Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

The old man pointing the crossbow at me wore a khaki shirt and no shoes, and his rope belt had a couple of carrots and a machete stuck into it. He was dark and small, and, I guessed, a member of the Wa minority. He chuckled. We were on a narrow trail, with bamboo groves either side so tall that they cut out most of the light.

The crossbow was clearly homemade – perhaps a family heirloom – rather cumbersome, and, fortunately for me, it wasn’t loaded. He was just having a laugh with the foreigner. Still, it got me thinking; a crossbow would be a great weapon to use, bookwise: because of the long loading time, you would have to shoot once then run away, so a crossbow duel could be dragged out over dozens of suspenseful pages.
I was in China, in the jungly zone close to the Burmese border, researching a guidebook. Though this area was too marginal to justify many pages in the guide, it fascinated me. Like all border areas, there was an intriguing mix of the sleazy and exotic; plenty of shady characters and cross cultural confusions and connections. Northern Burma is pretty lawless and one of the main industries here was receiving smuggled goods – teak, jade and drugs, usually – from over the border.

I knew it would make a great location for a novel, and another encounter furnished me with the leads: a couple of gap year backpackers turned up at my guesthouse, and seemed blithely unaware, so it seemed to me, of the need to take a little care as they searched out local temptations. I remember thinking, you could really get into trouble here.

Slowly the book took shape. I wanted to write an adventure story – I love the rather old fashioned stories about derring-do in foreign places. Something a bit like Deliverance, a holiday nightmare. Plus I’ve always loved that classic noir staple – doomed characters trying to get away with a crime and just digging themselves further into a hole. And I wanted all the action to take place over a single day – starting at dawn, and finishing at dusk. And – just to make it harder for myself – the whole story would be told from one character’s viewpoint, and, further, there would be no flashbacks or foreshadowing, or any of that literary stuff. Just one event after another, for the whole book; something like a film (I also write scripts) shot in real-time.

I knew it was going to end in a crossbow fight, but I didn’t want to take the obvious route, of creating a situation where the locals take on the westerners – no, I thought it would be much more interesting if the westerners ended up turning on each other… So. That’s how it happened. I hope you like Border Run, and don’t let it put you off travelling.

Border Run is published by Sort of Books on April 5th 2012

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest, where you can have an unforgettable experience of great natural beauty.
Get off the beaten track and hire a guide to take you through the pristine, old growth rainforest of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, Simon Lewis, says

Darkness was falling, we were alone in the forest and the fallen tree that served as a bridge over the swollen river had been swept away. We couldn’t go back – we’d already walked 20 km through dense jungle – and going forward appeared to be a dubious proposition.

But Mr Rush, my indomitable guide, didn’t give it a second thought.

“Just take off your shoes and jump,” he said and dived in. The water foamed around his thighs as he waded ahead. I followed tentatively with shoes held above my head, shivering at the cold water and feeling the mud squelch between my toes. I tried not to think about the leeches and snakes we’d seen earlier.

“This is nothing,” Rush said. “One time I came with two Dutch girls. The stream was so high we had to wait for some villagers to come along, and they pulled us all across with ropes.”

This, I believed, was a cunning tactic. Whenever it looked like I might complain, he’d bring up some other tourist who had it worse. And I had no right to grumble, I had got what I had asked for – a real warts and all trip into China’s biggest rainforest.

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest; but you have to get out of the sleepy capital, Jinghong, and away from the touristy “forest parks” before you can really see it. And for that you’ll need a guide.

Mr Rush really loves the forest. In his previous job as a beekeeper he had traveled with his hives to every province in China, and he had finally settled in Xishuangbanna because it had “the most magic”.

Though he said he was given his English name because of his eagerness to learn the language in class, it seemed particularly appropriate as he sped down the narrow, overgrown forest trails, swinging a machete to clear the path.

Being inside the forest was a sublime experience. Every moment I was overwhelmed by a glut of visual detail, millions of leaves and tree trunks, all in the narrowest of palettes, green and brown.

Dazzling touches of color were provided by the iridescent wings of butterflies, which seemed to taunt and flirt, by staying just out of reach. The buzz of insects sounded like incessant ring tones. Exotic birds flashed by as the trees above cast shadows and pressed in from each side, as if to repair the red earth scar of our trail.

For hours, the only other sign of human activity was the occasional hole hacked into the bamboo, made by locals looking for tasty grubs to eat. It was only after fording the stream that we began to see signs of civilization.

We passed through a rubber plantation – narrow trees planted in rows – and there were bowls or broken bottles that collected the white sap.

Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at 3 am. The locals don’t like to do it and employ Sichuanese laborers. They peered out at us from simple bamboo huts. Here there were no birds, or butterflies and the only animals were long, bright red centipedes. Rubber trees take up so much water that nothing else grows around them.

Here Mr Rush seemed to walk even faster, it was obvious that he didn’t like this monoculture. With the price of rubber rising, in recent years a lot of forest has been cleared for plantations. Fortunately, much of what remains is now protected.

“There is something very precious here and it needs to be protected. But the people also need to make a living. The challenge for China is to develop without destruction,” Mr Rush said.

Finally, we arrived, in darkness, at a village. With no light pollution the stars shone brightly, seemingly close enough to touch. The locals walked around with torches strapped to their heads, resembling giant fireflies. They were chopping vegetables, cooking, putting children to sleep.

I had a cold shower then settled down to a simple meal around a hearth. I was so hungry that even a bowl of the aforementioned grubs was welcome. Actually, they were pretty tasty, a good meat substitute when fried in chili oil.

Lubricated with home-made baijiu, our host opened up. He said that in his younger days he would go hunting for wild pigs in the forest with a home-made gun. He told a story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot its calf. The angry elephant, so the story goes, charged the man’s house and killed his wife.

Today there are few wild elephants left in the forest, in a nearby forest park.

My hosts were Jino, one of China’s smallest ethnic groups, with only 20,000 members. You can distinguish them by the white headdresses of the women and the rising sun painted, for protection, on the eaves of their houses. Not far away were the jungle villages of Blang people, famous for their elaborate black headdresses; and Wa, whose women were easy to distinguish by their long hair.

“The cultures here are worth every effort to preserve,” Mr Rush said.

As I lay down to sleep on a mat on the floor I thought about this unique face of China that Mr Rush had shown me. I promised myself I would return, though next time I’d bring some wellies.

Simon Lewis is the author of Rough Guide to China
China Daily Updated: 2010-01-07 10:22

The mellow little town of Dali is my favourite China oasis, my retreat when the pace of the cities seems too frenetic. It’s the capital of the minority Bai people in the southwestern province of Yunnan. The centre of the walled old town is China-lite, a tourist-friendly strip of hippyish cafés, but outside it’s pretty and relaxed, and the countryside around is breathtaking: in the dramatic Cangshan mountain range to the west I came across esoteric temples, guesthouse retreats, hot springs and even a secret monastery of kung fu monks. At the huge Erhai Lake, just to the east, I sat and watched locals fishing with trained cormorants.

As the closest uptight China gets to bohemia, the town has become the haunt of alternative types from the big cities, which makes the bar life intriguing, and I bumped into a few famous writers and bands, down to renew their creative juices.

Chinese student dropouts turn up, learn to fire-juggle and dream about opening a café. But the place maintains, at least for the moment, its rural charm.

The main street, cobbled Renmin Lu, for instance, looks the way Chinese roads do in the imagination – its terraced houses have decorative shutters and grass growing between the roof tiles; minority women in traditional dress squat beside their produce, while tailors and cobblers work in their little stores – and, towering over it all, are the mist-shrouded mountains.

| The Observer | Sunday 1 February 2009 |

On the fourth day I stopped caring about time. I thought it was the fourth day, but it might have been the third. Beijing was a receding memory, Moscow impossibly distant. I had slipped into the habit of sleeping for four hours and then getting up for four hours, it didn’t matter whether it was light or dark. Life inside the train bore no relation to the outside world -Siberia- which barreled past, cold, unwelcoming and as predictable as wallpaper; birch trees, hills, birch trees, plains, birch trees.

‘I hate those trees,’ said the elderly German in my compartment, ‘I want to cut them all down.’

Occasionally we passed an untidy village of wooden cabins but mostly the only human touch to the epic landscape was the telegraph poles at the side of the track.

My first Russian was a young guy in a shellsuit with a moustache and an anarchy tattoo. ‘The Beatles,’ he said, on hearing I was British.

‘The Rolling Stones,’ I countered.

He nodded. ‘The Doors.’

‘Pearl Jam?’ I inquired.

‘Nirvana,’ he asserted, ‘Napalm Death.’ Which seemed to seal the matter.

Once or twice a day the train stopped and I’d emerge for fresh air, dizzy and blinking, onto a platform swarming with frenzied shoppers. Traders stood in the carriage door and the townsflok, who had waited all week for two minutes of consumerism, rioted to get to them. To save time the traders threw money over their shoulders into the corridor to be collected by colleagues. They sold world cup t-shirts, plastic jewellery and Mickey Mouse umbrellas. Even the man from the dining car had a cupboard of trainers, which was perhaps why he could only offer gherkins and soup in his official capacity.

