and tuk-tuks will hound you. But they can't take luggage, so we opt for the subway (which, as it turns out, is excellent—easy, efficient and cheap) and part ways at Andingmen station to our respective digs in the hútòng district north of the Forbidden City.

The young lady at my hotel reception is pleasant and welcoming, as most Pekingese are, but difficult to understand with that heavy Beijing accent of R's and "sh" sounds.

"Your room has Black Forest," she says.

"Pardon me?"

"Your room has Black Forest."

It does? Will I be sharing it with wolves and sleeping in a gingerbread bed? Or do I get midnight snacks of cake?

"My room has what?" I ask.

"Black Forest. Black Forest. Morning dinner."

"Oh, breakfast!" I laugh as the penny drops. "That will be lovely."

As long as there's no Trans-Mongolian sauerkraut.