canal town
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today we got out early, heading for the canal town of SuZhou. We got to the Shanghai train station at 09:00, but found that there were no tickets available for any train before 10:06. No matter, we reckoned, it just gave us more time to read the guide book. We didn't know that problems with train tickets would become a major item for the day....
The guide book (wildly inaccurate, I should point out, in logistics such as train timetables) says that SuZhou is an ancient town to the west of Shanghai that prospered in the days of canal traffic of goods in the Yellow river delta, and has since cached in on its remaining canals as a tourist draw. It's also famous for a certain architectural style (black tiles and white walls) and for its Confucian gardens.
All in all, a match made in heaven for my black and white film. Delayed by an hour, we found ourselves at the SuZhou train station. It looked nothing like the canal town described.
The train station is a typically-grotty affair, a sprawling expanse of crumbling brick and ceramic tile cut off entirely from the town. First was the usual swarm of vendors, taxi drivers, scalpers, and so on. Then was a tangle of vehicles choking the taxi lane, then a highway, then a raised berm where the buses lined up, then another portion of the highway, then some more hoarding from some construction. Our guide on the motorcycle tour had told us that there are 6,000 construction projects ongoing in Shanghai at the moment, and it would seem that this extends to the touristy towns in the sticks as well.
In all, it was an imposing and off-putting greeting. It occurred to me that maybe we should just turn around and get out of there.
But we didn't. Toughing out the labyrinthine route to the town proper meant crossing the nasty, un-laned and high speed two-part highway, fending off all manner helpful (and grabby) hands, and wending between quite a variety of food vendors. The latter was actually enjoyable and interesting, it's always something to watch food being prepared in unfamiliar ways.
We eventually found ourselves in as calm a space as we've seen in our few days in China, a nicely tailored bit of green space along one of the canals. Following this, we hopped and skipped (with the baby carriage, which drew a lot of attention) from one stretch of completed paved walkway to another, passing through zones of construction that looked very much like the principle construction tool was dynamite. We were clearly in an area a bit off the beaten path, and passed few locals. Here, the proud houses bore their dates of construction (mostly in the early 1930's) but were in a state of advanced decay. Some were little more than teetering stacks of bricks, with an occasional glimpse into the interior showing that roofs had collapsed. And yet they were occupied.
At the end of the trek we found ourselves right where the Japanese map indicated we'd find a restored section of the ancient city, complete with boat tours. We'd been following the very usable map in Mari's rather excellent Japanese-language guide book, a head-and-shoulders improvement over the sadly feature-poor and inaccurate map in the Lonely Planet book I'd been using.
The town turned out to be a very interesting spot. The restored bits managed to be attractive, with the obligatory curio shops kept to a dull roar. With Kenny getting smiles from everybody in sight we picked our way along to a boat rental spot and spent a really enjoyable 40 minutes on a boat propelled by a husband and wife team with a pole/oar. In the short-hand way we've adopted for speaking while on the go on this trip, "I camera, Mari baby".
We found a great spot for lunch, then walked about much of the rest of the town on our own little unguided tour. The end of the day included a hike up the eight-story tower that overlooks the city, and then a dash to the train station.
Where a combination of things caught up with us. My guide book's idiot summation that buying return tickets could be difficult understated the situation entirely. Arriving at 16:30, it was just around 17:00 by the time we knew: there were no train tickets available until 19:30. What's more, most of the ticket booths had slammed shut at 17:00 despite the long lines remaining, and the people at the remaining ticket booths were increasingly pessimistic. We bought tickets for the 19:30 train as our fall-back, and tried to think of alternatives.
It was then, of course, that the scalpers descended. A particularly insistent one was badgering us in high-speed Chinese, and I snapped at him "We're trying to find bus tickets to Shanghai, can you help with that?" as a way of throwing him off.
As it turned out, he had an alternate suggestion in mind. Five minutes later, we'd dodged across the highway (me: "Why do we have to leave the station?" him: "Police!") and were huddled with a pack of his confederates in a debate over the price of some black market train tickets. The scalpers (for want of a better word, this isn't exactly organized crime) had soaked up all of the ¥26 (~$4) railway tickets and were selling them privately for ¥35 ($5). Not exactly scalping, even.
But damn annoying. Dancing back across the highway for the final time. Muttering something about the lunacy of $5 black market tickets, I was overheard by some German tourists who'd experienced the same thing but had managed to find a fellow who'd do the deal on the station grounds.
Sweating out fears that the tickets were fake, or that we'd be detained somehow, we managed to get back to the city without incident.
It was an adventurous day. Which reminds me, I'll have to update my "toilets of the world" page.