A bicycle trip along the South China Sea to the nuclear plant

When you’re posted to a city in a foreign country, where you don’t know a soul, you’ll try just about anything once. In the foreign service your first social contacts in a new posting tend to be colleagues at work. It’s understood that when a new officer arrives at post, everyone makes an effort to have him or her over for dinner or go out for lunch or do something to help the newbie feel welcome. At a small post where there’s only a few Canadian officers, this can be awkward when it’s clear that you have little in common with one another, but at a post like Delhi or Hong Kong where there’s a couple dozen officers, you usually find at least one or two people who share some of your interests. They become your entry points to creating a social network of your own, whether it be with people at other embassies, with other expats, or locals.

So it was that early in my posting to Kong Kong in 1992 I joined a group of expats on a 2-day cycling tour of the Shenzhen Special Autonomous Region of southern China. We started at the border and rode to the Daya Bay nuclear generating plant and back, following the coastal highway.  Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably would have taken a pass. The distances themselves weren’t great – I think we only rode about 60km or so a day – but the road itself was one long, dusty construction site. There were new factories and buildings going up everywhere, the road had no shoulders, and we were passed by a continuous stream of lorries belching thick black exhaust.

Shenzhen was one of the first areas set aside by the Chinese government as a place where foreign companies and their joint-venture Chinese partners could establish businesses for exporting goods overseas. The People’s Republic was still in the early stages of opening up to foreign trade, and the idea was that this special autonomous region would facilitate economic expansion without disrupting the Communist system elsewhere in the country. Chinese citizens could not enter Shenzhen freely; they needed a special residency permit that could be obtained only through the sponsorship of an employer. Many of the workers were young women who came from other parts of the country to work in garment companies, shoe factories, and similar types of sweatshop labour. They lived in dormitories and might only get home once a year, during the Lunar New Year celebration. Wages were high relative to those available in the rest of China, though still a pittance by Hong Kong standards.

I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that Shenzhen was one large construction site – it only seemed that way. We did pass through some older villages, where the farmers still went out each day to tend their fish ponds, vegetable patches, and rice paddies, and the children looked after the poultry and livestock. We stopped at an abandoned outdoor athletic training complex, the parallel bars still standing amidst the weeds. We ended the day with a swim in the South China Sea, the water being somewhat polluted but the beach was considerably more litter-free than the ones back in Hong Kong. We spent the night at a half-completed hotel in a nearby fishing fishing village where the “fishing” boats consisted of small open craft with large outboard motors, and sat idly at their docks during the day. After dark, we heard them roaring out to sea. Smugglers, to be sure, but in what I had no idea.

Hot, tired and dusty from the ride, I tumbled into my not-so-clean bed and tried not to notice the roaches. In those days I never worried about bedbugs; it was understood that if you traveled any amount in southeast Asia, you were bound to share your bed with insects from time to time. But roaches made me feel squeamish (they still do). Breakfast in the hotel dining room the next morning consisted of congee (a rice porridge) with chunks of liver floating in it and chicken’s feet fried in chili garlic sauce. I’ve never liked chicken’s feet, nor am I a fan of congee, with or without the liver. Fortunately someone prevailed upon the restaurant to bring out some stir fried rice noodles with vegetables.

As you might imagine, we weren’t allowed inside the nuclear plant. It looked how you’d expect it to look. It had been built by a French company some years earlier. We rode up to the main gate, turned around, and rode back to the Hong Kong border, mostly following the same route we’d come. Although it was not an enjoyable trip, it was a memorable one, as you can see by the fact I’ve thought to write down something about it. It provided me an inkling of the great economic transformation that was underway in China, and which continues to this day.

Entering Kosovo at dawn

We had flown into Skopje the night before, “we” being myself and a junior foreign service officer I was training, who I’ll just call “D’. We ate a simple latish supper at a street-side café, bought some black market CDs from a nearby vendor, and returned to the Alexander Hotel for an early bedtime. It was 2000, and D and I were going to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, the following day. NATO troops were occupying Kosovo, and by that point in time the ethnic cleansing and fighting had ceased, most of the unexploded roadside bombs had been cleaned up, and daytime travel was generally safe (at night snipers sometimes took potshots at soldiers and passing vehicles). Just the same, there were troops everywhere, and lots of armoured vehicles and military helicopters moving about. We would need to be on the road well before dawn, so that we could reach the border checkpoint before any of the daily troop movements in and out of Kosovo began, for the soldiers always took priority over other travellers. You could easily be stuck there for a few hours if your timing was unlucky.

