Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1
What's Wrong with this Map?
In the summer of 1976 I left China through Friendship Pass. As the train crawled
into northern Vietnam through the rounded hills south of the pass, we gazed down
into steep gullies crisscrossing the landscape beneath us. In some of the deeper
gullies narrow streams gurgling with spring water were left to follow their natural
courses. Inothers, the streambeds had been widened into rice paddies, the heads of
the rice plants still green and not ready to harvest. An overturned steam locomot-
ive lay in one of those gullies, its charred carcass sprawled on its back like some
ruined Jurassic beast. Signs of the Vietnam War, which had ended just a year be-
fore, still littered the landscape, occasionally dramatically - beneath every railway
bridge lay the twisted girders of all the other bridges it had replaced - more often
inconspicuously. Already the war was being forgotten. The very landscape seemed
readytoforgetit.Lookingdownonthelocomotive,Icouldimaginethesubtropical
vegetation of the gully simply growing up around the defeated machine and gently
swallowing it from sight before the recovery crews could arrive.
Friendship Pass is the Orwellian name for the rail junction connecting big-
brother China to little-brother Vietnam. Honoured as a site of friendship between
the two countries, it has just as often been a barrier of animosity across which the
two sides have eyed each other suspiciously, and occasionally launched a wasteful
invasion.ItwouldbeChina'sturntoinvadein1979,butthatpieceoffollywasstill
three years off that peaceful and beautiful summer when I came through the pass.
I was leaving China at the end of a two-year stint as an exchange student, heading
home via a long detour that would take me through Laos, Burma, India and Afgh-
anistan.
We approached the pass from the north. The Chinese train shuddered to a halt,
andeveryonehadtoalighttogothroughborderinspectioninsidethestationbefore
switchingtotheVietnamesetrain,whichranonanarrowergauge.Thosewhower-
en'tChineseorVietnamese -therewereonlytwoofus-weresetasideforspecial
treatment. When my turn came, the brusque customs officer asked me to open my
backpack so that he could inspect the contents. He was looking for something, and
in no time he found it.
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