FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Nanjing

The first thing we needed to do was to buy a ticket for the next leg of the journey, Nanjing to Xian. We found a tiny ticket booth with only once section open and after queuing for twenty minutes, a woman behind us (who again spoke good English), told us we needed to go upstairs and offered to help us further. After another then minutes of queuing, we got our ticket for a ‘hard-sleeper’, a night train leaving three days later.
Our residence for the next three nights was to be in Nanjing University dorms so we headed there. I bought some delicious fresh pineapple on a stick (things on a stick seem to do big business in China), which was much needed as it turned out to be an hour-long walk from the station, which, with our heavy backpacks, isn’t funny. The map in Chris’ China Lonely Planet offered very little help but after a lot of guess-work we found the university. Then it struck me that we had no idea where to go so we made sleeping gestures to various security guards and were vaguely pointed in the right direction. Sure enough, these were the halls of residence for the university students, set quaintly in a twenty floor concrete tower.
We rested and dined at a very local super-cheap restaurant, the idea being to pick entirely random items but the woman there made gestures that indicated either slight mental retardation, or the fact that we’d never be capable of eating the things we’d chosen. She produced an old note book with a dozen or so hand-written translations of dishes. The food was great and during the meal, she asked for Chris’ Lonely Planet so she could copy out some more translations of dishes from the “useful phrases” section.
We wondered around and found that this area was much more relaxed and studenty than anywhere in Shanghai, with may bars and restaurants. We bought some fresh yogurts from a tiny street kiosk and sat down on some boxes to drink them (we had to return the bottles). We thought it was milk before we tasted it but instead it was a very sweet rich plain yogurt. I turned to some while guys sitting near us and we got chatting. They were students here, on of them studying (Chinese) medicine, both from America. We joked about how the perception of western medicine must match out idea of eastern medicine: “those strange westerners with their little magic pills”, and they told us a little about living in China. I mentioned how strange it was to have everybody staring at us all the time, and asked if they were talking about us as well. They replied that when you’ve been here a while, you get to learn the kind of things they say about you but you wish you’d never known.
The next day we hired bicycles from a guy who didn’t speak a word of English but we managed to conclude that he wanted a ¥100 deposit for each bike, a charge of ¥15 and they were to be returned by 8pm. It’s really amazing how much you can communicate without a common language. We set off for the Nanjing Memorial Museum, which was all about the Nanjing Massacre of 300,000 Chinese by Japanese soldiers. We got impressively lost deep in the dry open suburbs where there were few cars, few people and surprisingly, a huge exhibition complex, so we asked for help there. We compared our useless Lonely Planet map to their detailed local-area map and discovered that one of the most useful phrases you could need when travelling was not in the guide-book, being “where are we on this map?”
We eventually found the museum and were offered personal assistance by an English-speaking member of the museum who was working there during her PhD in tourism. She guided us across the mass grave of over 100,000 people, showed us piles of the victim’s bones, and added more information that wasn’t popular knowledge in China. For example, the leader of the “safety-zone”, an area set aside to help fleeing Chinese people in Nanjing, was a Nazi, even though he is heralded across China as a national hero. We read accounts of the Japanese burning, raping, beheading, burying alive, machine gunning and bayoneting their victims, all mostly innocent civilians. The museum spoke of the importance of never forgetting everywhere although the general feeling portrayed was one of anger against the Japanese rather than the need to remember such events for the sake of all mankind. The museum offered a purely one-sided view and gave no possible reason as to why this atrocity was committed.
We rode to a huge market area, filled with restaurants, stalls and heart-breakingly low-tech versions of Japanese photo booths, where you could get a cutsie picture with a variety of different backgrounds and graphics. By now it was dark and there were long rows of red Chinese lamps lining the streets, all lit up, and many buildings were lined with small lights, giving a strange synthetic beauty to everything. We chose a fairly random restaurant and dined on fried rice, sweet and sour pork and omelette soup. We had lost track of time a little and realised we only had twenty minutes before 8 o’clock. Nanjing’s main roads are formed in a grid pattern and it’s traffic lights all have large indicators that count-down in seconds when the lights will change.
Nanjing is a very busy little city, with about six million people, and so our dash through the city centre wasn’t without fear as we rode by huge dirty bushes, crazy cab drivers and constantly beeping scooters. What made the scene more surreal was the fact that we could always see two or three of these down-counting traffic lights ahead of us, and we were desperately trying to make the next set before zero, and then the next set, and the next, as if we were in some arcade racing game where you have to keep making the checkpoints or your money runs out.
After 25 minutes of this frantic cycling, we arrived at 8.05pm to an unfazed Chinaman who gave us out deposits without fuss and then locked-up for the night. We bought some beers and gate-crashed a party in the courtyard of the halls we were staying in. It turned out to be someone’s birthday and nobody spoke English apart from a Swiss and German girl who were about as warm and welcoming as the Chinese were to the Japanese in 1937. After an hour of so of pained conversation, I gave up and watched TV in our room while Chris located some Japanese guys and had a chat. Feeling drowsy with the weak Chinese beer, I laid down and thought about Aki and Maki. I desperately want to see both of them again. I’m sure I’ll see Maki again, and that’s wonderful, but I don’t know about Aki. Surely her pride or dignity will stop her from visiting me in the UK. Once again I found myself unable to answer any of these questions so I just read my book until I feel asleep.

