Touchdown Nepal: Kathmandu Airport

This is not an airport, this is a bus station from 1950s England. Just who is responsible for cruelly transposing it onto Nepal? It is a mean practical joke to play on a developing country and not in the least bit funny.

It is pandemonium. With every step - pandemonium.

I crack ribs, splatter toes, scrape shins, feel the fleshy slugs of penises against me as I squeeze through spaces too small in order to join a queue. A queue that eventually leads to a desk where I place my passport down so that it can be issued with a visa. A cockroach scuttles across the counter, dances on my passport, and disappears down a crack. Another man at a smaller desk but with a larger beard takes my passport and makes me fill in another form. I get the impression that if the cockroach hadn't danced his dance this form would not have been necessary.

The baggage claim area below acts as three different levels of security check, a waiting room, departure lounge, arrivals hall, quarantine, shopping centre, tout-hangout and general circus for those bored of sitting at home or so mentally deranged as to enjoy this grade of chaos. It is as if someone has been given a pack of cards with all the essential components of an international airport and sprayed them into the air like an arthritic octogenarian magician. 

I make my way through a security scanner - it's not even plugged in. Occasionally a man with a uniform will come and feel me up, pat me down - I am certain at least one of these men was just a frisky cleaner. Four conveyor belts chug slowly and noisily along the back wall, every now and again stopping altogether in a hiss of black smoke. There is no hint as to which belt belongs to which flight or which airline. Occasionally a bag from any one of several flights will emerge at random from one of them. You have to be alert because when this happens and it is your bag chugged out into the madness, you have approximately 12 seconds to make your way through 200 people, grab it, clutch it to you. If you fail, it disappears into the bowels of this sorry excuse for an airport, never to be seen again.

Outside, an army of futuristic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wait in blue padded armour, with shields, helmets, and machine guns. Not because of political tension or terrorism but as a first line of defence against the unbridled chaos of the airport. Their job is to contain it, stop it from spilling out into the real world like a man-gobbling virus. I will soon learn that they failed, miserably. 

Pollution Postcards: Snapshots of China

Christmas, Beijing

It feels like Christmas. The low-lying hutongs of the Gulag are shrouded in Dickensian mist, red lanterns line the streets blossoming through the fug, and there is enough of a chill in the air to make you yearn for the warmth hinted at in the prettily-arranged shop windows and the clasped hands of young lovers.

Yet Christmas should taste of mulled wine, mince pies, and cherry lipbalm kisses. Here it tastes of the Industrial Revolution; burnt plastic, exhaust fumes, and slow death. It is not Christmas; it is October. China does not celebrate Christmas. It is pollution; everywhere. If it was in fact Christmas, all anyone would wish for is a lungful of clean air.

Beijing to Shanghai Bullet train

The trees, not many of them, are in perfectly ordered, straight rows. They are superfluous; tokens. The smog-filled skies, grey-hazed with pollution, make a mockery of these fragile spines. Houses and factories frayed with noxious fuzz at least look like they belong to this land.

Train station

They have poisoned the trees at the train station – the stumps are white with powder.

Fake Street, Xi'an

China is an enigma. For many people living inside the country, it makes no real sense. Outsiders have no chance. It exists as a multi-faceted land, utterly diverse, endlessly contradictory, and enormously powerful. And it is not a formless lazy lump, collapsed in a heap under the weight of its own indefinable enormity, oh no, it races into the future with the pace and stamina of a bionic athlete.

Buildings, neighbourhoods, towns, even small cities are dispersed, demolished, disappeared without a second thought as China pushes forward. A piece of history, however big or significant, matters not when pitted against the untold promises of the future. Nothing is sacred. Ancient hutongs in Beijing decimated, towns standing in the way of hydro-electic dams quietly gotten rid of.