Sometime between 4 and 5 am we were picked up at the hotel in a black Chevy Suburban with bulletproof glass, which makes it feel as though you’re travelling inside a fishbowl. Our ethnic Albanian driver was over-caffeinated and manic, and shouted more than spoke profanity-laden English. I sat in the front passenger seat, D sat in the more dangerous back seat (bandits or snipers would assume the person sitting in the back was the important passenger; I’m not sure D was aware of this). After about half an hour the driver’s incessant chatter was making my head hurt, so I put in a CD I’d picked up the night before, a bootleg copy of a live Clash album.  The Suburban climbed up into the hills as the sky lightened, the still leafless trees visible but not yet casting shadows.

We arrived at the border in the midst of ‘London Calling’, a fitting soundtrack for the sight that greeted us. The Greek soldiers manning the checkpoint were wearing respirators in addition to their helmets and body armour, looking like storm troopers in a dystopian sci-fi movie. The reason for the respirators was that the border checkpoint was located near a cement factory that had been destroyed by a NATO-fired cruise missile some months earlier. A large stockpile of lime at the factory had been pulverized in the explosion, and there were still elevated concentrations of lime dust in the air.

We cleared the checkpoint quickly, and made our way into Kosovo, following the main road along which tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars had fled ethnic cleansing for protection in Macedonia. Both sides of the road the whole way to Pristina were lined with empty plastic bags and plastic bottles that the refugees had discarded along the way. At one point we passed a number of mass graves over which stood a pole flying the new flag of Kosovo. As we drew nearer to Pristina we passed large numbers of newly constructed low-rise apartment buildings, their walls the terra cotta colour of unfinished building bricks, each unit with a satellite dish.

The previous year thousands of Kosovo refugees had been airlifted to Canada with our government’s assistance, and granted permanent residence. In the haste to flee their homes, many had become separated from family members and loved ones. Those who had made it to Canada provided the names of those left behind, and with the help of military and humanitarian officials the refugee office at the Canadian Embassy in Vienna had been locating the relatives still in Kosovo. My main reason for going to Pristina was to interview and process the visa paperwork for a list of people who had been located.

There was one other unusual thing I had been instructed to do on my visit. In the New York Times several weeks earlier there had been a story about a twelve year old girl who had been the only survivor when she and her family were gathered up for execution by ethnic Serb paramilitaries. The girl had hidden behind her mother and covered her face with her hands when the shooting began. Her mother’s body had slowed the momentum of the bullets enough that the girl’s fingers were broken and her face was scarred, but she was not killed. Her mother’s body fell on top of her, concealing her from the murderers who would have otherwise finished her off. A wealthy Canadian had read the Times story and offered to fly her to Canada for plastic surgery. A Canadian soldier tracked her down to a relative’s home in a rural village, and the girl would be brought to my hotel in Pristina so I could issue her a visa.

The girl was staying in a sector controlled by the US military. The afternoon of my second day in Kosovo I received a call saying the girl would be arriving soon, and could I please meet her in front of the hotel. D and I stood outside and watched as a half-dozen American armoured vehicles pulled up, the small girl being helped to the ground by a soldier in full battle gear (the American sector being still unsettled at that moment). The girl was indeed scarred as described, though not as awfully as I had been led to believe. She didn’t speak English. She was neither shy nor forthcoming in answering my questions through the interpreter. Considering what she had lived through and the situation she was presently in, she was remarkably composed.

Although I issued the girl a visa, she never did end up making her way to Canada. As it turned out, a wealthy American had also read her story and made a similar offer to come to the US, and she and her guardian decided to go there instead. I often think about that girl, who would be in her late twenties now. In my mind I can still picture clearly her face, and her small figure being helped down to the ground amid all those soldiers and military vehicles. I hope she has had some happiness since then.

Red Ants - Guangzhou, 1993

There were between 25 and 30 foreign service officers at the Canadian mission in Hong Kong back in the early 1990s, but only three of us had diplomatic accreditation to the People’s Republic of China, which we simply called ‘the PRC’. Remember that back in those days Hong Kong was still a British colony, and the PRC was still in the early stages of opening up to contact with westerners. Foreigners living in Hong Kong needed visas to cross the border, and once inside China we weren’t supposed to use the local currency, but were expected instead to buy and use special Foreign Exchange Certificates sold to us at an unrealistic exchange rate. Fortunately everyone at that time in southern China wanted Hong Kong dollars, so you’d exchange only a token amount at the official rate just for sake of appearances.

I held one of the three diplomatic accreditations so that I could travel up to Guangzhou to issue visas to PRC citizens being sponsored by family members living in Canada. The work was not especially difficult, just repetitious. A colleague and I would be dropped off at the train station in Hong Kong with a half dozen enormous hard-shell suitcases full of visa files. The trip to Guangzhou took a couple hours, and was usually uncomfortable but uneventful. The PRC-operated train was quite filthy and infested with cockroaches. One female colleague I travelled with would bring a tea towel to place between her head and the seat back for fear of getting head lice.

