Mother tongue deprivation is a bewildering condition. You begin to wonder who you are. This was my third day of communication by gesture, facial expression and occasional fruitless attempts at giving voice to the transcriptions in the phrasebook.

Boarding the ferry to Wuzhou was easy. You only need the name of your destination to achieve this linguistic task. I had counted one hundred and thirty eight 'bunk beds’ in the open dormitory (aka deck). The divisions between the 'beds’ (aka floorboards) were upturned planks of 3 - 4 inches high. At one end was a rolled up mat, no pillow, and a wood framed sash porthole.

I had semi-squatted to stare out at passers-by over the top of the half-sized stable door of one the unisex toilets lined up like sentinels on the deck below, my nether regions enjoying a cold wash from the running water which continually flushed clean the tiny bowl positioned half way up the wall.

After a dinner of dubious origin I had watched swirling swords, and flying chopped limbs pumping blood whilst the hero charged at full pelt, screaming and gesticulating wildly: the enormous television set at one end of the deck was the only piece of furniture.

At the bus station I again only had to mutter one word in order to communicate.

“Yangshuo?” I offered and sure enough the usual ancient wreck was pointed out. I opened my purse like a trusting child opens its arms, and there I was, on the one forward facing plastic seat, complete with horsehair upholstery jutting up through the holes. The others had been twisted on their own axis through 45, 90 or 135 degrees, making for a variety of viewing angles.

The bus slowly filled up with locals, all smoking. When the air was thick, the driver ignited some machinery bearing no resemblance to an engine. We lurched, stopped and jerked for five minutes then off we went, through crowded streets, winding narrow alleys, stared at by curious eyes, on out of the town and into the hills, past pine trees, ferns, bamboo and clematis.

I was glad to have my own teeth, although I suspect they have been loosened. After a couple of hours of banging and crashing we screeched to a halt. A young man clambered aboard, covered in blood, shouting, and obviously in shock. He rode for ten minutes, explained his predicament to anyone interested, and got off at the next village. There was no sign of a medical establishment, only three huts and a garage. I was furious at my inability to understand what was going on.

High up in the mountains on a winding road we were enjoying a blast of fresh clean air through the ever open windows (there being no glass in any of them), when a tyre burst. There was a bang, and the bus veered across the road, slid out of control for a few seconds and came to a halt. We all got off and stood on spongy ground by the roadside, relishing the fresh smell of soil and leaves in the drizzle. For several minutes the driver stood looking at the tyre, scratching his head in bewilderment. We watched in silence as he crawled underneath and pulled out a rubber hose with which he inflated the tyre temporarily from an air supply under the bus. I clambered down a densely overgrown, slippery, steep, muddy slope in order to relieve myself. Within seconds I was sliding down on my bottom, ending up inches away from a local woman squatting with diarrhoea. Shaken by this near miss, I hastily joined the other passengers for re-embarkation. We drove very slowly down the mountain, the tyre gradually deflating until eventually we could hear the screech of the metal rim on the road. After an hour we pulled in to a repair station and were signalled into the adjoining roadside shack 'cafe'. Hungry, I tried a piece of what looked like sausage. But my jaw dropped as I took in the scene around me, and a piece of the impostor sausage landed on my knees.

Seated on low stools in a dark corner of this roadside cafe in this remote town, a group of locals sat entranced before a tiny black and white portable television, transfixed by the sight of Terence Stamp clad in a gaudy, gorgeous dress, miming to Abba’s Dancing Queen” as the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert played out, subtitled in Cantonese.

At last, my mother tongue! But I still couldn’t be sure who I was.




Price: free  1     # china bus