Beijing fog

After 8 years Jemima and Saskia were going to be playing on the same team for the last time for the foreseeable. The thing was that the tournament was in Beijing. Well, it had to be done so off I went. The UNIS team was inexperienced and error-prone but stuck together well and the girls were a friendly, determined group. The conditions were tough for all-action players: There was smog, sunshine, a sandstorm and constant monitoring of some pollution index. The last game was the most exciting of all, 0-2 with 4 minutes to go, 2-2, and a shootout lost after the 20th penalty, draining for everyone and I was hoarse. It was emotional afterwards to recall the hesitant scuffling around with a football in 2005 on grey gravel outside Nesoddtangen school and how via the Spirit team on KGB and all over Akershus and Oslo, to Gold Star Hanoi, MRISA & APAC, they turned into two fantastic, selfless footballers, spraying the ball about on the big pitch.

Anyway, yes, I was my usual restrained self on the sidelines, sonically booming commands suggestions encouragement in a variety of languages. Afterwards a parent from a rival school said “We couldn’t work out if you were a Norwegian who spoke good English or an Englishman who spoke good Norwegian”. I smiled through gritted teeth and an abrasive tongue. I really have become the Teutonic professor of linguistics who appeared on a game show hosted by Groucho Marx many moons ago.

Marx: It says here that you speak 12 languages

Prof: Yeff, dat es korrekt.

M: Well, which one are you speaking now?

Beijing really was the most difficult place I have ever been to, to get around. The standard script for “Tim in a taxi in Beijing” was approach a driver to explain my destination, whereupon he would turn me down and usher me to an unmarked car with a shark waiting inside who would then proceed to drive me within a kilometre or two of where I was going, turn to me and, with a snarl, demand some Oslo-sized amount of money. Twice in a taxi and once in a cafe I paid bills because of the implied threat of physical violence. One driver came after me and chest-bumped me for money. He had left me at dusk somewhere other than my hotel. I didn’t have many allies amongst the hundreds of passers-by so I paid and wandered through the in-other-circumstances charming 798 art district looking for my hotel. A sandstorm descended as I was on the last lap of my surrealist hunt: “This is not my hotel” etc etc.

Do not get into a car with this man.

Given this background, even more kudos to the director at the Western Academy of Beijing for lending me his driver to take me back to my hotel so that I didn’t have to cause any more trouble for the Beijing taxi drivers by, you know, asking them to drive a customer to a destination for less than a ransom. Actually, a staff member at the Beijing school solved part of the mystery for me. He said that Beijing folk go by landmarks not addresses. When I told the hotel receptionist how difficult it was to get back to it by taxi she said, yes, that’s why I normally give out this piece of paper with directions with landmarks. Doh. In fact, all the staff on the pleasant WAB campus were super hosts, helping us unhouse-trained visitors. Thank you.

So, what to make of China? I had access to BBC on my phone but not NRK (are they still grumpy about the Peace Prize thing?!) There was no Google, no Facebook, and is in fact probably run by L*t*n fans because there was no access to the Watford Observer either. And the lack of Google shows how tied we are to the monster. No maps, no Gmail. Oh, I’ll just look up what search engine they use here. Doh. Oh, I’ll just write to someone to ask. Doh.

After the last match I had a fabulous and hilarious meal with Trinh, then followed Watford on the web all the way to the top of the table and the next day made my way home to Hanoi.

By train.

Why oh why? I will have to plead “rich tapestry of life” or “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” but I accept that it is likely that the court might well conclude insanity anyway. In itself, buying the ticket was a pain in the neck an adventure. A blog had spun an improbable story about how to buy tickets for Hanoi, just that it turned out to be correct in every detail. Don’t go to the railway station. Go to a little ticket office miles away where they will take you to a backroom and chest-bump you issue a ticket in Russian and German. It wasn’t until the Sunday I read the ticket and saw that it said the destination was GIL International Train. Hmmm, that may or may not be Hanoi. Worry worry.

