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Published: January 23rd 2012
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Early morning in Beijing, still dark but a smart hop to the train station slithering a little on the icy pavements. The impressive station lit up like a Christmas tree emerging from the night mist.
Slowly leaving the suburbs with a red yuan sun glowing over the wintry landscape. Bare trees, frost dusted, icy rivers and snow laying on neglected bare ground. Smog, mist and fog over all.
The Chinese seem to have exchanged early morning Tai Chi for patiently sitting in traffic jams on expressways. In the obscene chase for luxury goods the old culture is swallowed up by the ever increasing demand of production at all costs.
As part of the world's largest seasonal migration we left Beijing. Over the Spring Festival period the rail will handle 235 million trips averaging about 5.88 million per day. In addition the road trips will number 2.85 billion and air 34.8 million. Quite some movement; mostly students and migrant workers, we joined the throng.
These thoughts however couldn't take away me sitting in Train 23, grinning like a demented Cheshire cat at the thought of time to sit, write, read
and drink hot tea all day. Bliss.
Time passes and we have to decide what snack or food to eat next. You try to buy for every eventuality-porridge packs, soups, cous-cous, sweets, muesli bars-but who forgot the coffee sachets?
Fellow community group members have you ever felt you are fighting a losing battle? Each carriage has a coal fire which heats and provides constant hot water. We pass kilometre after kilometre of uncovered coal wagons, stacks belching out smoke or is it steam? Most probably an emission with particulate matter less than 2.5! Train lines, new roads converging onto mushroom like cities needing to consume more and more energy. Mad Max, I see it clearly.
The incredible feats of progress are not surprising, we stare in amazement at the miles and miles of Great Wall to the right of the train as we traverse the landscape waiting to join the Mongolian hordes this was built to keep out.
Midnight in Mongolia. Well it was China actually, on the borders of Mongolia that a very strange thing happened. Our passports having been taken out of our hands, cause for
great anxiety on my behalf having had drummed into me the idea of never letting your passport out of sight, the train set off again. Nerves of steel, I did not have, jumped at every movement imagining us setting off to Mongolia with no passports and that hard won visa! But off we did go to a changing shed where all the carriages are jacked up and the bogey wheels exchanged for a different gauge. Trying to disguise my apprehension I jumped instead at every loud noise in Tree of Life, the film we were watching. After about two hours the border official returned, tall and imposing in his long coat and moose-stalker hat and handed them back with a 'Goodnight kangaroo!'
It was of course not over. Dozing fitfully on our bunks we were disturbed about half an hour later with a repeat performance by Mongolian officials of the female kind. Intense scrutinisation of our photos and faces. But they still took the passports again. Being an old hand now, I slept until they were returned.
Waking to a frozen landscape it took some time for my sleepy eyes to adjust to the
snowglare. Endless white vistas punctuated by electricity poles and transected by the railway line. Small groups of huddled camels, a smoking ger in the background crouched under the shelter of the rolling hills.
The unforgiving march of industry seems to be lessened here over the border but having overheard conversations from a rotund Aussie miner in the Mongolian visa queue I fear this will not last.
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