FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: China: Beijing

At 6am, Beijing was cold, and with hardly any sleep, all we wanted was a bed. Some of the locals from the train showed us where we needed to go in a kind of we’d-be-better-off-without-them style but I appreciated the sentiment anyway. Eventually I said “ok, we’ll be fine from here thank-you so much” and after a short ride on Beijing’s half finished metro, we found the youth hostel and slept for about four hours.
The first thing we needed to do was to locate a large foreign bookstore in the city centre to buy a never copy of Lonely Planet’s “Tran Siberian Railway” guide. It wasn’t there and according to a couple of British travellers we met in the travel guide section, it couldn’t be found anywhere in Beijing, even though Beijing is either the start of end of one of the main routes, being the Trans Mongolian, which we planned to take. We’d have to make do with our four year old copy.
After a more-satisfying-than-it-should-have-been lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around a big glitzy mall and commented on the incredibly high prices. We had been told that Beijing and Shanghai were very different cities but capitalism seemed to have taken even firmer root in Beijing, with it’s trendy business areas, shopping malls and endless banks.
We passed a food market which sold silk worm on a stick, snake skin on a stick, lambs testicles (again on a stick) and other various animals that belonged in horror movies only. I had a contact number for a guy from globalfreeloaders.com who couldn’t put us up but was happy to take us out, so I went to one of the many public phones in a small kiosk to call him. In China, these kiosks always have a phone for public use which display the cost of a call and it is never more than ¥1. Having called him once, I paid the ¥0.6 I owed to one of the two guys behind the desk and realised I needed to call him again. The cost was ¥0.6 again so I went to pay this but the guy said I owed ¥1.2 for the two calls. Since we were the only customers, there’s no way they could have forgotten my first payment of ¥0.6 but one of the guys got really angry, throwing the phones across the kiosk and shouting at us. The extent that the Chinese will go to to squeeze a few extra pennies from foreigners made me want to puke.
We needed to buy a ticket for our next train: Beijing to Ulan Bator (Mongolia’s capital) so naturally we went to the main ticket office in the train station, but couldn’t find an English speaking desk. A few people told us to go to the “international hotel”. What did this mean? A hotel was the only way to get this ticket? So we walked in the vague direction of someone’s pointing until we saw a huge slab of a building, concave in shape and very grand-looking. Sure enough there was a travel agency on the second floor and although it was closed, a woman gave us a price list. It would cost us ¥600 (about £45) and the journey would take 32 hours.
The guy from globalfreeloaders met us at 8pm with some friends, a nice group of creative people: graphic designers and photographers, and took us to quite a posh restaurant for our first taste of true Peking/Beijing duck, which was nice but very gristly. Chris was feeling sick so we returned home early.

Our first full day in Beijing was a bit of a non-event as Chris stayed in bed all the time, occasionally leaving to bless the squat-style toilet with a large dose of poo-moose. So it was up to me to get things done: namely buy the train tickets and organise some free accommodation by meeting with a Chinese guy who called himself “George” who I found on globalfreeloaders. He kindly picked me up from the hostel and we drove to a café that he owned where we sat and discussed the next few days over some Coca-colas. He was an older guy, about forty-something, and had a family. He ran a small air-conditioning company and had invested in the café, buying the land outright when he was particularly successful some years ago. Now the café just acts as a meeting place more than anything, mainly for his friends, to discuss travelling. He seemed to have been to every country in the world and had brought back various artefacts from each one, all of which were on display in the café: African masks, Turkish pottery, Australian road signs, French football scarves, Italian opera masks, Indian tea pots, Russian plates to name a few. I told him we’d move in the next day for three nights as Chris was currently ill, and that was it sorted.
So I then went back to the ominous international hotel, brought the tickets and went to the toilet in a toilet with an attendant who I didn’t know needed tipping or not. He didn’t do anything apart from watch me so what should I have tipped him for? Maybe he didn’t even work there.
That evening the hostel was very restful and peaceful for me. I got dinner in a small restaurant attached to the hostel and met a young American girl who sat across from me on the same table even though there was plenty of space. Sensing that she wanted to talk to someone, I struck up a conversation and she burst into a breathless speech about her two weeks travelling in China. Then I spoke to an older Korean lady who had been travelling for seven months and would go back home the next day. Seven months? How can you return to normal life after that? But then again, she didn’t seem like she had a normal life. Then I just wandered around and settled in the café area, writing in my diary and chatting to the new guy in our room.