And when someone speaks up and suggests that heritage and history may actually have some value, there is a mild panic and a crass replica for tourists is created - simulacrum. And the tourists know no different. It's as if they have been programmed to appreciate the copies as much as the original. And why not? Is it silly to suggest that you can feel history? That you might actually need history? China is all about the future but wandering down a perfect replica of an ancient street in the Tibetan-district of Xi'an I can't help but be overwhelmed by the emptiness of the gesture and scared of the future.

Lishu

Lishu is grim. A city so polluted that everything, including its unfortunate inhabitants, is covered in a black slurry. The cars are painted with it and every step is tacky with it. The bus to the station dips into industrial parks where iron pipes and rolls of wire emerge from the slurry like trees and shrubs. The women on the bus look like prostitutes: leather hotpants, thick laddered tights, and diamanté Gucci high-heeled boots. Their faces are tired and hardened. The skyline is punctured by giant chimneys billowing out plumes of smoke.

I follow a steep path up through housing estates. The path is covered in shit, both animal and human. Fallen between ugly tower blocks are shacks made from corrugated iron, wood and cardboard. Once I reach the top of the hill, I can see more of Lishu: more factories, more chimneys, more pollution, more of a country racing into a sunless oblivion.

Grounded, Beijing

I am in a hotel room. I am naked accept for the hotel's fluffy white bathrobe. I have just had a bath and a shower. I am drinking green tea from a cup and I am pleasantly full from a buffet dinner. I sit at the writing desk in my room, staring out at the apocalypse.

The pollution in Beijing has been building to insane levels since Sunday's snow. Yesterday, it finally went over 500. It's impossible to give an exact figure as the scale only goes up to 500. Given that in the EU anything over 50 is cause for alarm, and in most countries a reading of over 300 is classed as a national emergency, you get an idea just how bad it is. This toxic fog is so turgid with poison that it has sunk under its own weight, enveloping the entire city and in particular the airport. You should not leave your house in these conditions. Even in your home you are at risk as the particles can make their way through the tiniest of gaps. Unfortunately, I have to fly to Korea.

Outside the airport windows all I can see is a radioactive orange glow. The top third of the air control tower is lost to the smog. Flight attendants and airport staff are taking pictures with their phones – this is beyond even what they would call normal. Unsurprisingly, all flights are grounded. Korean Air put me in a mini-bus that takes me on a Mad Max-style journey through streets entirely lost in a glowing throbbing chemical haze. And now I am at a hotel, at the writing desk, looking out at the apocalypse.

A Day in the Life: China Daily

China Daily is a daily English-language newspaper in China. I know, the name gives it away. What the name doesn't reveal though is that the paper is a mouthpiece for the Chinese government.

As predictable as the pro-government rhetoric and West-bashing diatribes are, there is also something fascinatingly random about just what news is covered by the paper. You get a version of China that the government want you to see or don't care enough to hide from you. Here is a selection of stories from Wednesday December 7^th 2011:

'Children freed from clutches of crime gangs'

178 abducted children were rescued from a child-trafficking crime ring by police.  

Children are being kidnapped across China at a rate of up to eight a day.  

Key quote: “We will gradually eliminate the market demand to reduce child-trafficking at its root.” 

The use of the word 'gradually' is particularly interesting. Surely there are very few things that demand a sense of urgency more than children being abducted from their families and sold onto people who want to buy stolen children. The concept of a 'market demand' in relation to kidnapped children is also fascinating: it would appear that even wanting a stolen child is a consumer choice now.

'Stray Dogs Saved'   

On the same page, and thematically linked, is this story about several dogs who were rescued from a meat market in Lanzhou, Gansu. 

Key quote: “More than 30 dogs, most of which were sick, were saved.” 

It paints a slightly surreal picture of China, in that one of the larger state's provincial capital is still a place where stray dogs, 'sick' stray dogs at that, are snatched up from the alleyways, caged, and taken to market to be sold as meat. The reason why this story is newsworthy is that the dogs were rescued. In smaller, lesser cities and towns these sick dogs are sold and eaten without a hiccup. Yum yum.

