Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I’d rather people did not know what I was doing. Not wishing, though, to actually lie to people who I might end up hanging out with, I have to construct a tower of evasions, which breaks under the mildest of inquisitions:
‘You’re a writer? What do you write?’
‘Travel stuff. Novels. Screenplays.’
‘You mean films? Have you written any films I’d have seen?’
‘No.’
‘Do you make a lot of money writing films?’
‘None at all.’
‘Well how do you make your living?’
‘Writing stuff for.. travel publications.’
And the amateur Poirot declares, ‘You work for Lonely Planet!’

At which point I sheepishly declare myself. And then they say, ‘I really like your books, the history is good, they’re well laid out, the maps are good, the level of writing is really high, but of course I use Lonely Planet’. I get asked a standard set of questions, including ‘Do you stay in all the hotels?’ ‘Do you get paid expenses?’ (No and no.)

I find myself saying, over and over again, ‘It’s not actually like being paid to be on holiday because, unlike you, I have a schedule’, ‘I just fell into it, I speak a bit of Chinese and I’m a writer.’ ‘It doesn’t actually pay very well.’ ‘I did a bit of India but it was horrible’, ‘The difference between my company and the Lonely Planet is that they employ researchers and my company employ writers.’

From then on, to those people, I feel that I have turned into a representative of my company, so ought to be seen to be looking busy and competent and up earlier in the morning and don’t want to be caught out sleeping in or skipping a bit.

I was sitting in a bar in Dali and a load of foreign residents were sitting around discussing the really interesting villages in the area when a certain ex Lonely Planet guidebook writer said, ‘Shh! There’s a guidebook writer here! We have a traitor in our midst!’

He was teasing of course, but yes, sometimes that is the attitude: Stealer of secrets, despoiler of the pristine, stormtrooper for the backpacker hordes. I understand; after all my job is to inform people about the places that the elitists want kept to themselves.

The really embedded travellers, of course, don’t need guidebooks. They buy a map and talk to locals. In another bar elsewhere, someone said: ‘don’t take this personally, but when me and my friends were in India, we built a fire in the middle of the road and ritually burnt our Lonely Planets.’ I was very amused. The ritual burning of the Lonely Planet – a necessary step, surely, on the road to travel enlightenment.

*******************

I would love to be still in Yunnan being in the sunshine and meeting more interesting people. But feeling the pressure of deadlines, I returned to Shanghai. All it has done is rain. Rain rain rain, more rain, and then more rain and now some rain to rain rainily. Voluptuous Asian rain, wetter than English rain, more definitive, altogether rainier. Roofs leak, cars splash, gutters overflow. You can’t get a cab, everyone is miserable, wet, ill. This is how rainy it is – Shanghai girls, some of the most image conscious on the planet, are wearing plastic bags over their slinky shoes. Water drumming and dripping keeps me awake at night. I have caught a cold. I washed all my clothes when I got back and they just wouldn’t dry, so I had to go out and buy a whole new set. One morning I banged on my walls and shouted, Canute like, ‘stop raining, please just stop raining!’

While the patter and drip continues outside I sit and flick through the Tatler 120 best Shanghai restaurants. Some pages I could just lick. It’s a whole other world. The wine section begins: ‘the kind of wine a person chooses says a lot about the kind of person they are’ Does it? Gosh. What’s a lobster bisque and how can it be outré? It tells you if you can get your car valeted while you eat. How civilised and decadent and upper class the whole venture is. Now there’s a guidebook to work for.

******************

I’m going to Magic Shool. It’s this little Mister Ben type shop in the basement of a shopping mall. They teach eight tricks for twenty quid in all. I know from my mate D the magic man, you couldn’t get taught one trick for that in London.

I learn one every morning as it’s near where I eat breakfast. They’re good tricks too, or they are when my teacher M does them. Even when I know how she’s done it, I still can’t see how she’s done it, if you see what I mean. Every time it’s the same: I watch her do a trick over and over again until I have to say ‘Ok, stop, stop, how did you do that? Damn, it, how did you do that?’ And then she shows me, and I’m like, ‘why, is that all?’

