Sonia took me to Chongqing Bus station. We met her in the Youth Hostel and discovered that she was attending the medical university down the road from me in Fuzhou. She’s training to be a Nurse and she likes my cigarettes, they are roll ups, pretty much unheard of in these parts. Very few women smoke in China, at least where I am, and I liked her all the more for that. She very efficiently got me there, neatly wrote down the phrase * I’m going to Fuzhou* in Chinese script on a piece of paper and left me to it. I had an hour to wait, so found a vacant chair in the bus station which was not easy and settled down to wait. At 11.20am I went to find my bus and got on it.
I knew this type of bus existed but I’d never travelled on one. No seats, but you get a bed. A rather nice one too. I don’t know much about these things but it looked like polished teak with a stainless steel handrail to stop you falling out. A man came over, told me sternly to buckle myself in and take my shoes off. I did. Then the bus started up and we got going. I looked around at my fellow passengers, greeted them in Mandarin but got no response apart from vague glares. I offered biscuits. I’d stocked up with Oreos. Still no response. I said hello to a little boy. He screamed and hid behind his mother. What WAS going on ? I pondered this. At FJUT all the students are friendly. But they know I’m something to do with the university. Here I’m some crazy Westerner on THEIR damn bus. And I think I make sense in Mandarin but maybe they speak Min a local Fujian dialect. So I decided to make the best of it. I read, dozed and looked out of the window for several hours. I did mental calculations. 7 hours, nearly a third of the way there…….
And then the bus stopped. At what appeared to be a derelict building site. Inside was a meal laid out and a man with a megaphone encouraged us to tuck in. It was 30 ¥, a lot of money for a bad meal in China and obviously a scam but they do these scams better in Italy, in my experience. And then a slightly too genial Chinese man who wasn’t on the bus suggested I go up the stairs with him. Oh dear I thought. This is the mugging moment. There will be 3 Chinese guys up there who will relieve me of my wallet. I thought carefully and still went up there. It wasn’t the mugging moment. It was the * I’m terribly sorry for the quality of the food downstairs. Would you like to try my excellent spicy fish hotpot moment*. ……