'US woman seeks her roots in Yunnan' 

A US student, raised by adopted parents in the US, is now looking for her biological parents despite them abandoning her for having “slightly deformed feet”. 

Key quote comes from the potential father: “We put the baby into a paper box on the side of the road..., and we hid at a distance. We didn't leave until we saw a vehicle with a plate registered in Kunming stop, a man get out, notice the baby in the box, and take it into the vehicle.”

The 21-year-old student is currently awaiting DNA results to see if this man is her biological father. When asked about the potential impact of the result, he stated, “If the test proves she is my daughter, she is welcome to visit her home, and we would like her stay with us for a few days if she would like to.” Awww - it's enough to turn your heart to mush, ain't it?  

This story is interesting for a number of reasons. Mainly, in that it highlights a huge problem that still exists in China where poor families (the majority of the Chinese populous) can't afford to keep a child with any physical impairment at birth, however minor. There is no welfare system. Consequently, on a daily basis, a child is dumped at a hospital or on the roadside in the hope it will be looked after and adopted. Unsurprisingly, not all of them then decide to seek their parents out.

'Smog has air purifiers flying off the shelves' 

Northern China is smothered in a horrendous, highly-toxic pollution cloud which has resulted in a huge spike in the sales of purifiers, masks, and any other thing that offers people some protection from this terrifying smog. Interestingly, the article does not refer to it as pollution but as 'bad weather' and talks about 'anti-dust' measures. They go on to side-step the issue by talking about how not cleaning your air-purifying filters is dangerous.

'Letters'

The Chinese government recently decided to increase the poverty marker of a daily wage to a single US dollar, allowing the millions of people who earn less than a dollar a day to claim some limited form of financial support from the state. Previously the benchmark figure was considerably less than a dollar. A letter, supposedly written by a member of the public, in response to the news reads thus: “At a time when an increasing number of people in the West are facing a decline in their living standards and when poverty in some countries is increasing because of governments' mismanagement, China does just the opposite and helps the lowest 10 percent of its population live a better life. This is a highly commendable decision.” The words turd and polishing spring to mind.

Caving In: The Retreat to Lijiashan

When the world seems like an increasing hopeless place, it is tempting to retreat into yourself, into a shell away from it all, maybe even into the cold contours of a cave in the western mountains of China. Ok, so admittedly the latter is not available to everyone, I was lucky...

Travel in China is not the easiest. There's the language barrier, the language barrier, and, yep, the language barrier. There's also the usual complications to contend with such as being too tall for the seats (I always end up wearing my knees like ear-muffs) with a backpack bigger than your average Chinese passenger, trying not to show even a grimace of disdain when someone sends a streaky greeny inches from your feet, and not knowing which stretch of barren landscape or which cloud of urban smog is your final destination.

Yet China has much to experience and there is no option other than to dust yourself off, chisel the dried phlegm from your boots, and hit that road again. This time I am heading for Lijiashan, a village in China's Shanxi province where the forty or so local families all live in caves. It sounds like a mythical land and somewhere I want to be. I want to spend a night in a cave and forget about the world.

But it wasn't going to be easy. The journey was already shaping up to be harder that most - I had to make my way from the old-world charm of Pingyao to the industrial city of Lishu and from there onto the town of Qinko where it was then an hour's hike through the mountains to the cave-village.

I left Pingyao early and with the help of the anaesthetic fug of pre-dawn travel, things were going smoothly. It didn't last long. At Lishu, I hit my first snag. I discovered that I had arrived at the wrong bus station and needed to get to another bus station on the other side of the city. I clambered into a tiny taxi with several Chinese who had all mimed to me that it was necessary to do so - it was a gamble. We trundled across the ugly, polluted sprawl to the other bus station, which turned out to not be a bus station at all but a patch of brown grass surrounded by dirty, crowded, unmarked buses. I gambled again, this time on the pointed finger of a small man, who had indicated a small bus, with just a small amount of authority in his eyes when I had asked 'Qinko?' It was enough for me. I jumped on the bus and squeezed myself and my backpack into a seat.