She has a degree in physics but instead of being a small town physics teacher, as her family wanted, she ran away to Shanghai and became a magician. She lives with the other magicians from the shop, in some kind of magic commune, where they have a monkish routine of magic training and perfection.

The atmosphere in the shop is studious as when they are not teaching the teachers work over and over on their sleight of hand skills. There’s a polystyrene target that they skim cards into and Houdini posters on the wall. Their uniform is an ‘I love magic’ t-shirt. But a life dedicated to magic has its pressures, it would seem; M has trust issues, she worries about boyfriends trying to steal her secrets.

A is a good advert for finding something that you like doing that isn’t bad for you, then doing it as much as you can. What A likes to do is ride his bicycle. He has ridden his bike all over Asia but he especially likes to ride it in Yunnan, has done for years. When he runs out of money, and can no longer ride his bike (boo!) he goes home to Canada and works planting trees till he has enough money to return to China and (yay!) ride his bike some more.

Now he works in Zhongdian as a guide, leading mountain bike and hiking tours, and he has just opened his own mountain bike tour company. When he’s not working he spends his time breaking trails, meaning figuring out how to get over mountains on a bike.

About two months ago A gave a Tibetan contractor a thousand quid or so and a sketch – it would be exaggerating to say, ‘on the back of a cigarette packet’, but not by much – and he left to guide a tour group around the local holy mountain and ride his bike a bit, and then two days ago he returned, and, da-da, now he’s got a house!

It’s small, just a brick shell downstairs and one big wooden second storey room, but it’s proper Tibetan style, with intricate detailing around the windows and the staircase and a balcony from which you can see the snowy peaks. It doesn’t have plumbing or electricity yet and he has to go to the public toilet and shower. He got back just in time to tell the contractor that he wanted a sink put into the kitchen – not something, apparently, that Tibetan workmen would assume.

The rent on the land is about eighty pounds a year and he has a ten year lease. So – his very own Tibetan style batch pad, built to his own design, in Shangri La, for a grand. Even if he doesn’t renegotiate the contract at the end of the lease, he’ll still have only spent one hundred and eighty quid a year on the place.

I went to his house warming party. We hung prayer flags from the balcony and let off firecrackers to scare the ghosts away.

The resident foreigners came and some locals. In contrast to the hipster Dali scene the foreigners here are rugged, outdoorsy types who like hiking. They complain about the lack of availability of accurate topographical maps and the annoying Chinese habit of building roads into nice remote places. They discuss rumours of trails that exist between villages or over mountain passes. And they talk a lot about wood – should you varnish, paint, stain? Old or new? – because they’ve got, or are renovating, beautiful Tibetan houses. .

K was angry about an NGO that goes into the villages and gives every house a solar powered water heater. It’s absolutely useless. It won’t boil water to make it potable, so it’s only purpose is for washing. But Tibetans basically don’t wash, and if they do they’re tough enough to do it in cold water. And the solar panels come packed in polystyrene chips, which the villagers, not knowing any better, scatter around, and their pigs and chickens eat them and get ill. But someone in Brussels or Beijing can tick a box and say, here’s a solar powered village, what progress.

And K said how he went to this one village which was a really beautiful place up in the mountains, and some NGO had sorted them out with electricity. And the first thing they had done was to get someone to lug a TV up there. And he said he asked them why they weren’t happy any more and they said, ‘now we know we are poor.’

What K’s NGO does (among other things) is to go into villages and build a small basketball court. It’s a great idea, actually; a flat surface for threshing and drying grain, holding meetings on and dancing; no one can steal it, break it, or sell it and it’s not screwing with anyone’s culture.

A is very intelligent but he gets words muddled, like he said Top Gun was a homoerogenous movie and someone was vegetarian for ethnical reasons. His stories tend to be about some guy he knows who cycled across this or that desert for a year or whatever. He never boasts about his own exploits. He biked across Mongolia and he rarely mentions it, but he did make one off the cuff remark that brought home how hardcore it was – he mentioned that he had had to have ten days food on him at all times because from one week to the next he couldn’t be certain of coming across any settlements. He complained about how embarrassing and awkward it was when a Mongolian nomad, as a gesture of hospitality, invited him to sleep with his wife. He told me about a mutual friend who cycled around Tajerkistan then into Afghanistan and is now working for the Danish embassy in Kabul and how this guy can’t understand how come none of his friends want to go and visit him there. I pointed out that there is no such country as Tajerkistan.

