I feel like we have jumped from the filmset of Indiana Jones or Mad Max in the Gobi Desert to Murder on the Orient Express! This is our only first class journey – one night and one day with a bit of luxury. The passengers are noticeably different…..not the backpackers of 2nd or 3rd class but the slightly more mature traveller with proper luggage and tidy clothes! And we all eat very politely in the restaurant car. Very Agatha Christie.
We crossed the Chinese border last night at about 8pm, and woke up this morning to China in all its glorious beautiful sunny technicolour. It's all real! All those pictures, films, photos seen – all those stories heard and read – and it really looks like it! This is one of the emotional moments of our trip. Looking out of the window at tumbled down villages, people working by hand in the fields, donkey and ox carts, remnants of the Great Wall meandering over the mountains, piles of bright yellow maize cobs, little haystacks….. It's so lush and green after wild Mongolia. Every available piece of land seems to be cultivated with terraces climbing as high as possible up the mountainsides. On both sides of the train the landscape meets a skyline of craggy purple peaks.
Around the cities we pass through there is also a lot of industry – chimneys pumping out smoke and stacks and stacks of coal lining the track. I remember this is the greatest manufacturing hub in the world. I am in the middle of reading Wild Swans by Jung Chan about three generations of Chinese women. To look up from reading about Mao's reforms and tyranny, and about life as a communist party member to see everywhere people working and building is like 3-dimensional literature. But I have to remember that things have changed again and we are seeing China in the present tense.
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