Shanxi is a poor province. Heavy industries like coal and chemical production make factory owners rich whilst killing the poor through abhorrent working conditions or slowly, and more painfully, through the pollution that hangs over the scarred landscape like a veil. On the journey from Lishu to Qinko, I see old men hacking at soil to exhume shrivelled lettuces whilst flames from pipes lick the grey skies behind them. Chimneys pump out endless plumes of toxins and there is nothing to see. In cinematic future dystopias, the cityscapes at least have light from neon signs, in Shanxi there is no colour just an overwhelming, omnipresent grey. Not once is it pierced by sunlight or noble gas glitz.

Eventually, after several uncomfortable hours, the bus comes to a halt on a dusty road by a grey river - I guess that this is the monastery town of Qinko and time for me to get off the bus. I take out the directions that I have on a piece of paper in my pocket – I must cross the Yellow River, walk for an hour along a road that hugs the mountains and then head up blindly over several steep hills until I arrive at Lijiashan. Simple.

After forty minutes of ascent along trails lined with skeletal bushes, aggressively gothic with sharp thorns and clawing finger-branches, I begin to worry that I have taken a wrong path. But just as those nauseous moments before full panic arrive, I spot my first cave. It is not a natural cave, or at least it doesn't look like your traditional caveman cave, it is more of a tunnel-house skilfully carved deep into the rock face. I continue up over a ridge until I find myself looking down at a valley dotted with cave houses. I had found Lijiashan.

And as I made my way down the slope, I felt that mix of unease and excitement that comes when you enter somewhere alien. It really was a village of caves. I didn't know what to do -  should I shout something English and commanding to announce my presence like a nineteenth century coloniser? was it actually possible to knock on a cave? At the back of my mind, there was also the child-like logic that suggested I shouldn't disturb any creatures that might dwell in dark caverns. I tip-toed further into the village, repeating in my head the word "Hello cave people, I am from England. En-ger-land!" in the plummiest of accents.

From high up on the opposite side of the ridge, I could see arms frantically beckoning me. I made my way up along tiny steep paths, past pigs rutting in pens, two children playing with stones, a lady drying fruit under a tent, and caves, lots of caves. The beckoners, it turned out, had a spare cave that they would let me sleep in and food to feed me too.

It was a strange sensation walking into the cave for the first time. The walls were rounded, smooth, and painted, and not with stick-men firing arrows into pigs but matt emulsion. The bed was built out of bricks. There was a small fire enclosed in concrete attached to the end of the bed. There were the most ridiculous Mao posters on the wall - it was the bedroom of a homosexual communist teenage troglodyte. 

The owners of the cave were friendly and warm, fussing around me, arranging when I would want dinner, feeding wood into the fire that would heat my bed and my cave. They looked like they have never strayed into the outside world. Once they were satisfied that they'd given me a crash course in cave-living, they left me and I decided to take a walk around the village.

I sit down on a narrow path and look out over the caves and distant hills. It is eerie, but endlessly peaceful: a strange but simple way etched into the landscape before me. A man comes out from a cave behind me, carrying a small stool which he places next to me. It is his dinner time. The noodle soup smells delicious. I like the fact that although he has lived here all his life, he still likes to eat his evening meal outside and admire the view as it fades away into night. We exchange words, nods, and contented murmurs, not understanding each other's language but feeling the meaning.

When I return to the cave, I am greeted by a hive of activity. The husband is pumping a wooden handle to oxygenate a fire for cooking whilst the wife puts the finishing touches to a mound of dumplings. As the pan begins to boil, ingredients are added and I take over pumping the fire. Soon the son returns and it is time to eat. Dish after dish of vegetables are placed on the small table. It is a feast: delicious and endless as all feasts should be.

