Nanning to Shanghai. (2224 km)

Another early start up at 6 am and checked out at 7. Was hoping to have an early breakfast before leaving, but breakfast doesn't start until 7 which would be cutting it fine. Took a while to check out so it was well after 7.15 when I got away, walking down to the station; several other people doing the same. First security check, just to get onto the station forecourt, was of passports or IC. Then a queue for baggage X-ray and personal frisking. Not very intelligently, the railway station itself was designed with a long flight of steps up from ground level. Not friendly to people with bags on wheels or the disabled. Showed my ticket and was directed to waiting room 3. My train,  T82,  is the only one leaving from here in the next hour and goes from platform 10. Since the security checks were quite fast I have plenty of time and joined the queue of people waiting for the automatic ticket barriers to open. At about 7.45, after letting on the old, disabled and people with young children, the last characters on the big sign high up on the waiting room wall change to something different from  those for the later trains and from yellow to green. I am about 4th in the queue, put my  ticket in the gate and get a green sign in Chinese and English saying "Full Fare Paid Please proceed". Once through the barrier, I follow the crowd to an escalator to the overhead walkway and then down to platform 10. No walking across the tracks here; the platforms and trains line up with no steps.

Nanning to Shangai Train at Yu Lin (old style platform)

Nanning to Shangai Train

Find my coach and berth with no problem. One thing I had never expected on this trip was that I would be sharing with children. Backpackers, middle aged hippies, all sorts of budget local travellers but not children.  My understanding is that children under 1.2 m travel free and can share seat or berth  with parent. So in my compartment there is a mother with a young boy and a couple with two little girls. A total of 7 of us in a 4 berth compartment. The train layout is basically the same as before but somewhat more modern. I was hoping that the compartments would be arranged for sitting, since we are starting in the early morning but they are already set up for sleeping, with sheets pillows etc. Many people have adopted a half nightwear style of clothing.

"Stabling" no Good? Let's Try "Stabilising"

Smoking is still a part of Chinese Life

 On all the trains up to now, I have been able to squeeze my bag under the lower berth but it won't fit here even when I take Dr Zhivago out of one of the pockets. So  it is a fairly packed compartment. Don't feel too bad since the couple have brought what looks like a week's supplies from Wal-Mart. We leave at exactly 8.15.  All the tracks in Nanning station look newly electrified but our train is pulled by a diesel.  For the first 10-20 minutes we go through the outskirts of Nanning which are just as unlovely as the city centre but with a huge amount of development going on, mostly massive apartment blocks.  Soon  we leave the electrified tracks behind, eventually reducing to a single  track passing  through rural countryside with lots of managed forestry; all for paper pulp? They are mostly straight, spindly trees with almost no leaves below the top quarter. We pass through some grimy industrial towns, realising that industrial grime is something I haven't seen for a long time.  Similarly, long trains hauling coal.  Most of the houses are drab, utilitarian brick boxes, two or three stories high. Later we pass terraced rice fields, not spectacular like those near Sapa,  but terraced all the same. Also fields of yellow rectangles in arrays put out  to dry? What are they? Look about 18 " long and 8" wide. Wood planks? Roof tiles? Unfortunately could not get a good photo.  If anyone has any idea I would love to know.

Mystery objects. What are they?

Any Ideas? 

Walked along to the restaurant car with a view to getting breakfast, but it is full of train attendants. It looks like a morning meeting with a pep talk from the boss and reminds me of the opening sequence of Hill Street Blues:   "And let's be careful out there".   Certainly the trains provide jobs for the boys, and girls. Most of the time they have nothing to do except occasionally sweep the floor and straighten the curtains, something the girl in our coach seems quite obsessive about.  At stations, they open and close the doors which,  although operated  at the push of a button, require an attendant to push it, and then lock it closed after the train moves off. They check the tickets of people getting on the train and exchange the tickets for plastic cards, one for each  berth, held in a large segmented wallet. And, of course, when the train is in a station they stick up a little flag showing the coach number outside and stand smartly by the doors. But the upshot  of the meeting is that it's a banana and muesli bars for breakfast!

When guarding her door at stations, our attendant appears to be barking orders at passengers  who have tried to get on the wrong coach but treats her passengers more gently, trying to stop us getting off the train at stations and herding us back in when we stray. Later in the journey I gesture about taking a photo of her guarding her door but she becomes very coy and shy so I don't.  