Beijing West station was bustling but not crowded. I was prepared for any standard of train from TGV to British Rail Lincolnshire Chugger. It was much closer to the good end of that scale and I had four beds to myself. Actually, I had the whole carriage to myself. I was Mr First Class. There was limitless hot water for noodles, a bit of muzak to make you long for tinnitus, but it was clean. I sat down for a clear stretch to catch up on reading. No internet, no map (digital or paper), still not absolutely sure it was the right train. I’m sure during the 3 minutes of research I did for this trip I read that the journey was supposed to be spectacular. I didn’t really agree. The first afternoon it was gridlocked traffic, hideous apartment blocks, then grey fields. Some Ha Long-like formations the next day but no sweeping panoramas. Flat is rarely spectacular. But it was comfortable, calm, punctual and unlike me, the time actually flew.

After a mere 23 hours we pulled into Nanning. I wandered towards the exit and a member of railway staff ran after me and told me to follow her. “Excellent,” I thought, “more first class treatment”. We got to the waiting room and she poured me into it. It was full of second-class people. “Wait until 6”. I tried asking whether GIL was actually a Communist joke meaning Hanoi but got nowhere. Everything will be fine, I told myself. If they can’t promise me the thing is going to Vietnam I won’t get on. I’ll just get a taxi to the airport and fly home. (The alert reader may be able to spot at least one weakness with that plan.)

At 5.30 they fetched me (lucky that, I couldn’t hold my breath for much longer) and escorted me to a train that had “Hà Nội (Gia Lâm)” on the side. I was like a GI in reverse. I was almost home. Only 13 hours to go. Again I was the only one in First Class. I loved the solitude. At about 10 pm a train guy told me to get my stuff and go through customs. Luggage was X-rayed and passport checked with about 50 others who gasped in awe at being in the same room as me. There were soldiers with guns and helmets and everything. It was not the time for joking around. Then we clambered back on and waited for an hour with the engine thumping. Frustrating. Especially because soon after we got going, we stopped again and train guy comes on to tell me to get my stuff and go and let the Vietnamese rummage through it. Then we sit there until 2 in the morning turning the engine over before finally setting off for the City of Fair Taxi Drivers. Two border checks, four hours, well done guys. I had a celebratory beer and woke up on the outskirts of Hanoi. The nice taxi driver from the railway station tried to agree a fee off-meter but soon sniffed that I had been around the Hanoi block before and relented. Better luck tomorrow buddy, you might get yourself a first-timer.

 

Signs of Taiwan

We went on holiday to Taiwan in typhoon season, so it rained a lot. Not very windy, not a cloudburst, just a lot of steady rain, and we spent a lot of time in shopping malls and on the Metro.

Things in Taiwan had a tendency to be over-organised: Signs telling you to keep your fingers away from the lift doors, painted lines for queues to get on for each Metro carriage, signs announcing huge fines for eating in a shopping mall, or saying that you may borrow the magazines in the hotel library overnight from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. Boo, I wanted the Taiwanese translation of Forbes from 20 past 9.

Taipei 101 is a skyscraper that was the tallest building in the world from 2004 to 2010. It stretches over half a kilometre in the air, 101 floors high, and we got to the 89th floor in the quickest lift in the world, peak speed 16 m/s. Up there one could feel the building rock in the wind and see Taipei’s transatlantic skyline.

It has the largest damper in any building which also is the only one visible to the public (hooray?)

One longed for the under-organisation of Vietnam where signposting is not a national obsession. The Taipei zoo was enormous and, of course, had arrow-signs saying things like “Penguin House 540 m”. Many cages were empty and lots of the animals looked miserable. It did however provide a nice baking hot walk and the brown bear was cheerful.

The bonus was a nearby cable car running for over 4 km into the mountains. Spectacular.

We took the express train from top to bottom on the island, the one that my mate Dave sorted for the locals a few years ago. It was so smooth, it was not expensive, it was punctual to the minute, and a scrolling screen told us how fast we were going. I think it got up to 289 km/h. We went business class and have never had so much legroom.