In the comfortable lull brought on by eating 37 dumplings, I watch the faces of my companions. We talk a while with our features. The mother is nearly blind; she can't see anything unless it is held a centimetre from her eyes. I pass her a picture of my family which she touches to her forehead in order to make out the strange white faces. She smiles as I indicate each relation; she repeats the name for each in the local dialect. Her friend comes to keep warm and look at the foreigner. We laugh together.

Eventually everyone becomes weary of conversing without understanding and a decision is made silently to do something special for me. In a grand ceremony, the father removes a veil from an old television set at the far end of the cave. It flickers in to life and we all watch as men in women's clothing sing in screechy high-pitched voices. It is surreal; too surreal. After ten minutes, I have had enough. A part of me craves a world where transgender karaoke is not prime-time viewing.

It is bitterly cold and it is time for bed. I walk outside to the toilet and urinate by the flame of my lighter. I then walk the fifty metres back to my cave and stretch out on my brick bed, warmed slightly by the fire that has died a slow death in the concrete urn. I pile blankets on top of me. It feels strange to be in a cave. I play Bob Dylan on my MP3 Player through a speaker, it somehow softens the darkness, makes the sub-zero temperature bearable, and lets me know that this retreat from the real world is only a temporary one.

We Are The Clowns, Beijing

I am a clown. We are the clowns. Not big-shoed, clumsy clowns. Not slap-stick, dick-slap, trip-trick squirty-flower clowns. We are anarchist clowns, J.G Ballard clowns. Bad clowns. Clowns in Japanese nuclear suits and cheap latex masks. Clowns that will fuck you up.

We are not in a circus, we are in Beijing. The polluted sky is a canvas tent; the limit to our deeds, how we will be judged. And tonight is Halloween. The boundaries between worlds has weakened, east and west, heaven and hell, blurred, lost to the night, and we are here to stomp them into oblivion.

Through Chaoyang District, the sanitised safety of Sanlitun, the tidy grime of Dirty Bar Street, terrorising this urban sprawl. Over each bridge, down each cut-through, through the very veins of the city, we go, limbs flying out with Inspector Gadget reach; legs coiling and unloading.

There are shadows to speed through. Lights to stand tall in.

On the stage of a nightclub a clown dances, surrounded by slack-jawed disbelievers, his reflection carved in a thousand mirrors by lasers.

One clown clambers up to the top of a street lamp. He sways, surveying, ready to pounce. He heckles passers-bys and taunts the twitching lenses of the security cameras.

Another pounds his fists on the concrete and howls at the moon before scurrying away after a couple, out past the witching hour. We clowns have bounce, agility, Tango-slap palms, and attitude. People are scared of us; their smiles as fake as the big red slices on our masks.

I sweat inside my mask, taste latex crumbs on my lips but I can't take it off. I am too far gone. This mask has power, it is sucking my personality out through my nostrils, mouth, eyes, with each breath and replacing it with some dangerous energy that pushes at the seams of me and my nuclear suit. I look at the others. I don't know who they are. But I know that we are the clowns.

Walking the Labrang Kora

It is dark. My torch struggles to illuminate anything beyond my feet. It is cold. My scarf, woolly hat, gloves, thermals and five layers of clothes struggle to keep out the chill, let alone keep me warm.

It is impossible to see where the pilgrim's path, the Kora, begins. My eyes scan the gloom, trying to make out the form of a monk that I can follow to the start of the route around the Labrang Monastery complex. The only figure visible is a lone road sweeper, disturbing dust with a long wicker broom. As the cloud settles, a monk materialises. Then another. An old Tibetan woman emerges too, her body a permanent right angle, propped up on a walking stick. I follow them. The moon is a thin crescent over the impenetrable black of the hills, the stars still bright above.



The first corridor of prayer wheels appears in the half-light. I follow the line of pilgrims, observing then mimicking, as they set each ornate cylinder spinning in turn. I am part of a procession, like them I press palms, push, pull these wheels into motion as if my karmic balance depended on it. Every 150 metres, we enter a room where a much larger prayer wheel waits. In these rooms, it is near pitch black; there is just enough light for me to find the giant wheel and walk around, reaching out to help it spin further and faster. Once, twice, three times around, stumbling, disorientated before being spat out into the new dawn.