I first met W four years ago when he had just come to China, a good looking lad but diffident. He spoke no Chinese and wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Now, I was annoyed to discover, he speaks better Chinese than me, owns a beautiful old Tibetan house, runs an art gallery, has a business renovating houses and another selling furniture and is a successful photojournalist – while remaining younger and better looking.

He had just got back from a photoshoot at Pu’er, where the famous tea comes from. The business is taken every bit as seriously as vintage wines in the west. Tea that is dried naturally is worth more, as is tea from certain areas at certain years. Pu’er is half fermented, and improves with age. Will had visited a tea bank. Investors would buy a brick of tea and put it in the tea bank and after a year it doubles in value. With such a high rate of return, many in the area have given up on real banks and started putting their money in tea.

Ah Dong is a Tibetan guide and driver who learnt English in India. He had walked for forty days across the mountains to Dharamasala in India, where the Tibetan government in exile is based. He had studied for four years then walked back into Tibet. It’s a common story, Tibetans who want an education sneak off to India rather than studying at a Chinese college. Most of the male members of his family had been killed as insurgents by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. But he said that had learnt during his Buddhist education in India that the Chinese were to be pitied not hated, as they did not know what they were doing.

There were a few more Tibetans there and after a couple of hours they were all singing and dancing. The dancing was hardly sophisticated, they put a chair in the middle of the room and then did something not that different from the oaky kokey round it. But their singing was amazing. I’m not very musical but I cannot hear those wistful, wailing Tibetan songs without it sending a shiver down my spine. It’s just what they’re used to doing and they weren’t trying to draw attention to themselves, it was simple joie de vivre. I was the only one who stopped talking to listen cause everyone else hears it all the time. Adrian said you never need a stereo at a Zhongdian party, you just wait till the Tibetans have had a few drinks.

I went to Zhongdian, a Tibetan town six hours north of Dali and a good thousand metres higher, to see A.

A new arrival in Zhongdian would be forgiven for thinking that someone had taken a beautiful old town of cobbled alleyeways and traditional timbered Tibetan buildings, and grafted onto it an ugly concrete sprawl of boulevards lined with cheap concrete.

But no – actually the concrete came first. When I came here five years ago the ‘old town’ was a slum of muddy trails and shacks. Mountains, crisp and unobtainable, lay in most directions but the town was gnarly. There were a couple of tourist cafes but there wasn’t much to eat, or buy in the dusty shops. The thing I remember most about it is the schlock horror of the Tibetan butchers, with yak viscera, spinal cords and heads sitting in a storm of flies.

What happened in the interim was, some Chinese marketing genius read Lost Horizon by James Hilton. It’s a novel from the 1930s, in which a gang of colonials have stiff upper lipped adventures in a Tibetan haven called Shangri-La. He invented the term, it is perhaps a corruption of the Tibetan Shangbala.

On basically no evidence whatsoever, this person decided that the secret Buddhist paradise described in the novel – the monastery of Shangri-La in the Valley of the Blue Moon – was, in fact, Zhongdian. It’s much more likely that Hilton was writing about Kailash, a holy mountain a thousand miles away.

Never mind. They changed the name of the town to Shang-ge-li-la, and they built the ‘old town’ pretty much from scratch. And I do mean town – it is an enormous project, there are dozens of cobbled alleyways and the hulking buildings are properly Tibetan, with huge wooden pillars, intricate detailing on the window screens and balconies and thick stone walls.

And each of these brooding mini-fortresses is now a bar, a restaurant, a shop selling combs made from yak bones, a traditional medicine pharmacy stocking caterpillar fungus and dried ants, and so on. They took the old temple and moved it a few hundred metres and built a new, much flashier temple, and nearby is the world’s largest prayer wheel, a gold cone about ten metres high which takes several men to turn it.

It has sort of worked. There are plenty of Chinese tourists here. And there is lots for them to do, with old growth forests and mountains all around, a few monasteries and hot springs, and a glacier up the road. The monastery just outside town must now be one of the richest in China.

