I delight in the occasional affirmation that we are, in fact, all the same. Its strange really given that my love of travel stems from a hatred of the self satisfied sameness we find ourselves wallowing in, contained in the borders that surround us and otherwise known as national identity.
This is a different type of similarity. The sameness that thrills me comes from somewhere much deeper, a core inherent instinctive thing that unites us all and in this way makes a mockery of the myths and bogus traditions that we repeat like a mantra to ourselves in order to find comfort for our insecurities and a division between us, (locals) and them, (foreigners).
In 2000 I went to China. I made it to Yangshuo via public transport armed only with an out of date guidebook, which was all but useless, and a phrase book whose phrases were impossible to read or pronounce. Fortunately I had the naivety and arrogance of youth on my side.
My aim had been to ‘get away from other travellers’ I didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of guys I met in a hostel, a collection of the very same set of nationals you could meet anywhere and all of whom are delighted by their own ability to reconvene in a different part of the world from the one they started in. Huddling together they can hang out in bars and have the good fortune not to need to talk to any of the local people whose country they had travelled so far to get to. That had been my aim, however by the time I reached Yangshuo on my bumpy, confusing, bewildering, utterly unplanned and downright foolhardy 3 day journey from Hong Kong I fell at the feet of the first foreigner person to speak English to me, It had been a tough 3 days, I won’t lie.
Thing is, I thought I’d got the whole travelling thing sussed. I had travelled around the world; I’d covered South East Asia, Australia, America, Canada by god I’d even been to Rome I thought I knew a thing or two. I didn’t. By entering China unguided I had rendered myself dumb and illiterate, it was only my ability to draw things (chickens) for dinner (buses) for transport and (toilets) for other business that I got anywhere at all. I could have turned and run but I’m stubborn like that.
Several moments stand out, for example I arrived on a bus into Guangzhou the day I left Hong Kong. Clearly we had entered a bus station, but there were two marked on my utterly useless map. The most useless map imaginable it had street names written in the Roman alphabet and these in no way correlated with the Chinese script that adorned the actual road signs on the jumble of busy city streets that surrounded me. Standing in a now deserted bus station clutching a shit map and loaded up with all my luggage, alone, a mighty long way from home, in the mist of a cultural system which made little or no sense to me, I did what I have since done several times and has stood me largely in mighty good stead. I turned right.
Striding along with a confidence that I in no way felt I had decided to give right a try and if this didn’t work out move on to left for a while then perhaps up and then down. Luckily I didn’t require any of the other directions, having walked for several minutes in a right bearing through a sea of Chinese signs with my heart in my mouth, I saw a sign I recognised. It said ‘Tourist Information’.
Finally I reached Yangshuo a popular travellers destination due to its unusual traffic bollard shaped mountains. A typical road might consist of several houses in a row punctuated by a mountain. I’d met some fellow foreigners in a café in town. A French girl and I hired a couple of bikes and we ventured out into the country to survey the unusual scenery. As we cycled we started passing young children making their way home from school. First a couple then a few more then a huge stream of kids flowed past us and as they did they shouted “Ni Hao!” or “Hello!” and waved at us the funny looking strangers. On and on this went and we smiled shouted and waved back, at a seemingly endless line. Finally towards the end we encountered two small boys, they regarded us in much the same manner as the others but instead yelled “Fuck you!” with a cheeky grin. But of course what’s the first thing a small boy asks an English speaker to teach them how to say? anything rude! We laughed so hard we nearly fell off our bikes.
