I am taking the 10 hour train to Beijing. It could be worse Urumqi takes 44hrs and no I have no idea where that is either it was on the China train travel website which has lots of useful info http://www.seat61.com/China.htm
Having suffered the occasional mild panic attack from people surges I braced myself for Shanghai train station. I had nightmares about the scenes from Christmas time where 2 million people got stranded at stations around China. Thankfully the process was very smooth. The porter did try to charge me 50Y for bumping my bags no more than 2 metres. The taxi to the station only cost 19Y. All bags go through an X-ray machine. Well unless you are carrying what looks like a gift then they don’t seem to bother. So if you see anyone suspicious carrying a big box with a colourful bow – run! Joking aside JC told me that last week some Chinese nationals had threatened to blow themselves up on a internal flight. It seems terrorism has also come to China.
I asked JC to get me a soft class ticket (1st class 439Y) I peered into the hard class expecting wooden benches but the seats were just a little narrower than 1st class. The advantage of traveling by train is that you can use an MP3 player at all times. This is my effective sound blocker from the male phlegm throat chorus. Unlike the long distance trains in the UK there are no quiet zone carriages and as the coach was full of (male) businessmen phones were constantly going off.
From my window seat I had a good opportunity to see the Chinese landscape, another reason to travel by train. We passed lots of new dual carriageways that looked eerily quiet much like the black and white films from the 1960’s showing new motorways in England. Car ownership is clearly confined to the large cities. Housing is a complete mix. High rise blocks some 16 floors tower over shacks and 2 storey townhouses. I was please to see that many had solar panel water heaters. The 2 storey houses had black roof tiles which reminded me of Michael Palin’s leap across a train track to bring back a Chinese roof tile for Terry Gilliam in the BBC programme Around the World in 80 Days.
I joked about the airplane safety video in an earlier post on the Shanghai flight about no remote control cars. In between the mobile phones and throat clearing I could hear a whirring and whining noise. In the aisle behind me were two grown men in suits playing with a remote control Porsche.
Arriving in Beijing the taxi queue was worse than Paddington station on a train strike day. There did not seem to be a system of dropping off and collecting passengers. I was tired and the wind was blowing Gobi desert sand everywhere. There was no way of getting across the boulevard avenues to hail a cab from the other side of the road. I got into what I thought was a taxi and agreed a price I knew was triple what I should be paying. At the first set of traffic lights the driver jumped out and changed his number plates when he saw a police car around the corner. Despite saying he knew where my guesthouse was and having the map and address in Chinese, he did not seem to know where it was 10 minutes into the journey. He started making calls on his mobile and I had visions of him arranging for me to stay somewhere else, permanently.
I was convinced of his alternative motives even more when he refused to call the owner of where I was staying. He also refused to ask directions when we were roughly in the right district. Perhaps this was due to not showing bad face or men never asking for help with directions. We arrived at the dark alleyway entrance to the Hutong where I was staying and began to demand his fare. I assured him I would pay him when we had reached the front door of the hostel. Did he think I was going to run off with 40kg of my luggage and not pay him? Before I could give him all of the money he grabbed what I had in my hand and ran off into the dark.
The situation quickly changed though when the elaborate antique door of the Hutong was opened by a tired but smiling Mr Yang. Zheng Yang is the husband of the owner to Kelly’s Courtyard, a traditional hutong house now run as a guesthouse. Hutongs are narrow streets or even smaller just alleyways that are characteristic of Beijing. Along the hutongs are siheyuan (courtyard) traditional houses. For many years since the founding of The People’s Republic of China the number of Beijing hutongs has dropped dramatically as they are demolished to make way for new roads and buildings. More recently, some hutongs have been designated as protected areas in an attempt to preserve this aspect of Chinese cultural history.
Lots of beautiful decorative Chinese furniture at Kelly’s Courtyard
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