In the ‘new town’ the butchers have cleaned up and there are even flashy supermarkets now. But plenty of people are worried about the social and environmental impact of mass tourism on such a scale in a fragile ecosystem.

In one supermarket I saw a good ‘new China’ image: a grisly nomad guy with gold teeth and matted hair, in riding boots and fur hat and fur trimmed yak skin cloak, striding down an aisle of shampoos.

One thing in the supermarket gives cause for optimism that someone, at least, is not just thinking about the fast buck potential. My purchases were put in a bag made of paper – Because plastic bags are non biodegradable and despoil the landscape, they are banned in Shangri-la. What a brilliant idea.

There is a snarl up outside C’s Irish café. A truck with a whole tree, roots and all, lashed to the back is trying to get up the narrow, (I thought pedestrianised) street. The tree’s branches are snagged in jerry-rigged electricity and phone cables and a man and a woman have climbed into the branches and are trying to lift the cables out of the way.

Someone is yelling instructions to the truck driver, another person is shouting warnings about more cables that might got snared, and a woman is yelling because the truck’s side has knocked tiles off her roof.

I wouldn’t go near a Chinese electricity cable under any circumstances. I wince watching this guy who, with no specialist equipment, is squatting precariously on a branch about twenty foot in the air, trying to pull electricity cables up and over the tree with his bare hands while smoking a cigarette.

I am on Renmin Lu. It is a lovely street, how, you feel, Chinese streets ought to look like and so rarely do – a paved alley lined with two storey traditional terraced houses, with decorative shutters and grass growing between the roof tiles, and above the roofs you can see the mountains.

The problem with spending a lot of time in a place is that you have to work harder to see it. I’m sure someone unfamiliar with China would really appreciate walking down here, stopping to consider the minority women selling veg, the chillis laid out to dry, the gory muslim butcher’s shops, the little cobblers and tailors and so on. But all I am usually thinking about is the fried English breakfast I am about to eat at C’s café.

When I am not working on guides I am a slovenly tourist. I find a bit of town that I like and wander round it endlessly with no desire to explore anywhere else. I eat the same thing in the same restaurant every day and you couldn’t pay me to go near a temple. It is shocking that I have lived for three weeks a hundred and fifty metres from Ear Lake and I have not been to see it once.

I feel I should point out that I do not spend all my time in bars. But if I spend, say, eight hours a day typing, and then three hours propping up a bar, which of those two would be more interesting to write about? If I wrote about the typing it would be like, ‘sat in Café de Jacks. Bored waiter doing press ups. Drank too much coffee. Flicked through National Geographic. Oh, not more Simon and Garfunkel.’ Tedious.

Which is a preamble to writing about bars again. On an average night there are enough barflys to pack one bar, and what tends to happen is that they all migrate, a capricious herd, to one place and fill it. Which creates a great deal of resentment and stress for the bar owners.

Like I was in Bad Monkey with about twenty people and I saw C from the Lazy Lizard peering through the window. His place was obviously completely empty. C and S ribbed him and he scuttled away (I would like to say, lizard in tow, but he only walks it in the daytime).

Cs struck back with a well advertised ‘Japanese cultural evening’, which attracted thirty or so. I have rarely been to a less Japanese evening. Not only was there absolutely no evidence of anything culturally Japanese there weren’t even any Japanese people there. But there was a fire in the yard at the back, and hippies drumming, and poi spinning, with nineties squat party music and décor – lots of UV paint and scavenged furniture.

Poi seems to be a popular thing to learn here. You have two balls of cloth dipped in paraffin and lit, on the ends of chains, and you spin the chains round and you get these impressive visuals going as the firey balls spin really fast in parallel or across each other. And someone who’s good does tricks like making them cross over or doing a kind of limbo dance with the flaming balls spinning horizontally above them. It looks like a cross between a martial art and drum majoretting and when anyone does it a group of appreciative people gather which I guess is enough reason to learn. I do think though that they ought to have a bucket of water handy.

S was singing songs and playing the guitar. She has a mournful face with that striking Naxi look, very high cheekbones, quite masculine, like a red Indian (ethnically, the Naxi are Tibetan). Like all the Naxi I have met she sang very well.

