Fisherman on the Li River, Guilin
** China is far away, and it was even farther away in 1991. It was summer.** A friend of mine worked for a jewelry company in Hong Kong. I decided to pay him a visit.
“Modern travel is not travel; it is being sent to a place, and it is very similar to being transformed into a package”. John Ruskin
The 747 swerved between two buildings and came to rest on the runway. Carlos was waiting for me. It was impossible for him to find the apartment without his help, he said.
The heat, the noise, the smell and the screams produced a suffocating effect. My friend lived in one of the large residential buildings that cover the Kowloon neighborhood.
The apartment was on the twenty-third floor. It was meager, rarefied air. We took the ferry to downtown. The men spat incessantly.
The humidity covered the water, the asphalt, the businesses that multiplied in the streets. While we were on our way to the restaurant, a storm came up. The rain was heavy. The heat didn't let up.
The chaotic Wan Chai Road in Hong Kong
“His feet longed to wander, they burned to depart to the ends of the world. Ahead! Forward! his heart seemed to scream. Dusk descended on the sea, night fell on the plains, and the dawn shone before the wanderer and showed him strange fields, hills, and faces. Where?". Portrait of the teenage artist, James Joyce.
On the weekend we went to Clear Water Bay. We crowded into a taxi with a friend of Carlos and her boyfriend. As we leave the city, tropical vegetation invaded the horizon and the buildings disappeared.
The beach was large, white sand, no facilities. We had provisions and drink. We bathed in the evening, and the phosphor made our bodies glow like in an animated movie.
Returning to the city I decided not to postpone my departure. I had two more weeks until my return and a hidden agenda. had seen the hills of Guilin over the rice fields in a National Geographic. I wanted to go there. I managed the Chinese visa with premeditation.
Rice terraces in Longji, Guilin
"Every hundred meters the world changes." Robert Bolano
At the suggestion of Carlos, I took a train to Shenzhen which acted as a free zone. Hong Kong was still part of the British Crown Territories. Border controls were irrelevant.
The train was comfortable, functional. Difficulty awaited on the scale. When I got to the station and got ready to buy a ticket for Guangzhou, the curtain of language fell, and I was left in the dark. My alphabet vanished within minutes of Hong Kong's polyglot bubble.
Large panels with incomprehensible signs rose around me. Queues of passengers lined the windows. I spoke in English to one, two people who passed by.
I dropped the backpack and sat down. After a few minutes, I decided to pick a queue at random. I waited my turn and I articulated the syllables of Guangzhou with the clarity of a fool.
I got a ticket as indecipherable as the panels. There was a time that agreed with one of the trains. I went down to the platform and trusted the Asian punctuality.
Buffaloes and farmer working in the field of Guangxi
“Traveling is brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and lose sight of everything that is familiar and comfortable to you.” Cesar Pavese
In the old Canton I wandered around, ate at a stall and slept in a hotel that I would not have set foot in in my city. I tried to buy a plane ticket to Guilin, but the flights were fully booked.
My Lonely Planet told me that I could up the Pearl River to Wuhan, and from there travel by bus to my destination.
The river port was even more hostile than the station, but in China there is always a guy willing to solve communication problems for a tip.
The ship responded to the basic model of ferry. From the deck I could not quench my craving for Orientalism. Factories and power plants followed one another on the banks. I learned that the distant does not equal the exotic.
"I got lost in the rice fields and came to a river"
"The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in looking with new eyes." Marcel Proust
From Wuhan I remember a glass jar with a snake in the market and a boy who invited me to a plate of rice at his house. I traveled to Guilin at night.
Upon arrival, I verified that there is nothing as threatening as an unknown city in the dark. When it dawned I discovered a place very similar to the previous ones.
"There is nothing as threatening as an unknown city in the dark"
It was necessary to go further, to Yangshuo. There I found the mountains that appear in Chinese paintings.
After a day of wandering around, I had dinner at what looked like a festival and met a local boy. It hurts me not to remember his name. He was nice, curious. He spoke English and wanted to practice the language.
The next morning he lent me a bike and took me to a wedding. The bride and groom greeted me with smiles.
There was a banquet on a farm surrounded by fields. The dishes followed one another on a long wooden table. We were sitting on the floor. We drank tea and rice liquor.
My friend was a teacher at a school. I went there with him one afternoon. While he was playing cards with his classmates, I went for a walk. I got lost in the rice fields and came to a river.
There was a woman washing, and a bridge without a railing that drew a crescent. A boy crossed it, stopped, and said something to the woman. I knew that moment would not be erased.
“Travel is the traveler. What we see is not what we see, but what we are”. Fernando Pesso
The river as it passes through the mountains of Guilin