FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Xian

We were being waited upon at Xian station, as the youth-hostel we booked the day before had sent a woman to the station with a somewhat Slavic spelling of my name: “KRAVOR”.
This place had a great review in the Lonely Planet, but the more we used the Lonely Planet, the more useless it became. This youth-hostel was just a big money sucking tourist machine, ran by an overly cheerful Chinese guy who called himself Jim Beam. Once we arrived there, Chris needed to wash his clothes, “OK, ¥10” said one of Jim’s overly smart henchmen.
“That’s a bit expensive” said Chris, not unfairly, since this would have paid for five beers in China.
“OK, ¥8” said the cheeky Chinaman. Chris settled on ¥5 but we still wondered how low we could have gone. The problem with haggling is that the British aren’t much good at it (Chris especially it has to be said) so they feel embarrassed to haggle and usually end up paying at least three times what a Chinese person would for the same thing. Since we had arrived at about 6.30am, we took a rest and then walked about.
Xian is a smaller city but still has huge buildings, big roads, McDonalds, KFC and shopping malls. But unexpectedly, it also has a large Muslim population, along with a large Mosque (although it looks just like a regular Buddhist temple).
As we wandered through the many markets, a kind lady started chatting to us and showed us some of her art-work, which were paintings of the four seasons on silk paper. Midway through our chatting, she started to name prices and it felt really wrong. This kind-looking lady had invited us into her studio, told us about her life and now just wanted money. As with most of the stall holders, she focused her attention on Chris and not me, as Chris’ face is one of “oh I feel like buying something” whereas I know mine is more like “well, this is all very amusing.” I did however buy an ice-cream and when I asked how much it was, the young lady said “fifty” and assuming this meant five jaio (there’s 10 jiao to ¥1), I gave her a ¥20 note and she only gave me ¥5 change. Now, ¥15 for an ice-cream is absurd. I previous day I bought one for ¥2, but she wouldn’t give me any more change. So I waited another customer to come to see what they would pay and I think I could guess what they were saying.
Clerk: Hold-on. This strange foreigner is watching us.
Customer: Why?
Clerk: I charged him ¥15 for an ice-cream and now he’s pissed-off. Would you mind coming back in a minute or two?

That night Chris showed me his plan for us to go to a mountain, climb it, stay on the mountain over night, then get a train to another city, climb another mountain, and then go to Beijing. He had adapted the plan from a suggested route in the increasingly annoying Lonely Planet. I went along with the idea but commented on how difficult the travelling would be. Chris disagreed and I couldn’t help but realise a little stubbornness in his voice. Oh dear I thought, will we be parting ways so early in this epic trip? I hoped not.
We spent the rest of the evening chatting to two Norwegian girls who were coming to the end of three months travelling across the world.