Chris was still sick the next day but well enough to move to the cafe4, under the kindness of George. After settling, I set out into town to visit the infamous Tiananmen Square. Within minutes of getting off the bus, two not-so-young girls came up to me, asking where I was from and all the other usual questions.
“Would you like to come and have some tea with us?” they said with a little too much urgency, too early on in our acquaintance. I asked what their jobs were,
“oh, we’re students”. I replied that I just wanted to walk around and that they were very welcome to join me. After a suspicious pause one of them said “sure, we want to talk English with you.” I asked their names: Tina and Susan. I laughed a little and explained that I didn’t trust anyone who approached me in China.
“That’s terrible” and Susan, who did most of the talking and had ridiculously thick bright turquoise eye makeup, “why don’t you trust anybody?” I explained how almost everybody just wanted my money “included you I suspect” I added. Susan stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me with a little disgust, “how did you lose your trust in other people? That’s sad.”
After some more semi-tense chatting, during which she frequently commented how handsome I looked, I asked how old they were.
“That’s a terrible question” replied Susan.
“No it’s not” I said, knowing full well that to ask a woman’s age in China doesn’t have the same taboo as back home. They both looked over thirty and I’d already had many women come up to me claiming to be students to go with them and be enticed into spending outrageous amounts of money.
“OK then” I said to Tina who looked the oldest, “what did you do before university?” This clearly had her stumped.
“Er… high school” she muttered unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said, “but you’re too old! You’re telling me you were in high school three years ago?”
“Yes” she replied. Then Susan spoke in fast Chinese to Tina, turned to me and said “do you want to have some tea with us?”
“Sure” I answered, “if it’s cheap, maybe about ¥10.”
“No” she said firmly, “we like expensive tea, cost you ¥200.” I just stared at them, “so you are just trying to get my money?” and they walked away. Within minutes of walking away, still chuckling to myself, another pair of girls said hello but much more passively than the previous couple. They asked the same old questions, I gave the same old answers but they didn’t say they wanted me to do anything. Upon my questioning they explained that they were English students. It fitted: they looked young and seemed eager to learn new words from me.
“Why are you in such a touristy area if you live here?” I asked, my suspicions dissolving away.
“Because it’s the weekend and we’re out shopping” said the girl with a yellow Addidas tracksuit and a dark Thai-style complexion. So I just followed them around for an hour or so, enjoying the company of people who weren’t after anything. After a quick photo, within minutes of departing, another two girls came to me and said hello. They asked the same questions but in a much more ‘just passing’ style and I soon rejoined my own company to wander through the surprisingly large square. There were many kits being sold and flown of all types and heights, some impossibly high like distant planes. Salesmen were everywhere, selling more cheap junk, and connect to chairman Mao in some way.
That evening George took Chris to the local hospital during which he waited five minutes to be seen, had an immediate blood and poo test, got the results within ten minutes and was prescribed and given drugs ten minutes after that. In a country where the maimed and starving bed for anything in all the cities, the health service still beats England’s by miles. This hospital was very simple. Things were just getting done without fuss or complaint. However, it looked much more basic, less well facilitated, and the Chinese spat on the floor which is surely a bad thing to do anywhere let alone in a hospital. In fact, the Chinese seem to hold no ground exempt from spitting. As we walked down a carpeted hallway in an office building, a dirty-jacket man spat on the floor, looking strangely pleased with himself afterwards.