We hired the same bicycles again the next day and rode to a mountainous area near the city to climb up and get a good view of the city. After five minutes or so into the gentle ascent, two very young looking girls said hello to us. I started talking with them and discovered that they were actually about twenty-two years old, even though they looked about fifteen. Their English was pretty good if a little strange. One of them had a pot of dried sugared plums and when she accidentally tipped them onto the ground the other girl said “oh no, I think surely your heart is melting.” I accounted this to either poor English or a keen sense of poetry beyond that of an ordinary person. The view from the top was almost comical, if not tragic: a sea of mist, dust and pollution only allowed the closest proportion of the city to be seen and everything else was drowned in smog.
“Oh today is much clearer than yesterday” one of the girls said, which bought to me images of people wandering off the mountain because they couldn’t see two steps in front of themselves.
On the way down we talked about how China and Japan compared and found the girls to be interested in studying Japanese. We rode through the city again and to a bridge that crosses a famous river in Nanjing. My only reference to the river was from the museum the previous day when I read that the Japanese had run-out of petrol to burn all the dead Chinese so they just pushed the rest into the river. This river was the barrier that marked the fate of so many Chinese because they simply couldn’t get across in time to escape from the approaching Japanese. Again, the bridge just faded into a haze and you couldn’t see the other end.
We then rode into town to look at a large bookstore and within minutes, a Chinese guy asked us if we needed help. He directed us to the English section which was the size of a small phone-box. Disappointed, we turned to look for somewhere for dinner and this guy clearly wanted to help us so we asked him to show us some places that the girls on the mountains had singled out. We found a dumpling restaurant without an English menu so this crazy guy ordered for us, pausing between items to check with me that we were gonna actually pay for him,
“you invite me yes?”
“Sure”, I replied, all too used to this kind of subtlety what with having lived in Japan for almost two years. So we ate out dumplings, and he gave us his card, practically begging us to email him sometime. With under an hour left before we had to return our bikes, we tried to squeeze in one more sight, the city’s entrance gates. They were nicely lit in the dark and the high solid brick wall had more lights lining the top. It was strange to think that when the Japanese invaded, this wall was the city’s only defence, and now it’s just a tourist sight. Again, we got the bikes back five minutes late, and then Chris passed-out in our room while I went on the internet to email Aki and Maki. Aki was online so we chatted and I cried a little. I had an early night for the sake of having no other plan.

This was to be the day of our first long railway journey, from Nanjing to Xian, on a not-very-comfortable-sounding “hard-sleeper” carriage over fourteen hours, leaving at 5pm. We had an extremely lazy day, just milling around, using the internet (I chatted to Maki for an hour or so, it was great) and chatting to each other. Suddenly it was four o’clock and we met our first major disagreement: I wanted to get the bus and he wanted to take a taxi. We got the taxi, at a cost of eight times more than what the bus would have cost and arrived in plenty of time. Again, the train seemed pretty modern and our “hard” beds were, well, yes, hard, but they were more than bearable. There were six beds to each section which were connected by a small open walkway running across the side of the train. We had middle beds. The highest were the cheapest and the lowest had the most head room and were more expensive; these occupants could use a tine table and while sitting on their beds. The top-bed people could use small fold-down seats in the walk-way, again with a tiny table and the people in the middle-bunks had to make do with just their beds.
For some unknown reason, the Lonely Planet had listed these beds as being the best. I had left my bag of snacks and water in the taxi so as Chris crashed out on his bed, I waited for passing trolleys. I watched as a snack-trolley went by, and then a hot-food trolley passed and I watched what money was being exchanged, an unfortunate necessity in China to make sure I was paying the same as the locals, so I watched the change carefully. But then he was gone and I’d missed it.
I eventually bought a big pot of instant noodles and emptied the various plastic sachets into the small dried noodle-brick. I found one of the many huge boiling water urns and started to eat the spiciest noodles I’d ever had. It turns out that one of the sachets was concentrated chilli paste and I’d used all of it. It took about forty-five minutes to eat. I bought a pot of pineapple pieces that were passing by thinking this might ease my stomach, which it seemed to do.
I then walked up and down the train, entering the restaurant car which seemed to be only for employees, the police and other dodgy-looking characters. I got chatting with the couples on the beds below us, who offered us a place to stay in Xian and gave us a number of a college who would accept us at a cheap rate. The guy did all of the talking, and he seemed a little overly confident in his “knowledge” of different cultures.
“Yes. I know much about Western Culture because I study it, part of my tourism studies. “
“Oh, when did you go to Europe?”
“”No, never. But I’m a tourism teacher. I know about your culture well.”
“That’s great” I replied.
“Yes. For example, I know that Chinese are very noisy when they eat dinner.”
He was starting to really sound as if he could see his own culture from an outsider’s point of view so I agreed, “yes, I guess so.”
“And you English are completely silent when you eat, because you feel the eyes of God watching you.”
Perhaps not. I paused, “um… what do you mean?”
He repeated his last sentence pretty much word for word and in the end I agreed whole-heartedly as it dawned on me that nothing was going to change his mind.
After exchanging brief conversation with the two other men in our section I settled down to a very unsettled sleep, but felt surprisingly happy and optimistic to once again be truly travelling.