At lunchtime, I go back to the restaurant to find they are selling real food. But the menu is a handwritten list in Chinese. Luckily another passenger speaks enough English to tell me that one is chicken and another is fish so I choose the fish and a Barley beer which claims to be brewed in Tibet. Later I talk to him and his son who is studying at Shanghai University. The son's English is quite good. The father is proud to tell me he is a party member and gives me a business card with a red hammer and sickle on it. When my fish comes, it is a whole, freshly cooked, fish, which is excellent. At least I won't have to survive the whole journey on muesli bars. 

Freshly cooked fish

And a Tibetan Beer

Pass the afternoon watching the scenery go by and contemplate the hugeness of China and the impact of mankind on our planet. People get upset about cutting down the rainforest in the few parts of the world where it still exists, and I have a huge sympathy with that view but I have been travelling for nearly three weeks now and nowhere have I been out of sight of a man made landscape, hardly ever out of sight of a home. OK, I know that railways and roads are built in populated areas, not along the top of mountain ranges,  but wherever land can be cultivated it is. Almost all arable crops; I haven't seen many cows or sheep. So many people to feed in the huge apartment blocks in big cities I have never heard of. The reality is that  almost all the forest was cut down years ago, possibly even centuries. A few years ago, a friend from Thailand told me that her grandfather made a living cutting down the forest for local farmers and landowners. If you cut down the forest and cultivated the land, it was yours.

We stop at many busy stations in large towns which I have never heard of:

Yu Ling, Cenxi, Wuzhou, Jianghua, Jiangyong, Yongzhou, Hengzyang.

The children are well behaved considering it is probably a boring journey for them, but they do get to meet new friends and do some endurance testing of the pop-up seats along the corridor. It isn't as gentle as the display IKEA uses to show how it tests its chairs. The seats stand up surprisingly well.  Luckily the children haven't discovered "taunt the foreigner", possibly because their parents have told them what foreign devils  do to little children. One of them has learnt Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

The Kindergarden

How many kids does it take to fill a corridor?

My friend from the communist party invites me to join him for dinner where I get excellent stir fried pork with green peppers, onion and dried chilli,  and rice. It's busy in the  restaurant car, despite the fact that most people have brought their own instant noodles and are using the boiling water supplied at the end of every carriage to reconstitute them.

After dinner I listen to Simon & Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen, LPs I transferred to MP3, now on my phone, which  reminds me of days at Exeter University sitting around, drinking coffee,  listening to music and discussing the meaning of life, the universe and everything, long before the phrase had been invented or popularised by Douglas Adams,  until the early hours of the morning. The people I got to know then were my first  "adult" friends. I kept in contact with some for a few years but then we drifted apart, to different lives in different places. Wonder what happened to them. What happened to the person I was then?  My life didn't follow the pattern I imagined; how many people's do? Listening to those songs on a phone, 44 years later, on a train in the middle of China, would have been quite beyond the boundaries of my nineteen year old imagination.

Went to bed about 1130 and slept well until about 6.30 when I got up and had a granola bar and 3 in 1 coffee for breakfast. Couldn't  face more rice or noodles for breakfast. The granola bars are exceedingly sweet so one of them provides my sugar ration for the day. The 3 in 1 is also very sweet but now I have learned to stir it vigorously with half a chopstick, it no longer forms sticky lumps. Outside it is raining. The forecast for Shanghai showed lots of rain so maybe I am in for a wet three days. So far, apart from China,  I have been very lucky with weather. We have passed over two major rivers and now running alongside an electrified railway on an incredibly long viaduct. It is one of the new dedicated high speed lines and we follow it on and off for hundreds of km. I don't see any trains on it and later when we stop at Yi Wu, it is clear that the six new TGV platforms are not operational yet. There are five platforms at the existing station so when the high speed rail platforms open it will have 11. Later, looking at the internet I find that Yi Wu has a population of over a million people. The shear scale of China, and its railway system is staggering.  

We definitely seem to be in a wealthier part of the country than near Nanning. The houses in the small towns look more like typical modern European houses with pitched roofs, and many have balconies. There are a  few old style houses but not many. We stop at a massive new station in Hangzhou Dong with 28 Platforms! Lots of people get off including the other occupants of my compartment so now I have it to myself. According to the schedule I was given, we should arrive in Shanghai at 1106 but either the schedule is wrong or we are running late since we reach Jia Xing at 1115 and that is still about 100 km from Shanghai. Finally we arrive at about midday.