The Terracotta Warriors was to be the big theme of the next day. These were thousands of clay figures, set in the earth in a remote part of Xian, as a kind of memorial to the death of China’s first ever emperor. But in the morning we had to get our train sleeper tickets for the mountain-climbing leg of our journey.
Chris carefully wrote out the Chinese for each railway journey we needed and I managed to shove it in the tiny money hole for the clerk to see before some dirty Chinese guy tried to shove his cash in for his ticket. Almost immediately, the stern looking woman (who’s ticket booth included a sign that read “English assistance”) said “No. Only Xian here. This no. This no” and after a gentle enquiry from me as to how we could buy these tickets that run between stations other than Xian, she burst into the usual frantic Chinese, interjected with “I don’t understand” and “I don’t know.”
We needed a new plan but now we put travelling difficulties to one side and headed on a rickety old bus to the Terracotta Warriors. Since me and Chris had decided before that we wouldn’t hire nay English speaking guides, I confidently walked passed the small group of “official” guides who verbally barked at us, claiming how vital they were to learn anything about the Terracotta Warriors. If I hadn’t have decided already, their sales pitch alone would have been enough to discourage me from wanting to be led around by another person who was after my money. But to my amazement, Chris stopped and listened to her.
The most terrible thing about these guides is that they try to make you feel guilty for not hiring them.
“You’ll only come here once in your life”, “you need me”, “you won’t learn anything about it without me.” But I could watch Chris’ confidence seep into the dusty ground as he haggled a mere ¥5 off her original offer of ¥50 to ¥45. Pissed-off, I approached him and said “what are you doing?” and then he repeated the same gobbledygook that the guide had just given him.
“OK” I said, “I think now’s a good time to separate for a while. I’ll meet you back in the hostel tonight.”
They were certainly worth seeing and I enjoyed walking around by myself, peering at the English and Chinese inscriptions and occasionally muttering to myself. Originally these life-sized clay soldiers were painted in bold colours and held real life-sized weapons. But now the colours had faded, the weapons were stored out of public sight (why?) and two thousand years of fire, water leakage and theft had reduced many of these models to great piles of clay, with the occasional head or arm poking through.
Over 2000 years old, the most astounding thing was how many of these models were yet to be uncovered. It reminded me of walking through the Egyptian museum in Cairo as I glanced at objects that had been made in an age impossible for me to imagine.
Another small but equally amazing feature was how some of the Warrior’s weapons on display (there were only a few) were perfectly smooth and sharp, like they had been made the day before. Apparently they had been preserved with chromium 2000 years ago, a method of preserving metal that was invented just after the second world war! As I did in Egypt, I got the sense that our current age of technology is not the same one as that of 2000 years ago. So what happened between now and then?
I met Chris at eight o’clock that evening back in the hostel and then I went on the internet for a couple of hours, writing long messages to Aki and Maki. Me and Maki kept darting around the same subject but neither of us could quite bring ourselves to ask the obvious question: were we going to be a couple when we live in London?
I was happy to read that Aki was doing OK, getting on with life and spending more time with her friends. I went to sleep thinking once again about these two completely different people.
Chris really wanted to hire bicycles and cycle round the city. I wanted to meet Leo, a Chinese guy who was a part of the global-free-loaders.com group. This is basically a network of people form all across the world who are willing to let travellers stay at their place for free, no strings attached. In response to a request for accommodation, he replied saying that he no longer had his own flat so we couldn’t stay with him but he’d be happy to show us around Xian. Chris was determined to cycle by himself, so I met Leo by myself. He came to the hotel and we immediately fell into a nice friendship of honesty and gentle cultural comparisons. First we got a bus to a restaurant to meet two of his friends where I tried a delicious rice and pineapple dish served in a pineapple.
One of these friends of his worked in a new bakery in the centre of town, which his aunt owns. It was a flashy place with young assistants ready to give advice on your choice of cake. Leo told me that it had only been open for just over a week and was already popular with students, who apparently have a lot on money and can therefore afford this bakery’s inflated prices.
We then walked to a couple of local universities and just sat and chatted. Leo was a really interesting guy with a great flare for English. He was fluent and could easily understand me even though he had never left China. He told me about his dreams to live abroad but every time I said “why not?” he would list a hundred and one reasons why it would never work out and I explained that most of these reasons were either fictitious, highly unlikely or easy to solve.
China’s a strange place. As we walked past the university fence, I noticed all these stencil-sprayed adverts, all with a phone number and Leo told me they were people offering fake diplomas and exam results. He informed me that it was almost “English Corner” time, when many students would gather in the main square to talk in English. Rather looking forward to the prospect of being a superstar, I wanted to stay but Leo said I’d just be asked the same questions all the time, which I knew would be true, so we moved into a new area having once again visited the bakery for some free strange oily coleslaw sandwiches.
We walked into a really pretty open area lined with new old-style buildings (with the curled roof corners and all) which Leo assured me had a musical fountain display every day at 8pm. We walked to a large flat polished marble square with coloured lights inset in the ground, about 8- metres by 80 metres.
“Oh this is nice” I commented as we continued walking through the square.
“It continues down here too, to the water over there” said Leo, and I realised that this fountain square was just one of six 80 by 80 metre squares that stretched right across the park. By now it was dark and almost 8pm, so we got in a position that Leo told me would keep us dry, and sure enough the music started and all six squares lit up and I watched one of the most dazzling and beautiful sights in my life. The water shot up in rhythm to the music, moving diagonally, in circles, in ovals, in waves, in any pattern you could think of, all with different coloured lights. The water made shapes you could never imagine it could make and the whole thing was truly breathtaking, and also free.
On the way back to the bakery, we walked through a beautiful newly built area that consisted of small squares of grass and carefully positioned decorative trees, lit with subtle lighting. I commented to Leo, “you know, this would be wrecked within weeks if it was in England.”
“Why?”
“Well, because there are a lot of dickheads in England with nothing better to do.” The sheer fact that he couldn’t imagine why anyone would purposely wreck something like that made me think about one of England’s worst elements: vandalism.
Back at the bakery we chatted more about Leo’s possible future as a tour guide or Mandarin teacher abroad and I left extremely happy to have met such a nice guy. When I got back to the money-sucking hotel/hostel, Chris and I chatted about our day and although we had originally planned (well, Chris had) to climb a mountain the next day, I told him that I wanted to see Leo again. Getting to know the locals was more important than following tourist trails for me. He seemed a bit stumped and told me that he wasn’t very good at changing plans. Bloody hell I thought, had Chris really ever been travelling before?! Isn’t not having a plan the very essence of real travelling?! I could see now that we’d be spending more than a few days apart from each other over the next five weeks or so.