Guangzhou has an interesting history. Located in the Pearl River estuary, it was one of the few ports where foreign countries could trade with China back in the days of the emperors (which lasted up until the early twentieth century). During the Opium Wars of the 1830s-40s the British seized Guangzhou (which they called ‘Canton’) from the Chinese, and operated warehouses and trading facilities. Down by the riverfront where many of the buildings of the British era still remain is the part of town most visitors see, and where you’d find the hotels catering to western business travellers. As you move inland away from the river, you’re confronted by modern China and all its noise, traffic smog, and concrete high rises.

My preferred place to stay in Guangzhou back then was a recently built and only partly occupied Ramada hotel located somewhere out in the urban sprawl. This was so that after a long day of interviewing visa applicants through an interpreter I could grab dinner in the hotel’s surprisingly decent restaurant and then shuffle over to the Red Ants for a bottle or two of Pearl River beer.

The Red Ants was a hole-in-the-wall western style bar in a nondescript mall, only you’d not see many westerners in it. The evening clientele was mostly a mix of twenty-something Chinese and African exchange students. In those days China was still actively cultivating cultural exchanges with socialist African nations, and through this the adult children of well-connected Africans would be sponsored to go to Chinese universities. The Red Ants was the preferred watering hole of many of these students – mostly men – and their local girlfriends. The DJ catered to his clientele, so the music was typically pretty good – a few western pop songs interspersed with King Sunny Ade and Bob Marley. To this day, whenever I hear No Woman/No Cry I still picture the seats emptying as the couples rose to slow dance at the Red Ants.

Sidled up to the bar with an oversized Pearl River bottle in my hand was the closest I ever felt to being a character in a John Le Carré novel during my foreign service career. Walking in the door you got the feeling you were doing something just a little subversive, that at any minute the authorities would be busting in to shut the place down and incarcerate or deport anyone found inside. Remember, this was only a couple years removed from the Tiananmen Square protests, where hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing were killed by their government. But in reality the Red Ants was no hotbed of intrigue so far as I know, and if the authorities had it on some sort of blacklist, they never bothered to take action any time I was there.

The last time I went in was probably in the fall of 1995. The Red Ants was looking shabbier than ever, and there weren’t many people around. A disinterested young woman was randomly plugging worn out old cassette tapes into the sound system. Bob Marley’s voice warbled and cut out.  Where once it had been unique, newer western style bars had opened up in more convenient locations, and many of its denizens had relocated there.

I did a Google search today but could find no recent references to the Red Ants, only a few notes in a Google book about an art exhibit held there back in 1993. While China’s opening to the west and subsequent economic boom was good for many people in southern China, it wasn’t for the Red Ants. Perhaps it’s just as well.

Temples and tigers - India, 1992 & 1995

Urban India overwhelms the senses. The noise, the aromas, the heat, the glare, the press of the crowds day and night – nowhere else on Earth can compare with it. I once caught a train to Jaipur, the “pink city” of arid Rajasthan state, that left Delhi at four in the morning. A deliberate choice, since our train car did not have air conditioning, and we wanted to arrive before the full heat of the day was upon us (“us” being me and three colleagues from the High Commission). Despite the early hour, the streets of old Delhi were bustling. Not as congested as they would become a few hours later, but nonetheless busier than I could have ever imagined. Where the throngs of people were coming from or going to I could only guess.

Bread to feed the poor at a Sikh temple in Delhi, 1992

I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. Back to the beginning: in January 1992 I was preparing to be posted out to Hong Kong in April. In the meantime, the visa section in New Delhi was shorthanded, so I was sent to India to help out until March. The work was not especially interesting, mostly just clearing a backlog of family-sponsored visa applications that had built up. There were a few moments of excitement – I interviewed one elderly man for about twenty minutes in my claustrophobic office before a registry clerk dashed in with a medical report saying the old fellow had a serious case of tuberculosis. I had a fairly straightforward weekday routine: a High Commission driver would pick me up at my hotel in the morning, I’d interview visa applicants all morning, have lunch at poolside, do more interviews in the afternoon, and then be driven back to the hotel to eat, sleep, and repeat.

