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Monday 2004-06-28 - Kuqa, Xinjiang (China)
On the train
At 6:10 am the bus is already waiting to take us to the train station which is way outside the city. The train will take us from Kashgar to Kuqa, a town which is new to me. The station is modern: luggage goes through an x-ray scanner before we’re let in to the waiting room and here, at least, there are no stairs to climb to get to the platform (I have bad memories of Ürümqi in that respect). We have reserved places on the train in a hard-sleeper carriage; there are open compartments with six beds each (on three levels) and two little folding chairs in the corridor alongside the compartments. Custom dictates that as long as people are not sleeping — and this is not a night train — the people who have the upper beds can sit om the lower bed since the two folding chairs are not enough. Alas, in our compartment, a very uncouth Uyghur claims his bed and Carla is banned to the folding chair. Meanwhile I sit on the corner of the other bed, which belongs to a mother with a young boy: for them it’s no problem, even when they stretch out for a nap. Big thermos flasks with hot water are provided so we can make a cup of tea or prepare a bowl of instant noodles; every now and then an attendant comes past with a little cart with fresh hot water but on this train no food is sold and there’s no hot water tank at the end of the carriage as is normal in Chinese trains.
We ride along the edge of the Taklamakan desert, with the Tien Shan mountains in the North, here mainly consisting of bare sandstone in various colors. Near the rails, grass has been planted in a square grid pattern to prevent the sand from blowing away or blowing onto the tracks; at some stretches I even notice the tubes of a drip irrigation system: not for agriculture but merely to promote a little vegetation and stop the sand…
Apart from the unfriendly Uyghur (an exception), the atmosphere on the train is nice; people sit around quietly to chat or eat a snack; no one is loud, not even the children. On arrival in Kuqa, one man even helps us to get the luggage off the train, handing us our bags through the window. Then he waves goodbye to us.
We arrive a little late, but a bus is waiting to take us to the Min Mao hotel which has a curious “old-soviet” style with a key lady to open the room for you — who usually has to be found on another floor first. Otherwise, no complaints.
Thursday 2004-07-01 - Daheyan, Xinjiang (China)
Deserted desert
I wake up at seven; the sun is shining and an attendant is bringing a new thermos of hot water. We’re riding through a nice mountain landscape, obviously quite high but these mountains are covered with coarse grass; we see some snow-capped peaks behind. Every now and then we go through a tunnel or over a viaduct across a valley. There’s very little sign of human habitation.
Farther on, the landscape gets harsher, a mountainous desert. Curiously, we see a lot of small groups of houses along the railway, even villages — all completely deserted: only the walls stand, all roofs have disappeared. There’s no sign what the inhabitants of these houses could have lived from: no fields, no stables, just houses; yet they must have lived from something. The very sparse vegetation seems barely enough for grazing a few goats. At one point, we cross a river and upstream we see a whole town, also completely deserted: no roofs, no windows in any of the houses and apartment blocks; a power station that no longer works. Why were all these houses, villages and towns built? Were they here before the railway came — or built because of the railway and abandoned again when the railway was completed? Something else? The number of completely deserted villages here in the desert is remarkable but we see no explanation, no clue.
At a little past noon we arrive at Daheyan, a small factory town in the middle of the desert; a bus is waiting to take us on to Turpan, which isn’t on the railway line.
Saturday 2004-07-03 - Daheyan, Xinjiang (China)
Honoured guests
On arrival at the station in Daheyan we’re waved into the “Lounge for Honoured Guests” — normally reserved only for people with soft-sleeper tickets (which is not us): apparently as foreigners here we’re considered “honoured guests” as well. There’s one disadvantage to that: we have to climb six thickly-carpeted stairways with all our luggage (not so good for my foot) but there are advantages, too: nice big, soft chairs, we don’t have to put our luggage through the scanner (why not??), and we’re let onto the platform and train first so getting onto the train isn’t as hectic as usual.
Sunday 2004-07-04 - Liuyian, China
Facilities on the train
It’s light, but we still have a way to go before we arrive at the station in Liuyian. Our night train today is again a little newer, and nicer, than the one before. And there’s one striking difference: in the bathrooms (two at one end of each carriage) there is a mysterious little net fixed to the wall, a little above the rail you can grasp so you can squat safely even if the train rounds a curve. On closer inspection, I see a little sticker next to the net explaining its purpose: it’s to park your mobile phone in while using the facilities. A nice illustration of how popular and wide-spread mobile telephony has become in China in only a few years’ time!
Thursday 2004-07-08 - Xi’an, China
Last train ride
By 14:00 we’re back in Xi’an, in time for a late lunch of sweet and sour pork with a very good draught beer. Then we go to the supermarket to get some snacks for on the train, and go and pick up our luggage from the hotel storage room and repack a little.
A little before five we walk to the station where we’re allowed into the soft-sleeper lounge again, and can go onto the platform before the masses — thankfully because it’s very crowded here. We find the train for Beijing already waiting; it leaves at exactly 18:00 but by then I find my luck has run out: I have the middle bed on the right — and just don’t manage to climb into it with my still painful right foot which I just don’t dare set on the narrow steps of the ladder (not without my sturdy walking shoes on, anyway). Someone has a brainwave: we swap beds and now I have the middle bed on the left which I can climb into because I can set my right foot on the lower bed, and my left one on the ladder.
Thursday 2005-09-22 - Beijing, China
Back on the train
At 16:30 we leave for Beijing West Station. We don’t have a routine yet but boarding the train goes smoothly. I can sleep on a lower bed (my favorite) in the six-bed hardsleeper compartment and before lights out at 21:30 I’m in bed already. It’s fun to be back on the train in China!
Friday 2005-09-30 - Xining, China
Train to Golmud
At 16:00 we leave our Xining hotel to be brought by bus to the train station where we will board the night train to Golmud. For a change we don’t use the soft-sleeper lounge, it’s not all that busy here. This turns out to be an experience in itself: when the train is nearly ready for boarding, everyone is ordered to line up in single file — it’s just about accepted that we stand two abreast but still somewhat frowned upon. Then getting onto our wagon is a problem at first: there aren’t proper steps although the door is open. One acrobatic guy manages to climb up anyway but doesn’t know how to solve the problem; he disappears, presumably to get help; it takes a while before the wagon attendant — she must have been sleeping — appears and folds up a part of the floor to the door: ah! now there are proper steps and we can get in.
Once we’re all seated (all our compartments shared with some Chinese) and the train has left the station, the next problem annnounces itself: there is not only no water at all in the wash rooms but there is no hot water to prepare tea or noodles either: the water still needs to be heated with a little coal stove (the fumes are making me cough). After a long wait the availability of hot water is announced and the attendant starts to fill the thermos flasks for each compartment. Meanwhile the cart with noodles and drinks hasn’t appeared either so we walk along the train to get them from the restaurant car — passing through some very old and rather dirty hard-sleeper wagons.
While this train is as punctual as all Chinese trains are, the service and quality is decidedly worse than on the trains around Beijing.
