Part XVI: Around the World in 80 Days – Swept away by the crowd, delivered by the cab

By Temple Ligon

 

In Beijing for just two nights, I wanted to be sure I was all set to leave Beijing after the second night in plenty of time to get to the Tianjin docks to board the Diamond Princess. The day before, I had a short planning session with the bell captain at Raffles, my hotel, and we agreed the most certain action would be to take a cab for the hour and a half to get to the Tianjin docks. Go directly from Raffles to the docks – no guessing about which transit to take and which stop to get off and get a cab. I was going from one of the world’s biggest cities to its docks, all for the first time.

At a stretch, Beijing is a port city, but its port is Tianjin.

Between every region’s two major cities in almost all the world except South Carolina, there is fast reliable transit, and the commute between Beijing and Tianjin met every definition of rapid transit. On the other hand, knowing where to go in Tianjin and how long to expect to take sounded a lot like too many questions for this first-time visitor who would rather spend the money and take the time to guarantee perfect connections. I needed to engineer a timely arrival at the Diamond Princess, a five-star cruise ship where I had a reservation to take 19 days from Tianjin to Vancouver, Canada.

So getting to the Tianjin docks was put together without any opportunity for a screw-up. I was going to get the Raffles bell captain to hail a cab for me, negotiate a pre-paid ride to the ship’s dockside almost a hundred miles away, hand the cab driver an envelope with the exact fare plus a fair-minded 20%. Of course, I thanked the bell captain with his own envelope to keep, just so everyone could see I truly appreciated such a smooth operation. Since the Diamond Princess was boarding that day, May 1, 2012, all afternoon until five, I chose to leave Raffles at 2:30 to take two hours to get there at thirty minutes before the final deadline. The cab could probably do it in ninety minutes, but I put it together for a two-hour ride. Murphy was probably born at a construction site to the wrong mother, but every now and then Murphy stories surface among cab drivers.

Now that my ideal afternoon connection with the ship was all planned and paid, I could spend the morning touring the Forbidden City, a k a the Imperial Palace, only a few blocks from Raffles. But after walking about halfway there, I knew I was in trouble. Can anyone walk through Times Square at half-past eleven on New Year’s Eve? How about walk through the gates to the Forbidden City in mid-morning on May 1? I forgot. It’s the most important Chinese holiday, something like a combination of Labor Day, Thanksgiving, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter Weekend and July 4. For good measure, throw in Bastille Day, just to be sure the place is impossibly crowded. If a Chinese citizen thinks of visiting the capital city, it’s probably happening on May 1.

As crowded as it was, I noticed the pedestrian police doing a credible job keeping everyone moving forward to the gates where there hung a huge portrait of Chairman Mao. As I bumped into a uniformed paramilitary type, I felt a tinge of rudeness and a mild push. In this mob, what was I to expect? Then it hit me. I was a red-blooded all-American boy and I looked it. I didn’t look like some Eastern European from the former Soviet bloc, and I sure didn’t look the least sino-whatever. And my clothes were a dead give away.

I shifted sartorial strategy and walked at an angle away from the great unwashed until I came upon a souvenir vendor moving hats and flags. I bought one of each. My hat was one of those ‘50s propaganda jobs, all green canvas with a red star on the front. It made me look like a sympathizer, for sure. I inserted the miniature flagpole in the lower pocket of my double-breasted navy blue blazer, which put together a confusing mix of politburo and patrician. With that ridiculous cap I could pass as a nostalgic former East Berliner on May 1 vacation to see how the communists still put on a labor/military parade.

Incredibly the pedestrian police really were more polite to the Berliner in the communist cap. The flag was a bit too touristy, but the communist cap did the trick. Sill have it.

The mass of humanity I saw in front of St. Peter’s on Easter or the hive of workers I hit against in the Mumbai train station together could begin to suggest how crowded the Forbidden City was just before noon on May 1.

I had lunch on the street, a mystery fish something or other everybody else was eating.

I got back to Raffles close to one o’clock, packed and went down a little early to be sure my bell captain was still in charge. He was.

Right on the money, he had a cab waiting for me at 2:30. Envelopes were distributed and we two took off.

After an uneventful ride down the interstate, I began to smell trouble once we entered Tianjin. My cab driver pulled up into an intersection, threw the gear lever into park, and rapped on another cab’s window. I could tell by the way the other driver was pointing, my man had no idea where he was and – worse – no idea how to get to the docks. Well, we still had an hour before the Diamond Princess pulled away at five.

We were in the heart of the city – downtown streets twisting in every direction like the finance district in Boston where the streets followed the cow paths. My man had a hard time moving in the same continuous direction, but somehow it looked like we were headed for the docks. We were slowly going downhill on a slight grade, and we always seemed to see the river working its way to the docks.

After what must have been a half-hour, leaving me another half-hour to go, we drove into an industrial area where we could see the cranes on the docks. But then we found out we were among the old docks, not the new docks where we had to be. I lost patience and yelled to another cab driver who knew English – enough, anyway. I asked if I could pay him to lead us to the new docks where the Diamond Princess waited. He knew what I was saying and what I was needing, so off we went, two cabs and one customer and two fares.

Our lead cab driver had a feel for time and distance and he knew we were in trouble. We really flew.

With all of three minutes to spare, I got out of my cab without giving my driver one more damn dime and paid the lead-footed homeboy and took the ramp to the Diamond Princess. By the time I made it up to a deck where I could look back to the dockside, the ship pulled away. I really mean three minutes to spare.

It wasn’t quite the deal killer as it appeared. All the while we were riding around the docks like the Keystone Cops, I knew the ship had stops in Russia, South Korea and Japan before we were in the open Pacific, so I could have caught up at one of three points if I absolutely had to. On the other hand, this trip was costing real money, and I didn’t see any need to add a premium just because my Beijing cab driver didn’t know Tianjin, or just because his professional peers didn’t see we needed the new docks, not the old docks.

Besides, bad cab drivers – having been one myself – make good copy, what?