THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10th – NIGHT BUS TO CANTON.

We waste the day in Graceland Café, across the street from the Silang Hotel. Ron and Yvonne are there, along with Roy and Jenny. We pass the day reading, writing, and taking the occasional meal. All of us are on tenterhooks, anticipating our exit from China. 

The day drags. At 2.30, I borrow a bike from the café’s charming owner, Grace, and cycle into the centre of town, to the shop owned by Forrest, the t-shirt painter. He had our custom-made shirts ready: an amalgam of images from our travels through NYC, Scotland, Iran, Pakistan, and China. And I pay him the ￥15 (we had already paid ￥10 deposit) then ride back to the café. There are rats on the bench in the kitchen as I walk through it, on the way to the dark, squalid toilet. 

At 3pm, we all walk the short distance down to the bus station, and join the crowd of backpackers boarding the sleeper bus waiting there. The attendant bitch-from-hell screeches at everyone to put their bags on the roof, but no one does. She probably goes through this rigmarole every day, and we all cram our gear into the aisles.

The bus pulls out of Yangshuo more or less on time and bounces up over the hill to the river. The driver stops to chat to a friend, giving us time to photograph a collection of ramshackle houses clustered on the opposite bank of the river. The afternoon draws on as we rattle through the Guanxi countryside. Smoke hangs and wisps over fields of cane and curls skyward between the limestone peaks. 

Everywhere people are working, tending their fields, working their stock, carrying things. Water cascades in silver fans from bamboo watering cans onto neat rows of vegetables. Blue-clad peasants bow beneath cone-shaped straw hats as they dig and weed and harrow the soil. 
We strike up a conversation with a New Yorker named Simon. He has a likeable wit and an eye for the ironies of life in China. The Chinese script on the sides of every lorry, he says, ironically means “drive safely” which is the opposite of what actually happens! He too is sick of China and longs to be out. As he and Linda chat, I return to the pages of A Tale of Two Cities.