By OISE Oxford tutor Kit Villiers
We passed up the passengers' breakfast of cold rice, and filed down on to the old wooden dock. After wandering through various cavernous dimly lit warehouses (15 watt bulbs seemed to be the maximum) which looked as if they'd seen no trade for decades, certainly not since the Communists took over in 1949, we finally saw a few official looking people who wanted to see our passports. I say 'see' rather than 'read' as some of these gentlemen, who all wore the ill-fitting military uniforms so many officials sported in those days, included several for whom reading Latin script was a bit of a challenge. This became apparent even to our half-awake group when some of the oldest (officials, I mean - not our fellows) were spotted scrutinising our documents upside-down. As the minutes passed, our hearts sank: our passports were by now in a large pile, being passed from one official to another in a somewhat aimless fashion not perhaps surprising amongst people who probably would see no other passengers that day, and would get their salary however many or few long nosed foreigners they admitted to the Middle Kingdom.
Eventually we emerged again into the lovely bright sunlight (this was many years before the pollution which ravages much of China today), and were amazed to find that the bus we'd hoped we'd arranged was there and waiting, and that it looked like it had been built in relatively recent times.
We were the Hong Kong Hash House Harriers, then as now an all male drinking club with a running problem. Normally we jogged non-competitively around the trails of Hong Kong of a Monday evening, but once a year or so we went on a foreign jaunt somewhere in S.E Asia. Now, following the death of Mao and the opening up after the Cultural Revolution, it was China's turn. Our plan was to base ourselves on a hotel outside the city and try to find some nice countryside to run in. One of our number had organised all this beforehand - at least the voyage, the bus and hopefully the hotel. I imagine, even using his Cantonese speaking secretary, he would have needed extreme patience to achieve this, bearing in mind the primitive communications of those days.
Our driver seemed to know where to go, and we trundled off through the back-streets of Canton. I was amazed how dirty it was, and how shabby the people were in their Chairman Mao suits. It did remind me a little of Seoul in the winter 10 years before - ramshackle brick buildings covered in soot, with people staring at our bus, as though they had nothing to do except stand about all day. I looked in vain for anything that might have been a shop or restaurant , or even had a bit of colour. Eventually MacDougall (another Aussie) spotted something and yelled for the driver to stop. He dashed out and came back laden with fireworks, telling us that there were only two things you could buy in China - fireworks and bananas.
I later found out why the fireworks: outside the city, China was totally dark; our hotel proved to be a pretty basic affair out in the ricefields, and once it got dark you really couldn't see a thing until MacDougall (who'd remembered to bring matches) set off a rocket or two. Of the hotel itself I recall only the so-called disco. There was a band of sorts, and a sign in Chinese from which even I could see that foreign folk had to pay three times more to go in than locals. We looked in after the fireworks, hoping that we might be able to dance with girls from surrounding villages, but there wasn't a soul. The band played to nobody the whole evening, and looked like it performed this ritual every evening. One was left to ponder the economics of communism....
Next time - we actually get to run in the Chinese countryside.