But Angel, this Chinese girl (I should explain that Chinese people give themselves English names for when they hang around with foreigners) who was off her head, was hassling her and S’s patience broke and she said to me, quietly but intensely,
‘Fucking Han Chinese. All my life they give me trouble. When I went to Beijing, every day people asked me, do you live in a mountain, do you eat raw meat, do you drink blood. They think we’re – what’s the word?’
‘Savages.’
‘Savages.’

Angel has the usual Han prejudices and it messes with her head that a Naxi mountain girl is clearly more sophisticated than her. S, for example has even been to England – Weston Super Mare.

To be fair to the Han I should say that the traditional prejudice is changing and these days in some circles it’s cool to have a minority background. A lot of Han guys like to marry minority girls because they are allowed to have two kids not just one. The minorities have maintained their traditional culture while the Han have largely abandoned theirs, and now I think a lot of insecure Han feel a longing for the perceived authenticity of minority culture and the secure sense of cultural identity that minorities have.

S’s boyfriend  has had to give up his t-shirt printing business because he is out of money so he is going back to Wandsworth to, he says, get a job on the tills at Waitrose, save a thousand pounds, and come back. It is a prospect that does not fill him with enthusiasm, so he keeps putting it off, and he and S live in a twilight world of last suppers before his long deferred departure.

S told me to look up her Naxi friend’s bar in Beijing called UPSETTER.
‘Are you sure that’s what it’s called?’
‘She’s married to a French truck driver. Neither of them have a good grasp of English.’

S has to go to Bejing to take her mum to hospital because the hospitals in Yunnan are really bad. I tell her about the time I went to the hospital in Kunming. I was instructed to go and sit in this room with about thirty other people. So I was sitting there thinking where’s the magazines, when this guy in a white coat came in smoking a fag, got out his stethoscope and told me to take my shirt off – what I had assumed was the waiting room was in fact his surgery. And this other time I went to hospital I was sold ‘special antibiotics’ for about twenty quid, and then I went to the chemists and saw you could get them over the counter for eighty pee.

This American girl whose name I do not recall talked about going to stay with her Chinese boyfriend’s parents. They lived on a mountain with no electricity and she was expected to get up, like them, at 6, wash in cold water and then go and help with the harvest. Which is one way to bond with the in-laws I guess. She talked like it was a good experience but of course it was over.

I met another Chinese student drop out . She said,
‘I want to get a tattoo of metal pipes across my heart.’
‘Pipes?’
‘Yes pipes, and valves.’
‘Across your heart?’
‘At the back.’
‘Right.’
‘Either that or a cat.’

There I met the owner of Plan B, which is a trendy nightclub on Brixton High Street, and he said ring him when I get back and he’d put me on the guest list. His Irish girlfriend smelt a passing French hippie and it reminded her of Irish travellers back home and she went on this anti-gypo rant, which I felt did not accord with the spirit of the place really.

C the writer has given me compelling new evidence for my theory that writing books about Tibet drives you mad – he told me about a writer (who will remain unnamed, as will his company) who disappeared while researching a guide to Tibet. He was living in a cave. Some nomads found him and took him to the police. He was delirious and nobody could get any sense out of him but they found an address book in his pocket with some Hong Kong numbers in it, so the police called them and his friends flew in and collected him. So there you go. He still finished the book, apparently.

Poor S. He’s just googled the name of his bar, the BAD MONKEY, and found a blog entry all about him by some western traveller which calls him ‘an Essex boy with waist length dreads’ (true) and ‘a poster boy for the wasted’ (a bit unfair). The bar itself is excitably described as a ‘modern day opium den’.

S used to test games for Sega in the day and in the evening worked for Howard Marks (the, er, author). I tell him that I’d normally expect to see his type in India, and he gives me a succinct summing up for why not to bother with the place: ‘I like eating meat and being able to fool around with the native girls and anyway the smell of shit makes me puke’. (Not that all of India smells of shit, but I know what he means).

His present headache is trying to get rid of his sort of Mexican girlfriend before his sort of Japanese girlfriend gets back – that’s the problem with running a bar, all your girlfriends can come and hang out where you work.