The High Commission is an enormous walled compound, containing not only the chancery and visa offices, but also townhouse-style accommodations for Canadian staff with children, the aforementioned swimming pool, tennis courts, a clubhouse, and probably a bunch of other facilities I never made use of. Things were quiet and peaceful inside the compound. Outside the walls – especially the one that provides access to the visa section – was India in all its chaos. Crowds of people would be coming and going, vendors sold snacks and drinks and all manner of other things, untended cattle browsed through piles of debris. The hotel where I stayed was like the High Commission compound in miniature; a quiet, walled-in oasis that seemed to be just barely keeping the rest of India at bay.

On weekends I went off to explore India, usually with my friend and colleague Joe, who was also on temporary assignment there. Our first expedition was the same one millions of tourists do each year – to see the Taj Mahal. Perhaps the only thing more amazing than the Taj itself is that across the river is the foundation for a second Taj, intended to be a mirror image of the first but in black marble. Before it could be built, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who had commissioned it was killed by his son, who rightly feared the empire would be bankrupted by further construction. While in Agra I also got to visit nearby Fatehpur Sikri, a gorgeous city built in the 16^th century to be capital of the Mughal empire, only to be soon abandoned due to lack of water.

I’ve already alluded to another weekend exploration, to Jaipur, like the Taj an important tourist destination. It’s famous for its pink sandstone buildings, its hilltop fortress, the Palace of the Winds, and the Jantar Mantar - an amazing astronomical research complex built in the early 1700s. While in Jaipur I picked up some nasty variety of giardia or dysentery, probably at a restaurant. The symptoms started to hit me Monday morning at work, where my colleagues said, “Uh oh, you look like you have the amoebas”, a generic slang for any serious gastro-intestinal ailment, typically treated with a strong dose of amoebicide pills obtained from the High Commission doctor. I spent the next 72 hours in my hotel room. For the first 24 I felt like I was going to die, and wouldn’t have cared had I done so. The next 48 I mostly just slept. For over a year afterwards I would still get periodic recurrences. In case you’re wondering how one gets “the amoebas”, they’re transmitted the fecal-oral route. That is, I ate some food that contained traces of human feces. Yum!

My next trip once I was back on my feet was the one I was most looking forward to: a visit to Corbett National Park in the Himalayan foothills to look for tigers. When I was a kid, I was addicted to nature documentaries, especially Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Seeing a tiger in the wild was one of my life’s dreams. It came true, but not on that first visit to India. Joe and I did manage to see a great deal of other wildlife in the park, but no stripes. We went out in the jungle in jeeps, on elephant back, and on foot, but the closest we got was a set of pug marks (tracks) made by a young tigress a few hours before we came along. The Indian jungle was cool and quiet, the loudest noise coming from the peacocks that lived near the huts where we stayed. It was a welcome respite from Delhi.

Pug marks of a young tigress, Corbett National Park, 1992

Three years later I returned to India on holidays, this time with my wife. Having learned my lesson about the amoebas, we ate only two meals a day, one in the morning, one at night, mainly piping hot vegetarian curries, and drank only beer and lemon-line soda. We had no tummy troubles, and the food was fantastic. Speaking of food, in Delhi we visited the city’s largest Sikh temple and witnessed an amazing sight. Each day volunteers from the temple feed thousands of hungry people who appear at the gates. They were fed at long communal tables in shifts of several hundred, each person receiving a bowl of dal and some homemade flatbread. Our host explained to us that Sikh temples are obliged by their scriptures to feed and shelter anyone in need. A New Zealander friend later told me she had once backpacked alone around India for several weeks, and any time she found herself in a strange town with nowhere safe to stay she would find the Sikh temple and ask to set up her bedroll on the floor. She was never refused and was always treated to a hot meal.

It was on that second visit that I finally saw my tiger. We went to Sariska National Park, located along the main highway between Delhi and Jaipur. We had received mixed reports; some people claimed there were still tigers in the park, others saying the big cats had all been poached years earlier. We stayed in a former hunting palace inside the park boundaries. In the early evening a driver took us in an open jeep along dirt tracks in search of tigers. On a small ridge we passed three men, poor day labourers walking home to a nearby village. We had driven no more than a few hundred meters past them when my wife gasped and pointed. An enormous male tiger was moving quickly through the bushes alongside the track, away from the men. We followed the red blur in the jeep and it became evident what had happened. The men had flushed a large male sambur (a type of deer) as they were walking along, which the tiger – who had been laying up somewhere nearby – was now stalking. We drove along to a raised spot from which we were able to watch the tiger dash across the road and confront the sambur in a clearing below us. After a brief standoff, the sambur turned and fled into the bush, and with a roar the tiger disappeared after it. The whole encounter lasted less than a minute, but it was worth the return visit to India. By the end of the 1990s there were no more tigers left in Sariska; we had seen one of the last ones.

Amusing sign at entrance to Corbett National Park, 1992