Long-distance Training!

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Over 5,000 kms lie between me, in the climbing 'Mecca' of Yangshuo, and Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province in China's far northwest.

From Yangshuo to Guilin is a pleasant enough 1.5 hours in a bus, unless you have some hideous beast behind you, retching, coughing and spitting, and screaming past his cell phone in your ear THE WHOLE WAY! He was perhaps the most feral creature I had seen in China, and one reason that travels here can be nauseating!

30 hours on a sleeper train to Xi'an was relatively uneventful as I caught up on sleep from the last two nights of Fussball action. Apparently there are no sleepers to Urumqi tonight... or for the next week! ...but there is a 'hard-seat' tomorrow if I want it...

After making the purchase, I decided that I definitely didn't want it, but that it would at least guarantee me the "full" chinese train experience!

After a walk around the city, and a bit of time relaxing in the gongyuan (public park) in Xi'an, it came time to board for the mega-ride.

The train was crowded; 17 carriages, more people than could fit on the bench seats, and I was the one and only white guy! This is OK, I am used to that kind of thing here... but people have been telling me for days to do anything I can to avoid over-night-ing in a hardseat:
A; you cannot get much sleep sitting up in the crowded sardine can, and
B; you are likely to have anything of value stolen as soon as you do fall asleep.
Now, I don't like to buy into these stories borne of paranoia, but I will be spending 2 nights in hard-seat, traveling through some if the most inhospitable terrain on this earth to central asia, into the centre of China's civil unrest... but whatever...

On board, things were immediately different. There was a relatively large proportion of the Turkic looking Uyghur people, who are Xinjiang's original inhabitants, and the ones who are opposed to the Chinese occupation of Xinjiang. I sit down and already feel there is a little tension in the air, although whether it is real or perceived I cannot tell.

In my booth are 2 Uyghurs, a Kazakh, and Han Chinese and Gansu Chinese. I attempt some rough introductions and it is clear that people are a little unsure about this lau-ai (whitey) in 'hard-seat' (like a fish out of water). But I can communicate a little with at least 3 of them, maybe 4, it is hard to tell...

One of the Uyghurs apparently speaks and understands less Chinese than me, and so he gets drunk off a bottle of beer and forgets about the rest of us. I think he was trying to tell me we are brothers and he will go to NZ with me... but then neither of us really understands the language we are communicating in. The train workers are all Chinese, and seem to take special pleasure from harassing the minority people about their tickets... Voices and tempers flair quickly in this part of the world!

Night comes, but the lights stay on. I try to catch some sleep... Shortly after midnight I wake with someone's head in my armpit. At 2am, I have a numb arm where my head has been resting, and my feet are being used for a pillow by someone who is sleeping under my seat. Sometime before light, I find myself safe and sound on the lap of the Kazakh next to me, much to his amusement. During the night, the whole carriage looks like some kind of horrible aftermath; a huge pile-up of bodies.

In the morning. the train rose from the rolling mountain scenery that makes up most of central China, where many people have built their houses by digging into the sides of hills of loess deposits, to a more expansive area of yellow flowery meadows and crops of wheat and sorghum, which make a beautiful patchwork tapestry leading to the base of large barren mountain-sides. It looks like something straight out of a 'Classic Mongolian Scenery' book. Rising further, the scenery became more barren and rocky and looked like what I imagine the Gobi desert to be. Herdsman could be seen following their yaks and sheep around the short scrub that grew, until that too disappeared, leaving only barren nothing-ness as far as the eye could see.

Then from nowhere, trees, plants, crops and animals. Workers in the fields... ah, the miracles of groundwater irrigation! Beyond this (which is somewhere in central Gansu province) the desert became more featured, with sand-dunes and occasional rock outcrops showing ancient river channels. To prevent sand-dunes migrating onto the road and tracks, the chinese government spent huge amounts to plant a short dark plant which holds the dunes stable, and gives them a grey-black colour and making it feel like something on the dark side of the moon. More Oases were scattered along the way at infrequent intervals throughout the rest of the day, but it remained in my mind that this area must be almost impossible to survive.

Meanwhile the foreground to all this varied from sweaty half-naked Kazakh, to Uyghur asleep with mouth open, to kid wee-ing in a plastic bag and family of five pile-up on a bench. Sadly, I didn't take any photos. It didn't feel right to pull too much attention toward myself or my belongings...

At each stop people jumped off or hung out the window as stall vendors flogged off as many melons, peaches, tomatoes, meat sticks, flat breads, noodles, cigarettes, bags of milk and green gooey things as they could before the whistle blew and everyone piled back into the fuming carriages. I relished these opportunities to get out, stretch a little, and get some blood back in the legs and air in the lungs.

The train route follows the old Silk Road, cutting a path from China's ancient capital near Xian to the west. Along the way are a number of sites of historical significance; many of them battle grounds, or staging posts of various armies.

Our eventual arrival in Xinjiang was greeted with a sudden sandstorm from the desert, which filled the train with dust before we can all close the windows. The train received a ferocious sand-blasting, giving it a real desert feel. I half expected a horde of marauding bandits to hijack the train during the night¡­ Sleep on the second night came about more easily due to my exhaustion... that's not to say that it was good, but that it happened!

Awake again, barely, and still in the desert, things quickly became rocky as we passed through a lunar landscape and then out onto a great plain, with water and plants and grass all the way to the foot of snowy mountains, much like the Canterbury Plains... ahh home.

Urumqi itself is a large industrial town surrounded by factories with large smoke stacks and power lines everywhere. The outskirts are home to many slums, although in the city itself, the streets are clean and things run relatively efficiently.

Even getting off the train was an experience, as well over a thousand people moved as one jostling mass toward the station exit. Stepping out of this mass exodus, blinking in the sun, the epic finally over, my mind struggled to tell whether I was half-dead or half-alive¡­

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