Taxi tales from China

All good travelers will tell you that you should try and experience a new city you are visiting as a local would. Which means taking a cab to see the city is usually frowned upon amongst serious travelers. I think it's a great sentiment. It just so happens that I am not the sentimental types.

I don't mind playing the comfortable traveler, and watch the world pass-by from the comfort of the backseat of my cab. Boring, you say? Hardly. There is limited scope to get bored as you watch the tarmac from a hole in the taxi floor (Bangkok), discuss world politics without knowing each other's language (Taiwan), or fight over the route to your destination (Mumbai). If you are lucky, you could also watch the taxi-driver eat his breakfast, turn left as he signals right, run over a few pedestrians, scratch his bum and give you an ugly look for making him do all this, when all he could be doing was something do with scratching and balls (China). Coincidentally, or maybe not, the three major cities in China that I have been to have all left me with stories from their cab-rides.

In Beijing, you will find that some of the old taxis have grills around the driver's seat, basically separating him from the rest of the car. My initial reaction on seeing this was that there must have been a lot of taxi-crime and therefore the government must have mandated the grills. I didn't realize that the grills were meant for the protection of drivers themselves. Allow me to explain.

Landing at the very chic, new Beijing Airport on a rainy day I took a cab to the city. I had become used to the over-competitive Beijing taxi drivers and I didn't pay much attention when my taxi driver started racing the other cab drivers as he got out of the airport. But then he suddenly stopped and told me in sign language that he had missed the expressway exit. Before I could shout at him, he promptly put the car in reverse and started backing up to go to the exit he had missed. So here we were: reversing on an expressway, experiencing poor visibility due to the heavy rain, in a car with no rear wipers, and with traffic speeding towards us at maddening speed. I literally jumped up from my seat and made for the driver's throat when I realized why they had installed the grills.

Shenzhen was where I decided to try out one of these latest VWs being used as taxis. I know, VWs are not that high on anyone's list of dream cars but the alternative was to take one of the old taxis which looked as if they were used as animal shelters during the night. After waiting for over an hour, I finally managed to hail one of these new taxis for my journey from the airport to the city center (around an hour's time). For the initial half of the journey, the taxi-driver kept looking at me in his rear mirror and mumbling something. I thought maybe the poor guy had had a fight with his wife before he left his house and was probably testing if he could spill out his heart to me. As time went by, he started gesticulating and speaking louder while staring at me in the rear mirror. I wanted to tell him that even though I sympathized with him, I couldn't comfort him much as I didn't understand Putonghua. I realized how serious the issues were at his home when he graduated to turning around in his seat, pointing at me, and shouting something. Wait a minute, I thought, how can he blame me? I didn't even know his wife! Before I could take this entire thought to its logical conclusion, he had stopped the car and was asked me to get down. My acute traveler sense suspected a flat tyre. Being my helpful self, I got down quickly and took out my luggage to make the tyre change easier. Promptly, the taxi driver closed his door and zoomed off. Leaving me on the expressway, luggage by my side, 15 kms from my hotel and shocked beyond belief. It took me another 3 hours to find a taxi and get to the hotel. I went to bed that evening thinking what I had done to piss off that guy so much. I still don't have an answer.

Shanghai, by comparison was far less life threatening. Five of us (3 foreigners, 2 locals) had gone to Pudong (the new Shanghai) for some sight-seeing and dinner. On our way back we were trying to find a cab to take us back to the hotel, but found it extremely difficult. Either the cabs were full, or were not ready to go to the other side of the river, or others got to the cab before we did. After letting us foreigners try and hail a cab for a good 20 mins, one of the locals with us decided to put us out of our misery. He walked to the middle of the road and stepped right in front of the next empty cab coming in his direction. The taxi driver stopped, we all rushed to the middle of the road, got inside the cab and we were off to our hotel. Simple.

Moral of the story being, life can hardly be uninteresting behind the rolled-up windows of a taxi. And China happens to be the perfect setting to cab-it. Their world is so different from whatever you may have seen elsewhere, and a cab-ride guarantees you a close interaction with at least one local. How you come out of it on the other side of the experience is your ingenuity. Or pure providence.

TOKYO: What the Guide Books don’t tell you…

As a tourist, Tokyo happens to be my favorite city in the world. I was fortunate enough to work in a firm which had one of its offices in Tokyo, and I ended up traveling frequently there. In my multiple trips to the city I saw so many different sights that I always felt I was visiting a new city. I am still amazed how one city can squeeze so much into itself.

There is plenty of information available on the net and in the tourist guides (and I went through several of them before I landed in Tokyo), but there are some things I thought should have found a mention somewhere but don’t.

The people in Japan are very friendly and they try their best to help you, but unfortunately a large majority of them don’t know how to speak English. In one particular instance, we stopped a guy on the road for asking directions to the ferry station. A mini-game of dumb-charades ensued where I made gestures which I later realized could be interpreted as anything from an airplane to a water buffalo. But, once he understood where we wanted to go, he actually walked with us to the ferry station, helped us buy the tickets, handed us a few extra brochures and then saw us off at the ferry like some old relative.

Thanks to Hollywood movies, for us Japanese food had always been synonymous with Sushi. If you are grossed out by the idea of eating raw fish wrapped in rice, I suggest you try Yakitori (literally means grilled chicken). The cooked-over-charcoal vegetables (and obviously, chicken) smeared with tare sauce is mouthwatering-ly good, and goes really well with some good old fashioned beer. For the more adventurous there is teppanyaki, where the food is cooked on your table – no guts, no glory, eh?

Then there are the Tokyo cab-drivers. Dressed in a suit, tie, white gloves and shiny black shoes to match, they seem better prepared to attend that business meeting that you have flown five hours to participate in. Unlike other cab-drivers around the world, there are no commentaries on the socio-political situation unfolding around them, no inputs on how you can improve your dress-sense, no tips on how to make quick money and certainly no attitude.

How do you judge the stage of a society’s development? My answer is Toilets. The logic is straightforward - if you can afford to spend time on making your ablutions more comfortable then you must have surely achieved the more important things in life. And Japan, I believe, is therefore the most developed society. A heated toilet seat that makes sure you can read that magazine in the loo without literally freezing your ass off? I say, “What an idea, sirjee!” My hotel toilet seat had more buttons than that on my TV remote, and even the adventurous-me could not risk pressing all of them. And while we are on topic of Toilets, I think all men should check out the Mandarin Oriental’s loo where you can actually take a piss at the world.

For so many of us Indians, Japan has been this country hidden in one corner of the world whose only point of reference for us has been Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More recently, Sony and Honda may have replaced those two as the two most famous Japanese proper-nouns, but the point is that a large majority of us don’t know too much about that country. Even the travel enthusiasts that I have met so far have rarely mentioned Tokyo as a destination they’d put on their places-to-go list – everyone seems to be planning a trip to Europe. I recommend Tokyo as a must-see city and one that you will want to come back to again & again.