I played cards then slept, battleships, slept, charades, slept. It was an invalid’s life – a long slow delirium in comfortable confinement. But on the seventh day, or perhaps it was the sixth, when grey housing blocks started appearing and Moscow was imminent, I felt nostalgic for that easy sloth. When I finally got off, something felt terribly wrong; it took me a while to figure it out – oh yes, the ground wasn’t moving.

| ROUGH GUIDES | 25 Ultimate experiences Journeys |

A teacherish voice called from the train loudspeaker, exhorting the passengers to wake up please, we would soon be arriving.

I grew conscious. My eyes felt toasted, my bottom tenderised, and my shoulder, having been rammed against the window bracket for hours, seemed to have relocated to my ribcage. It felt like my left leg was being jabbed with spikes and someone had stolen my feet.

I shared my bench with a pair of cobblers, father and son. Under the seat they had a sack with two chickens inside. The chicken heads protruded from holes and pecked at discarded sunflower seed shells. Now the son, beside me – in fact, much of his body was in contact with mine – yawned and grunted and stamped.

He had a foppish, asymmetrical haircut that would look cool in a London nightclub but was odd in combination with his peasant uniform of ‘Lining’ trainers – white with red flash – and a shapeless brown suit. I felt guilty for the anger thoughts I’d directed at him during the night, when he’d slid into my patch.

Outside, the low sun tinted the mist pink. Hills had been chopped into bite size fields, a cubist landscape. The fields were divided by mud ridges just wide enough to step along. A woman ladled urine from a bucket onto rows of veg and a man sprayed pesticide from a backpack. A white egret, skinny and with bent back, like a fashion model, posed by an irrigation stream. The mud walls of houses were the colour of the red soil, as if they had grown from it. Their tiled roofs curled at the ends. That seemed a characteristic Chinese flourish, you saw the same upward gesture at the end of a calligraphy stroke, in the flick of an opera singer’s wrist. A man was leading a water buffalo. What a head a water buffalo has, sports car sleek with go-faster horns.

On the facing bench, the seamstresses were waking. In daylight they’d played cards joylessly, taking it in turns to present their laps as a table. Beside them sat one of those mysterious Chinese businessmen, well dressed but carrying nothing but a mobile phone and a jam jar of tea. In between us on the floor the cabbie snored away. Last night he’d drunk a bottle of whisky then wrapped himself up in a plastic sheet and lain down. In the moonlight I’d fancied he resembled a mummy, and the fruit peel and wrappers around him were his grave goods. He didn’t look like that now, he looked like a bum, perhaps as much as I did.

Everyone seemed to have had a lovely sleep. I marvelled, as I had during the night, at that peasant ability to hunker down and switch off. They’d slept in positions I would not endure for more than a few minutes.

A guard wheeled a trolley up the aisle, selling breakfast and socks. I bought a couple of eggs boiled in tea and pointedly dropped the packaging on the floor rather than out of the window. A girl swept rubbish into a pan, barking at passengers to raise their feet. One of her epaulettes was loose and flapped like a broken wing. Now a patriotic song was playing. How I loathed that loudspeaker. In the more expensive classes you could turn it off.

Yesterday evening, when the journey had begun, I’d had a fine time. Cigarettes, fruit and beer had been pressed upon me, and I’d fielded questions concerning my origin, occupation and salary. I’d handed round my lucky five pound note and the queen had been much admired. Having scandalised my audience by revealing how much cigarettes cost in my country, I’d had to admit I had no idea of the price of a cow.

Then the lights had gone out and they’d all gone to sleep. I’d grown obsessed with finding the one position that would be comfortable and remain so. I would think I had it then ten minutes later have to shift again. Round about four a.m. I’d forgotten my pains in a delirious flush of ideas. I’d decided that someone ought to genetically engineer a goat that could eat plastic, to clean up all the rubbish along all the railway lines of Asia. Many brilliant observations had followed, none of which I could recall now.

Following that, I’d replayed Monty Python sketches in my head, until I’d realised I was giggling aloud. I think it was shortly after that that I’d passed out.

The cabbie unfurled himself and a chicken pecked at his foot. The seamstresses got their cards out and the cobblers brushed their teeth. The cleaning girl recovered my book, now covered in banana, from under the seat, and emptied her pan out of the window.

| Bradt Travel Guides/Independent on Sunday travel writing competition winner