Sometimes in the crowds, the darkness, the general confusion, I trip over a pilgrim prostrating beneath me. Lost in a religious fervour, these figures kneel and then lie in the dust before scraping themselves along the dirt track. Some have wooden paddles on their hands and circles of padded fabric to protect their knees, others do not, but they, as I, must carry on until the Kora is complete.



The sun is now fully up. For the first time I can see the hundreds of pilgrims around me clearly – red-robed monks, long-sleeved Tibetans, Yoda-like elderly women, walnut-faced men, all clutching prayer beads in their left hands and chanting with each step. I can also see the points on the monastery walls which have been rubbed into three shiny patches – a head and two hands - where the faithful press their foreheads against the cold stone with their palms placed either side.

The journey continues for three kilometres and over 1100 prayer wheels. I touch each one, helping send it and the prayers it contains on to further revolutions. When the Kora comes to an end, when I have spun the final wheel, I instantly miss the feeling of being swept along in that tide of such calm, focussed devotion. Although trippy, intense, and disorientating, out of it, I feel like I am drowning.

The Bag, Xiahe

A Picture Paints A Thousand Words: Here's 532 about a picture

'Bitch!' I scream at the old woman. 'Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.'

I continue to shower this frailest of flowers with cuss words right there in the middle of the shop -

'Don't you know we were meant to be together? Are you that F-ing stupid?'

She seems entirely oblivious to what she has done and continues to casually, mindlessly even, upturn china plates with one pudgy hand. I guess it's unsurprising really, my rantings are non-verbal after all, kept within the seething purple-crayon-squiggle of raw anger that is my brain. The tan vintage scuffed-up leather satchel of supreme loveliness that she now clutches in her sausage-digits was meant to be mine.

I am in a charity shop in Gorse Hill in my home-town of Swindon. It is a strange pseudo-village within the town, where various nationalities and second-hand retailers converge. I am shopping for a pair of pre-owned shorts for my trip to Asia. I am on a tight budget. In truth, I don't really have enough money to make the trip. And that is the reason why I put the leather satchel back on the display shelf after pressing it for several minutes to my chest like a six year old girl would a puppy gifted by her father. I returned to flicking through some highly-unfashionable short shorts, the type worn exclusively by German dads on walking holidays and paedophiles, when it occurred to me that, in the grand scheme of things, spending £4 on a bag that was infinitely cool didn't matter a jot. 'To hell with it,' I thought and turned round. An empty shelf faced me.

Five months later. Dusk. The start of the Labrang Monastery kora, in Xiahe, Gansu Province, China.

There are a few Tibetans selling clothes on the dirt track adjacent to the first run of prayer wheels. The clothes and bags are piled high on tarpaulins on the ground. Next to the old ladies selling bread is a blue tarpaulin with bags piled on it. I watch as pilgrims quickly and expertly sift through the bags. I see one man toe at a handbag, dislodging a small pile and in turn revealing a leather satchel. I pick it up. I hold on to it. The trader lady looks at me strangely. We barter for a few minutes with hand signals – the Chinese have a hand shape for each number. Eventually we arrive at 13 Yuan, around £1.30. The locals who have been watching and listening intently start to laugh. I hope that they are laughing at the happy conclusion to the scene, rather than the fact that I've been ripped off.

The bag smells. It is heavy. Cumbersome even. I have no room for it in my backpack and it is too heavy to carry separately but history has taught me, if you see a good leather satchel buy the fecker, because some old woman is always waiting with baited breath to snatch it from you.

So, for posterity, for me, and for old ladies everywhere, here is the picture from Labrang, of the pile of bags minus the leather satchel that now hangs off my shoulder and swings to the rhythm of victory.