We stayed in a super hotel in the second city of Kaohsiung which just happened to have the world’s third quickest lift. It had two buttons: 1st floor and 39th floor, where the lobby was. We stayed on the 54th, using a standard lift that, while probably not in the Guinness Book of Records, could give any lift in Europe a run for its money. Other countries collect Olympic medals to feel good about themselves. Taiwan apparently focusses on lift velocity.

The view from the 54th floor in Kaohsiung

Our holiday activities included going cycling in heavy traffic in a typhoon (and disproving the notion that you never forget how to ride a bike…), we avoided the magician doing the rounds at the hotel dinner, we ate too much aubergine delight, we used one of those old-fashioned belt-fitness machines, we played a lot of arcade games, and we didn’t go to any temples. The nearest we got was the Greek-themed amusement park down south which was crazy, while the art outside the whale-shaped shopping centre was in-your-face.

We had one disaster that comes when holidaying slightly off the beaten track. I had booked a resort on the southern coast for a couple of nights. It was quite expensive, on the beach, had good reviews and rustic charm. Well, wrong, wrong, wrong. It was on a main road and completely shabby. The pictures on the web were utterly misleading. This is what it really looked like.

In the olden days, when one was poor, there was no way out of such crummy situations. Nowadays, there is the option of calling a taxi to take us for two hours back to a five star hotel. So we did. On that journey we had a nice female driver who played soothing music. On the way there we got a grunting oaf who wouldn’t turn down the volume as he watched a war film which appeared to consist mainly of pleading before bullet-in-the-neck executions.

In Taipei, the Zoca pizzeria had hassled staff but proper Italian food and the Bulgarian restaurant had a charming attentive host who gave us an excellent personalised meal. But in Taipei there is also a Modern Toilet Restaurant, where everything is lavatorial. It was like an adolescent joke taken too far. And in case you thought it was a one-off, it’s not. It is part of a chain (<- pun) (and according to the website the first product they sold was chocolate ice-cream). Perhaps it really is a cultural theme, as in a nearby cafe:

While we were in Taiwan 48 people died in a plane crash, which reports said was due to underestimating the danger posed by the typhoon, and just after we left, the pavements exploded in Kaohsiung, for literally kilometres, depositing people and cars on roofs of nearby buildings. Just bad luck? I don’t know. Maybe the place is superficially safe, but behind the signposts it’s shakier than they would like you to think?

Anyway, if you need to know exactly how far it is to the nearest loo, Taiwan is the country for you.

 

 

Reinventing InterRailing 25 years on

In the olden days, you could buy a magic ticket called InterRail and rattle around Europe on trains for a whole month. I did it a few times and loved it. There was a fellowship of the impecunious, straggly-haired travellers you met in train corridors, queues to pay the supplemento, or at the shop with cheap food near the station. Then, years later when I checked it out again, it had all changed: You had to choose which European “zone” you wanted to travel in, and then decide on how many days out of the 30 you actually wanted to travel on and some of the point, like impulsively deciding to go to Morocco, seemed to have been lost.

Anyway, Ragnhild and I spent many of our holidays in our 20s on trains, and more recently, our family has taken to flying to Paris rather than directly Bordeaux, just so that we can take the TGV the rest of the way. The children are fliers rather than trainers and so were horrified to hear of the plans for this year’s holiday: Take trains from north to south through Vietnam. “But what’s the point? We live here!”, “Can’t we just fly?” etc etc.

Well, it was a success, and even if they might not be prepared to say it themselves, the kids enjoyed it. The joy of getting into your pre-booked carriage with bunk beds, pressing all the buttons, sleeping for hours, eating crisps and drinking water for breakfast, observing the poor blighter in who got the 6th bed in the carriage eating hard-boiled eggs washed down with a beer at 6.30 in the morning.

Some slept well into the next morning.

And if you were concerned about safety on the trains then fear not:

We did the 1500 or so km in 4 stages, 3 by train and one by bus. We spent the time doing slow things like talk, read and do puzzles. Mystifyingly, it said “Sleeper” on the bus tickets, even though it left at 1 in the afternoon. What could this mean? This is what it meant, a lie-down for all of us.

No, what do you really think of it?

The spirit of old InterRail lives on in Vietnam (notwithstanding the admission in the next entry 😉