“The Summer Palace”, one of Beijing’s major sights, was to be the next day’s plan for me. About 2.5 km square, it acted as leisure ground for one of China’s old Emperors when it was summer time and too hot to be indoors. It was beautiful. Willow lined paths between two lakes, rock garden patches, archaic decorative bridges and many traditional old Chinese buildings. Included in the entrance fee was admission to many small museums within the park, some ridiculously boring (as the young daughter of a British couple put it: “it’s just a bunch of chairs”) and some fascinating, if for no reason but the age of some of the relics which surpassed 3000 years. But Beijing’s eternal haze hung over the park, making it hard to see objects across the lake (although the lake was large) and at around 4pm, I could stare straight at the sun which then looked more like the moon: pale and misty.
Beijing is the place to see the Great Wall of China, well, at least where you need to catch a bus from. After a seventy minute journey we excitedly past patches of the wall itself before pulling up into tourist hell: “T-shirt one dollar, one dollar, postcards, book, T-shirt one dollar” was the local mantra yet again but our faces showed we had already experienced almost three weeks of this and were sick of it, although Chris still had to stop to look!
We first went to the Great Wall cinema which showed a film about the history of the wall in 360˚, using eight projectors, technology and film alike being about thirty years out of date. And it was only in Chinese with no subtitles. Crazy for such an international tourist attraction.
We wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find the way onto the wall and eventually found an absurdly tiny sign. Although the wall covers some 6000 km, you’d never guess it because of the bloody Beijing mist. The tower sections at every 200 metres or so consisted of a series of tiny tunnels you had to squeeze through although some Chinese considered these areas fit to have a piss. I noticed one woman doing herself back up, a puddle just below her.
It was extremely steep in places and the height of the coarse steps varied from around 10 cm to 50 cm. It was so busy that at one point people were crushing each other by one of the thin steep stairwells, seemingly unable to simply let one go at a time. 90% of the crowds were Chinese. The relative expense of China’s tourist attractions make it harder to enjoy them. You certainly get a sense that it’s just all about the money and this must surely be China’s biggest threat to a dwindling tourist industry. Surely no one who leaves China could forget the constant money grabbing, can’t-get-enough, tourist preying mentality and prevents me from recommended China to anybody. Whether you’re on a big budget or not, the persistence of the Chinese to trick, con and mislead foreigners is simply too much to create a fulfilling experience. Bottles of water were on sale on the wall for ¥10. A bottle of water in a shop was about ¥1.
So we got on the wall, walked about a mile, took our pictures and came off. There were no signs to tell you where to go, no information about the wall, no guides, no maps and no organisation. Things didn’t improve when we went to a restaurant in the city centre, as reviewed by the now utterly useless Lonely Planet, in which prices had risen by 50%. A half of a duck ¥100. We ordered a half between us and out came a serious looking chef with a meaty-looking half duck. He asked us how we’d like it cup up and proceeded to cut small slithers of meat and skin and serve it up on a small plate. Although the meat on this duck looked barely touched, he served up the small plate and left. This was it. Our ¥100 half duck. It barely enough for a sandwich. Sure it was tasty especially the oily skin, I’d never tasted anything like it but we couldn’t forget about the bill. It turns out that ¥30 is a fairly standard price in Beijing for a whole duck. Sure enough, our restaurant was full of fat Americans and glitzy foreigner business people.

Onwards into Mongolia the next day, leaving at 7.40 am, the longest railway journey I’d ever taken. It was a Chinese train and each compartment had four beds, two bunks on each side with a small table in the middle against the window. Me and Chris were in separate carriages as there weren’t many beds left which was a good thing in my mind. After a few hours of relaxing, listening to Eddie Izzard comedy CDs I ventured tot the restaurant carriage where I sat on an empty table. Within seconds the miserable Chinese “waitress” ushered me over to a table already occupied by a middle aged Scottish couple. I gave my order from a choice of the two items that were actually still available on the English menu (or so she said: I saw Chinese people eating fried rice and prawns which didn’t even feature on the absurdly concise menu) and happily chatted to the couple. I don’t know if the Chinese waitress was merely trying to save tables or had been administered the job of social ambassador, but I was pleased for the blunt introduction.
At the China/Mongolia boarder the wheels of the train were physically changed to ride the differing Mongolian tracks. The whole boarder process took about four hours, during which I decided to get off and couldn’t come back on until the process was finished. I had no idea what country I was in when I got off, a fairly unique feeling, until I saw everything priced in Chinese yuan in a small supermarket that most of the travelling Aussies and English were over-stocking on beer in. Having had our passports carefully checked by the Chinese for two hours, the train ran for ten minutes and the whole process was repeated by Mongolian. A young Mongolian woman official in ridiculously large oval hat scrutinised my passport and called some other officials over just to add to the drama of what would otherwise be an incredibly dull job. Having spent five minutes inspecting my battered passport like it was a nuclear bomb, she returned it with an air of contempt that said “just this time I’m not going to send you to a Siberian slave labour camp.”