from Travel Around the World? Why Not?
a novel by Wolf Larsen
(Background: The main character is in the Philippines)
Then the bus reached Manila. The pollution in Manila was the worst I’d seen anywhere yet. Tailpipes everywhere threw lots of black smoke into the air. The pollution was so bad lots of people wore surgeon’s masks to cover their mouths and noses as they walked through the city. In Manila I jumped a bus for Batangas, on the Southern tip of Luzon.
In Batangas I got into some bubble attached to a motorcycle kind of taxi and off to some hotel I went. It was a grubby dirty dingy affair with one 40-watt light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a few cockroaches to keep me company.
The next morning I woke up and laid there thinking, “What am I going to do today?”
“Do I want to wander around this place?”
“Or do I want to jump on the ferry as planned, and start island hopping through the Philippines?”
“Maybe I should go to China today?”
“Yeah, right!”
“That’s it! That’s a great idea! Today I’ll go to China!”
So I threw on my backpack and in an abrupt change of plans I didn’t go to the ferryboat and start island hopping. I got on a bus for Manila, and then a taxicab to the airport and I asked, “How much is a ticket to Hong Kong?”
“Two hundred dollars,” the guy behind the desk said.
Yippeeeeeeeee. So up in a plane and down into the airport of Hong Kong and then I got on a bus which dropped me off at the bottom of a hill and I walked up the hill with the pack on my back and at the top of the hill I reached the youth hostel and I paid a little money and moved in – i.e. I threw my pack by my bunk.
I sat on a chair outside and looked down at the viiiiieeeeww while I drank a beer! What a view! It was night and there were all the lights of high-rises and cars down there. Spreading out in the ocean was a fleet of cargo ships and their lights dancing up and down with the waves.
I had another sip of cold beer. Yeeaah!! I had woken up in the Philippines that morning and decided to go to China – and now here I was looking down at the lights of Hong Kong.
The next morning I walked out into all the Hong Kong! Hong Kong! What a crazy crazy place in a wonderful wonderful way. Hong Kong is a constant bombardment into your ears and eyes and nose! Hong Kong is a feverous everything! There are endless high-rises and constant traffic and lots of HUGE double-decker buses VLOOOMING like big colorful monsters through the streets. Overhead the near sky is filled with Chinese signs-signs-signs. Everywhere I heard the CLATTERING BOOM-ing BOOM-ing construction noises of more high-rises being built. “Communism” was coming, or the English were finally giving up “their” “democratic” colony, or something like that. HOPE was everywhere.
I stayed five days in Hong Kong. It was five days of the greatest chaos your eyes and ears can enjoy. It was all a flash of Chinese characters in neon and slamming-shriiiilling-clanging construction sites and sidewalks crowded with a flood of human life. Hong Kong is a noisy breathing monster of millions of intense people all running around and doing everything fast and hard.
Then I went to the Chinese embassy.
“I’d like to go to China,” I said.
“Of course you do,” said the nice gentleman behind the counter.
“How long will the visa take?” I asked.
“Four days,” is what I think he said.
“Four days!” I thought. “Fuck that!”
“Is there anyway I can get the visa now and go to China today?” I asked.
“Sure,” the gentleman behind the counter said. “All you have to do is pay more money.”
“Having money is cool,” I thought. “Yippeeeeee!” (Back then I worked as a seasonal laborer in Alaska.)
So that night my train landed in Guangzhou (Canton) Station. My eyes popped out of my head at the sight of thousands of Chinese peasants camped out on the floor of the HUGE TRAIN STATION.
At that time, the Western news media presented China as an extremely disciplined well-organized society. That certainly wasn’t what my eyes were telling me the first moment I got off the train.
Copyright 2007 by Wolf Larsen