Then it’s co-owner C’s turn to get annoyed, as he finds an internet review of the bar which claims he and S are on the run from the Thai authorities and relates an incident where a girl pissed through the wooden floor upstairs onto the customers below. I tell C I’m writing a book, and he says, ‘we should do that, it’d be huge, with your stories and my spelling’. He so closely resembles and sounds like the Camberwell carrot guy off ‘Withnail and I’ that he gets exasperated with people noticing it. They’re very entertaining, like a stoner Derek and Clive.

I’m impressed that two English hippies started a bar here on their own – conventional wisdom holds that it can only be done with a Chinese business partner. They sleep above the place, like the Chinese do. They’re proud of being the first bar in Dali with an inside toilet and the first to import beer from Laos, far superior to the local brew. Half the clientele is the foreign counter cultural element and the rest is locals picking up bad habits.

I usually go there with C. He wrote a guidebook to Tibet, and now is here to write a novel about a guidebook writer who has a breakdown while writing a guidebook to, er, Tibet.

I don’t tell him I had the same idea when I was in Tibet – because if a guidebook writer was going to have a breakdown, then that would be the place it would happen. It’s the harsh grandeur of the landscape and the bewildering paganism of the culture. You meet some guy who’s just, say, hopped 108 times round a chorten, or walked a thousand kilometres to pay homage at some shrine, and reviewing hotels and restaurants starts to look pointless and prosaic. I bet anyone who’s spent any time in Tibet has at some point wished to ride off on a horse and go and live in a tent. Especially when the alternative is trying to think of more adjectives to describe monasteries.

He’s very kind and clued up. He took me to this tiny bar where the urban literati hang out when they come here. There was a Beijing rock band skulking in the corner and a Shanghai novelist at the bar. I wish I could say that I spent the evening hob nobbing with the Chinese literati, but what actually happened was a man who I was introduced to as an ‘underground poet’ took it upon himself to play harmonica like a dog gnawing on a bone and – entirely unasked – declaim his underground poetry at the top of his voice. And instead of telling him to shut up or hitting him on the head the other bohemians gave him face by clapping politely when he finished bellowing one ditty so he would immediately start another. It was purely a bullying demonstration of the esteem with which he was held.

So we went down the road to the LAZY LIZARD, run by CK. He has a real lizard, I think it’s a kind of gecko, in a tank. It’s got a spiked collar and he takes it out for walks. And he has a tattoo of a lizard on the back of his neck.

To drum up custom he has a laser pointed up the street, not far above head height, like a taut green rope. Great marketing ploy, I first found the place by following, out of curiosity, the line of the laser, from several hundred metres away.

R was there. He’s an ex cabbie who speaks Chinese with such a San Francisco drawl that no Chinese can actually understand him. He’s sixty two and teaches yoga. When I see him at night I think, brilliant, I hope I’m hanging about being droll around cute chicks at four am when I’m sixty two – but when I see him in the daytime…

Dali is a quaint town between a lake and a mountain. Bits of it are quite touristy, like I’m writing this in a café and a tour group of Australians have sat loudly down. I find it telling that the only Chinese they seem to have picked up is ‘bing’, cold, as in ‘put it back in the fridge, it’s not bing enough, I’m not drinking warm beer, bing it, bing it.’

This is on what the locals call ‘barbarian street’ to each other and ‘foreigner street’ when they realise you can understand them. It’s all boutiques and cafes and Chinese tour groups. It annoys me that the tour guides are all dressed in Bai traditional dress but they’re Han Chinese. About the only real Bai people you see on barbarian street are the middle aged women who walk up and down whispering ‘smoke ganja, smoke ganja?’ at the barbarians.

I’m staying out by the lake at a new place. The rooms are really nice, if eccentric. The shower is a cubicle like an orgone accumulator right by my bed with a radio and a back massager inside and everyone on the road outside can see into it. Yesterday you couldn’t go in the hotel DVD room cause the staff were drying the ganja harvest on the floor.

So yeah it’s great here but I have to get this novel finished. I do wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t have stayed up the mountain. Mind, I have averaged more than a thousand words of clean copy a day which I think is pretty good considering I have yet to get up before midday. Tomorrow a rather more harsh regime begins.