Sandstone Press

All Pink and Shiny

Posted by Ron McMillan on 17th July 2009

I was in a police car chase once. In China in 1997, while returning to Beijing from a photography assignment in the boonies.

It happened at the end of two tiring days travelling to and from a rural high school funded by a client hoping to forever embed in rural Chinese kids the cool factor in drinking tooth-destroying branded sugar drinks.

The day of the chase started painfully early, with a last few hours of numbingly predictable PR photography endured before climbing back aboard an ageing Toyota Crown for the four-hour haul back to Beijing.

Like most drivers, I know from personal experience how perilously easy it is to fall asleep behind the wheel. But make me a passenger, and even a moment’s slumber is an impossibility. And so, even three hours into the journey, I was wide awake when we sailed through a giant intersection at what I immediately construed to be an ill-advised rate of knots.

Sure enough, at the other side, a fat man in green signaled us to pull over. In China in the mid-90s, only politicians, capitalists and traffic cops were fat, and, at about a hundred pounds overweight and wrapped in shiny green polyester with red flashes down the legs, this guy was the archetypal Chinese traffic policeman. We pulled up, and my driver reached dejectedly for his wallet while Fat Cop waddled to meet us.

Then the cop’s attention latched onto something behind us. He blew his whistle and waved furiously - then had to leap quickly sideways, itself no mean feat for a man of his poundage. He only just avoided being creamed by a jeep that fired past at speed. My driver by now had his window lowered and his license out, but the cop ignored it, wrenched open the rear passenger door, and threw himself, bum first, onto my lap.

“Follow that car!”

My Mandarin wasn’t at all up to the task, but from the way he pointed at the jeep disappearing into the distance I got the message, and my driver didn’t have to be told twice. In the space of a few seconds a high-speed car chase was on, with us in the role of deputised police pursuit car, and me unknowingly revelling in the sort of situation that I might write about many years later for something called a ‘blog’.

Soon we were weaving through increasingly dense urban traffic at nearly ninety miles an hour, my driver doing his best to persuade Fat Cop of the absolute sincerity of his belief in the pursuit of justice.

By now it must have occurred to Fat Cop that he was sitting on someone, but he did not turn around. Something to do with loss of face, I surmised at the time. Instead, he levered his considerable weight forwards and elevated his ample posterior by a millimetre or three. It was an obvious attempt to convince me that the right and respectful thing to do was to prise myself out from beneath his gigantic arse.

I of course stayed exactly where I was and did my best to keep the giggling to a minimum.

He kept his eyes front, ostensibly watching a high-speed pursuit that our driver had embraced with terrifying zeal, and after a moment’s thought, let his full weight back down onto my thighs. That would teach me.

This continued for several increasingly painful minutes before it became apparent that the jeep had shaken us, and Fat Cop ordered us back to the Precinct House - sorry, the intersection where he had parked his powerful Cruiser - sorry, rusted moped.

When the Toyota’s velocity had slowed to something a little less life-threatening, he turned around to deal with the disrespectful pillock who had made no effort to get out from under him.

I met his gruff gaze with a circus-clown smile and a cheery “Nihau!” (Hello!), and the look of shock on his face when he realised he was perched in the lap of a foreigner still makes me smile.

He shuffled sideways onto the seat, and victory was mine, even if by this point my thighs were as flat as empty sausage skins.

For the few minutes it took to regain our starting point, I busied myself creating the illusion that my legs were not in agony as circulation returned, while Fat Cop did his best to pretend he was alone in the back seat. When at last we stopped, he was in such a hurry to get out that he forgot to gouge a bribe out of the driver. That’s how embarrassed he was.

So why the story from the faraway past? Simple – I have travel on my mind. Again. And whenever that happens, I think of sojourns gone by.

Like the bus trip from Kathmandu to Pokhara through some of the globe’s most stunning mountain scenery and during which, to escape the insane overcrowding inside the single-decker, Roy and I opted for the slightly less sane option of savouring the entire journey from the roof rack, reclined on voluminous sacks of garlic. Odours notwithstanding (though to be fair to the vegetables, they could not smell much worse than budget travellers who had been on the road for months already), the trip was an almost unmitigated joy. I say almost because coming around a bend to find another coach lying parallelogrammed in a field beside the road got us thinking. If only for a moment.

Or the non-stop haul from Zermatt to London in a Volkswagen ‘combi’ van camper that was running badly from before we set out. A visit to a garage down the valley from Zermatt saw a mechanic hook the engine up to a primitive computer (this was 1980) and tell me in French (the closest thing to a common language at the time), that one of the cylinders was in trouble, and we had probably burnt out a valve. So I asked if it would get us to London.

“London, England?” he said, incredulity written all over his honest face. That was answer enough.

But somehow it got us there, even if the fast lanes of French Autoroutes were only ever ventured into as a last resort.

Or the time I stepped out onto the north-south highway on the coast of West Australia and, the strains of Steely Dan’s Gaucho ringing tinnily from my state-of-the-art 1981 Walkman, put my thumb out. In less than an hour I scored the longest ride of a long-running hitch-hiking career.

It lasted more than twelve hundred miles and took me to the godforsaken mining-industry town of Port Hedland, a lift that took three days and featured a stop at a ramshackle highway-side bar whose entire clientele were aboriginals.

“Cooo, look at this one,” crowed a frighteningly large native Australian lady with teeth like an abandoned graveyard. Lest anyone in the crowded bar was unsure whom she talked of, she pointed a pudgy finger at me.

“All pink and shoiny!”

I am back doing the thing that is only second to travel itself in my list of favourite pastimes: planning a trip.

The Orkney Islands beckon – five or six weeks of continuous travel in August/September to research the follow-up book to BETWEEN WEATHERS. I can hardly wait.