Days 18-19: Across China

Those train tickets did arrive, a whole hour or so before I needed to leave for the station.

This victory certainly made me feel more hopeful that I would make it out of Beijing, but the challenge of navigating the station still lay ahead. The five page 'how to board a train in China' manual provided by the company who booked my tickets wasn't really helpful in any way, apart from the fact that it was five pages, which suggested to me that it was a serious business. In China, boarding a train involves having your tickets checked not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. At every one of these four checks, I would hand over my ticket and wait for several minutes while the guard stared at it, turned it over, squinted, called somebody else, looked at it again, shrugged, and eventually gave it back to me and let me continue. 

By the time I finally made it on board, I had made up my mind. China was, culturally, so far away from home that I couldn't even begin to understand it from my fleeting visit. The effect of the shock was that I couldn't ignore all the things that bothered me. It sounded like people were constantly shouting at each other, and why did they keep spitting on the ground, chewing with their mouths open, slurping their noodles? No doubt, I disgusted them just as much. "That scruffy boy didn't shave this morning"they probably thought! 

But now I could see China from the safety of an air-conditioned train carriage. Taking pictures was usually difficult, as we travelled fast, the windows were dirty, and the sky was mostly grey (whether this was just the rain or if smog was also to blame I'm not sure). I noticed, though, the opposite to what I saw in Russia. In Siberia, it seemed that nature was reclaiming the little patches of forest that humans had stolen from it. Here, however, humans were busy taking every square inch for themselves- if there was not a high rise block of flats then there was a crane building one, and if there wasn't a crane then there was food growing there. The rivers ran a dirty brown, with huge tangles of rubbish floating in them like ugly icebergs; and in the small spaces between the sprawling cities, the fields were crisscrossed with a dense grid of powelines.

The second day of this journey brought new scenery again, and probably the most spectacular views I'd had from the train so far. I'll let the pictures speak for this...