Anna Karenina and a lack of Uno on the Train to Lhasa

Leaving Beijing was quite a sad experience for me, beyond the most obvious of reasons, as I had to get on a train for 45 hours with a new group of people. Not that the new group didn't seem interesting, but I had just shared so many experiences with Verena, Robin, Sarah, Raul and the rest that it somehow seemed that I was cheating on a girlfriend to go on a long train ride with other people. There would be no more hiding vodka from the train attendant, no more heated games of Uno, Ticket to Ride or Billionaire and those people that had already forgiven me for body odor that arises after four days of not showering were no longer with me. Oh well, such is the life of a traveller I suppose, and I just had to get on with it.

I had forgotten to recharge my laptop before leaving the hotel, but I was not that worried, as every single train station and airport that I had ever been in has power points liberally spread around. You might have to reach behind a vending machine or sit on the floor next to a check in counter, but always have I been able to find an outlet. The reason for this, I figure, is that everywhere needs to be cleaned and so the staff need to be able to plug in the vaccuum cleaners and floor polishers. That was until I arrived in the Beijing West Train Station. I guess that here everything is cleaned by good old fashioned elbow grease and so not a power point was to be found. Not even under the tables in the MacDonalds or KFC (believe me, I got some dirty looks while I was looking).

We had been informed that, unlike the trans Siberian railway, there are very few stops on this trip and almost no opportunity to hunter-gather along the way like I had been doing (though much better food is sold on the train). Thus while I was waiting in the railway station I under took my last scavaging trip and was highly successful: I managed to down a small, chicken like bird and find pig's trotters and mushrooms (both vaccuum packed separately, though they tasted oddly alike).

For this journey, we were in the hard sleeper class, which is a bit like third class in Russian trains, with six beds per cabin and no door. Whether by bad planning, back luck or what, I still dont know, the group was split up into the lower bunks across six different cabins, rather than being all in two cabins. Tsoka, our new tour leader, did a great job bargaining with the local people to get everyone in two cabins except Dany and I. There was a drunk, smelly local guy in one of the two cabins and he refused to move and Dany and I were mroe than happy to stay where we were as we were sharing with a family of three Germans from Berlin and a really quite Chinese guy.

Paritally because of the isolation and partially because the makeup of the people on the new trip is different, meant that the journey was a lot more boring than my last train journeys. There was no cards being played in any of the cabins and some people were talking in the other cabins but they were really cramped and so I didnt really want to intrude too much. Dany and I did talk to the German family in our cabin, who were very interesting. Dora, the 24 year old daughter has been studying and living in China for a year and her parents had come to visit before she goes home. I never spoke a word to the Chinese guy we shared with, he in fact spent less than twenty waking minutes in the cabin over the whole time.

The good thing about this was that I managed to finally finish Anna Karenina. I had gotten less that half way through the book since starting in St Petersburg, but managed to knock it off just before pulling in to Lhasa. Not too bad a book, all things considered. I always knew that things would end badly for Anna, but geez, that is a bad way to go.

The train journey itself is quite spectacular, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I loved the desert scenery in southern Mongolia, biut this was something else. Since we left after dark, we awoke in the morning close to Xi'an, home of the Terra Cotta Warriors. As a side note, the trains are so mich better in Chian the Russia: The beds are long enough that I can fully stretch out and not reach the end, the pillows are plump and the cabins are kept nice and cool, perfect for sleeping. The landscape around Xi'an is quite went with rice being the major crops. By the early afternoon the landscape had started to dry out a little and the major crops turned to corn, wheat and potatoes. the best was yet to come, however.

Waking the next morning at about 8am, I could tell the sun was up but there was either mist or cloud outside (we had climbed to nearly 5000 meters above sea level) and I could't see a thing. Almost miraculously, however, two minutes later the cloud lifted and the most spectacular landscape was revealed. Green and brown mountains were spread out on either side of us, devoid of any vegetation other than low grass. Rivers and streams reguarly split the landscape and in the distance rose massive, snow capped peaks. I even saw three antelope alongside the tracks, the first wildlife that I had seen in almost 15,000 kilometers of riding the train.

The photos below can hardly do justice to the spectacular vistas, as we rode along, around every bend, another picture perfect scene would reveal itself, a new jagged peak in the distance, a bright blue lake alongside the tracks (we supposedly stopped at the highest freshwater lake in the world) or a herd of yak (what is the propper word for a group of yak?) would be drinking at a stream. The one thing that did strike me was the abundnace of water, I am not sure why but I always thought of the Himalayas as a very dry place.

There was only one stop on all day, a seven minute stop at Na Qu, which is 4513 meters above sea level, and fortunately well below our highest level of nearly 5100 meters. the high altitude, combined with 40 hours of sitting around doing nothing, really got to me quickly and the 50 meter walk to the front of the train and back left me short of breath. They had been pumping oxygen into the cabins since the night before, so we didnt notice it until this moment. For a laugh, when we got back on the train we asked for oxygen masks to try. They didn't seem to do much, but it was a good photo op.

As any diver will tell you, as you go up air expands. When diving , this means that if you go up too quickly your lungs will pop if you dont breathe out or you will get the bends. When on a train going above 5000 meters, this means that anything with air trapped in it will get tight. Just after we had gone to sleep there were two pops, not long after each other. While I was trying to work out what was going on I realized that I could smell potato chips and that the two bags that Dany had bought had exploded. We figure that there should be a warning on the bags: Do not take about 5000 meters. Fortunately none of our beers exploded. The other thing is that the gas in your stomach, which is also trapped, expands. I (along with most of the others in the group) spent most of the second day on the train in a mild amount of discomfot, with the occasional major cramp, and it all worked its way through.

As we decended down to 3600 meters, at which Lhasa is situated, we saw our first tree for the day. I cannot tell you how strange it is to travel at a reasonable speed for over 9 hours and literally not see one tree. There are not too many places in the world you can do that. Lhasa also has some crops grown in the surrounding valley (also a new sight for un in Tibet), although the wheat crop, which was being harvested as we went by, looked quite stunted and spindly.

Pulling in to Lhasa station, unlike probably everyone else on the train, I was quite sad to disembark as it signalled the end of the first part of my journey. I covered over 15,100 kilometers, spent more than 230 hours on the train and had gone from the Arctic Circle to the Roof of the World. I had watched the stunted trees of the tundra turn into the lush forests and farms of Siberia to the sands of the Gobi Desert, to the rice fields of China to the mountains of the Himalayas. I had made some great friends, met some wonderfully warm local people, eaten some very weird foods and drunk the perfect amount of beer. After a moment just soaking it in, I stood, picked up my bags and walked off, into the next chapeter of my great trip.

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Part of trip: The Big One

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