And so I spent the next day with Leo, just following him around on his daily schedule. Fortunately for me, he didn’t have a day job, just some English teaching assistance in a small English school an hour away from where he lives. With his great English skills, he could be doing so much more so I persisted with reminders of his own dreams, as he had told me about the day before.
I met the aunt of his friend who owned the bakery, an interesting lady who had lived in America for six years, but Leo’s English was better than hers. She kept asking him when she didn’t know a word, and her Chinese accent was thicker. She drove us to an industrial estate and we walked into a graphic design studio where they were designing paper bowls for a new fruit, ice and bean product to be sold in the bakery, which is apparently common during Chinese summers. They asked for my help so I gave my opinion, and they changed the design to follow it! So it seems I will leave my mark in China in a pretty unusual way.
After another free meal at the bakery, which had seemed to become my Xian base centre, we got the bus to Leo’s small English school and met the main teacher, a good friend of his called Austin. Austin was one of those instantly likeable, full-of-enthusiasm-for-everything guys: perfect for an English teacher. I sat in on the class, which consisted of four girls, the youngest about sixteen, the oldest about thirty, Leo and Austin. Each student spoke a very different standard of English to the next, and what with the amount of Chinese being spoken (with Leo interpreting), I was not sure how useful the lesson really was. After a ¥3 ride back into own on a rickety old noisy tricycle taxi thing, I walked back to my hostel and chatted to Maki on the internet while I wrote a long email to Aki. A strange situation indeed.

The next day I met Leo for lunch in a restaurant that served “waist” noodles. These are huge fat noodles, which you order a few at a time, about 4cm wide and 40cm long, which you mix into a soup of herbs, tofu, tomato and other unidentifiable things.
We took a leisurely stroll through the city, passing hundreds of shops, many with techno blasting out the front, some with cute girls with microphones doing some promotion. It’s easy to see the entire range of China’s economic classes by simply standing on the corner of a street. There are rich couples with designer handbags, tiny phones and huge cars which drive past hoards of day-time shoppers in more casual clothes, either walking or on electric or petrol powered mopeds. Then you have the “jacket” class. These are men dressed in tatty clothes with filthy hands and inconsistently dark faces, but all wearing a jacket, usually riding bicycles. These men were either carrying, eating or cooking food on the street. And finally there are the beggars and the dodgy street sellers, which seem to be one and the same. I’m quite sure a man selling franchised labels of water and soda who looks like he hasn’t smelt clean water in a year isn’t an official representative of Coca-Cola products.
We went to the main public library and I browsed in the English books section while Leo dozed on a table. After some more walking around, trying to get him to promise me that he’d get going on getting a job abroad we said goodbye, which really just felt like more of a ‘see you later’.
I met Chris in the hostel and picked up our bags, which the hostel tried to charge us ¥10 just to hold them for seven hours. I argued the price down to nothing. After buying four large beers to help knock us out (we were going to be on hard seats on twelve hours), we rushed to the station, grabbing some fried vegetable rolls on the way from some random street stall. It was absolute bedlam at the platform, just chaos. People were pushing into other people cramming into door, guards blowing whistles and gesturing aggressively and a sense of panic was everywhere. I just held onto the knowledge that we actually had seats, unlike many of the others.
The journey was just awful. The train was filthy, nothing like the other trains we had got on before. Dirty people, well, 99% men, were sprawled about everywhere: on the floor, against doors, on the wash basins. People were actually perched on the sinks trying to sleep on them. And everyone looked miserable. People were smoking under the “no smoking” signs, spitting in the aisles and always coughing great hacking coughs that sounded like their intestines would be revealed at any moment, and shouting at each other.
And then I started to feel sick, more and more so. My stomach started swelling to the point that I’d run out of holes to reposition my belt buckle. What was happening?! Was I going to explode like a balloon? I couldn’t stop burping awful pungent burps. I felt like I just needed a crap and then all would be fine but when I tried to go (there were no people sleeping in the toilet which kinda surprised me), I just couldn’t.
I felt worse and worse and I noticed how horrible my environment was more and more. Some fairly respectable looking young Chinese guy had started chatting to Chris, who wasn’t really (understandably) in the mood to listen to yet more enthusiastic broken English. But he turned out to be a big help as he helped us to upgrade our tickets so we could get beds and I desperately needed to lie down. Midnight passed and we had just settled into our new beds and I was starting to feel like I wanted to vomit. I didn’t get any sleep as I kept going to the toilet and dry gagging, unable to vomit-up anything, constantly sipping water to try to control my feverish body. As I watched the first morning light drain into the dank sleeper carriage, I finally vomited a thin-carrier bag full of vomit which was a tremendous relief as the previous dry retching, when I sounded like some kind of deranged animal, coughing up air, was hideous, but I only felt a little better.