"From Beijing to xian by train"

21st December (Day Sixteen)

I had a nice long lay-in today and did not get up until 9.30am, then it was back-pack packing time! One thing that I had started to notice was my back-pack appeared to have lots more crammed into it than the others in my room, even though I had left quite a bit at home the night before I left the U.K. Anyway it was me that had to carry it and I would rather be warm than cold, so I probably wont regret bringing extra of clothes with me.

At 12.00 midday I said goodbye to Jo, Amy, and Paul. Jo and I had been travelling together since Moscow and we shared a compartment on the Trans-Siberian train, during that time we became quite good friends, and I was little bit concerned for her welfare as she was running short of money. That is actually an understatement as she virtually had no money left and she was trying to get to Australia. Anyway I learned later from a letter she wrote that she had managed to get to Vietnam, from there she obtained a lift on a ship from Ho Chi Min city to Indonesia. She went on to Australia overland where she had a dual English/Australian passport, so she had no trouble getting into the country, due to lack of funds.

Fredrick, the Swede, shared a taxi with me to the station as he was going to try and get on the train to Xi’an as well but, whereas I had bought my ticket from the C.I.T.B. and had a guaranteed place, he was going to try and get one from the station ticket office. He did have a lot of trouble but eventually he was holding his ticket and was actually in the same compartment as I was, so at least I was going to have a bit of company on the journey. Once we were at the station we were surrounded by ’Staring Squads’ which the L.P. guide had warned me about. It is not a threatening situation, more one of curiosity as for some of the Chinese people a foreigner is a sometimes rare and certainly an unusual sight. Gradually it became obvious that more and more people were starting to stare at us and it was almost like a fever as they slowly moved closer to hear what we had to say until we were almost completely surrounded by people. Quite a strange feeling. The fact that they made no attempt to hide that they are listening to every word was truly bizarre, the do this in Europe would be considered very rude.

Once we were on the station platform, we had to try and locate our carriage on the train, it was printed on the ticket, together with the seat/bed number as well as the destination (most of which was in Chinese). I was in car three, bed eight. Once we had selected the correct carriage we located our seats which were also our beds for the night. This type of train was nothing like the Trans-Siberian train and was a lot more basic, older and dirtier Not very satisfactory at all!

There are three classes of travel on the Chinese trains starting with Hard class, which is only a wooden bench seat and is not recommended by the LP guide except for extreme emergencies. It is the way that the Chinese peasants travel and certainly looked cramped and overcrowded when I walked through the car to have a look. Next is Hard sleeper, which is what I had. It was not as bad as the name suggested as the bed was not hard, (unlike the Hard Seat), and there was a pillow and some blankets to keep you warm during the night, although I would be in my sleeping bag. Each carriage had a long corridor down one side with a few fold-down seats next to small tables. The beds were arranged in five open compartments of six beds, three either side, (thirty beds to a carriage), with the best bed being the middle one as the one at the top is too high, and the one at the bottom tends to get everyone sitting on it, due to the fact it is the most accessible to get to.

Between the bottom two beds was a table with a large thermos flask full of boiling hot water beneath it, great for making tea, coffee or Cup-a-Soups. Michael Palin called this class ’friendly class’ in his T.V. programme (Around The World In eighty Days). The third and final class is Soft Class which is for the ’softies’ as they have a nice private compartment with four beds and is very much like the compartment I had on the Trans-Siberian train. The only thing wrong with the soft class is the price. It was almost as expensive to travel soft class as it was to go by aircraft!

At 1.30pm the train left on time and I was on my way out of Beijing and hopefully heading for the warmer areas of the south. I had enjoyed my stay in Beijing immensely but I was ready to move on now and see the rest of the country. Fredrick and I were the only Europeans in our compartment but on the platform I thought I saw a couple of other European looking guys, so it was my plan to have a walk along the train and see if they are on it also. In our carriage were two Japanese girls who were in China to study the language, although they did not speak too much English we had lots of fun trying to converse to one another during the journey which was twenty two hours long and was to arrive at Xi’an at 9.30am the next day.

The views from the train  were very interesting. We passed many small villages most of which had a wall around the outside as if it was a fortress. The main mode of transport is the bicycle or the good old horse and cart for moving goods around from the fields to the villages and markets. It was a little bit overcast but still very nice and I suppose it looked a lot like the ’Fens’ in England as the terrain was very flat.

Later in the evening I went off to see who I could see and I got chatting to the two guys I had spotted earlier, Erick from the USA and Rick who was from Canada, both had been teaching English in Japan and were on their way home, via China and a few other countries along the way.

When I told them we had two Japanese girls in the next beds to us, Rick was soon in to chat with them, I think they really enjoyed our company with Rick translating two ways from Japanese into English and then back again for my replies. Rick was of course speaking good Japanese but then had to tell me in English what they were talking about. It may sound complicated, but it worked quite well and soon passed the hours until it was time for bed. We chained our back-packs to the luggage racks and got into our sleeping bags with our boots under the pillows and my day sack, (containing my camera, films and other valuables) against the wall next to my body. This may sound as though I was being paranoid but all the advice we had been given suggested, ’Watch your bags at night’, Something that is extremely difficult to do when your asleep!

22nd December (Day Seventeen)

After spending half the night trying to get to sleep, the ’D.J.’ (cabin attendant) turned on the music at 6.00am! During the journey yesterday the music had been quite melodious and, although not my particular taste, it helped to pass the time of day and helped the journey along nicely. However, this morning it was totally different, as the music was unbelievably loud with drums, cymbals and everything else crashing in my ear, as I was right next the speaker.

We got into Xi’an railway station at 9.30am and Fredrick and I decided to go to the Jeifang Hotel (recommended in the Lonely Planet Guide) and was supposed to be close to the station itself, but like Hell could we find it! We walked around the block and were just about to give up and find somewhere else for the night when we found ourselves back at the railway station and right outside the Jiefang itself which was so unmistakable that we had walked right by it first time round. It turned out to be really nice for a back-packer type of hotel and was only Y50 (£5.00) each for a twin room, which was decorated quite comfortably with a bathroom attached to the room, and it was heated, (a real luxury!).

Xi’an is in the Shaanxi region of China and is one of the oldest settled areas of China with remains of human habitation dating back to prehistoric times. This was the area of the Zhou people who eventually conquered the Shang people, and then ruled much of the north of China. Shaanxi remained the political heart of China until the 9th century at which time the province was a crossroads for the trading routes from eastern China through to Asia.  

Five million people died in the famine from 1876 to 1878 and then another three million in the famines of 1915, 1921 and 1928. Today some thirty million people live in the Shaanxi region and like so much of China, it is rich in natural recourses, particularly coal and oil. The Wei River, a branch of the Yellow river, cuts through the middle of the province making the south and north very different. The North being a plateau covered with thick black soil with deep ravines and vertical cliff faces, whereas the south is a comparatively lush, mountainous area with a mild climate.

Read Neils complete adventure here.