Our Trans-Siberian train experience was exactly as we imagined it. Actually, it was as Hayden imagined it. Having caught an overnight train once before in Egypt I was a little sceptical of Hayden’s oriental romantic notions. However, the wooden interior and luscious maroon and gold carpet and upholstery exceeded all fantastical expectations! We even had our own shower! The train departed at 7:30am so we had the whole day ahead of us to stare out of the window in comfort and take in the scenery of the Gobi Desert. We had stocked up on our standard breakfast of muesli and yoghurt, but had neglected the coffee. Well, we had the coffee (plus sugar and milk powder as well as access to boiling water) but no coffee pot or cups as they had been left in the car. I’m not sure if what happened next can be attributed to Hayden’s clever imagination or the strong desire for coffee, but a coffee pot was made out of a Pringles container and our yoghurt pots now doubled as cups. With hot fresh coffee in our hands we settled in to our ‘home’ for the next 27 hours. Lunch time rolled around and we ventured to the food carriage to explore what was on offer. The menu was standard Mongolian food, but the carriage itself was a feast for the eyes. Its ornate wooden carvings and Mongolian artwork along with the gentle clanging of loosely hung decorations almost made you forget you were on a train snaking your way through southern Mongolia.
We reached the Chinese border just after dinner and customs and border security was rather a non-event. What was an event was the fact that the train tracks are entirely different in China, so they needed to lift the whole train up, take out the wheels and replace them with ones compatible to the new tracks. This occurred around 10pm and took a couple of hours and was no simple process, frequently I had drifted off to dreamland only to be jolted awake as the carriages banged together as the wheels were being replaced.
We woke in the morning to smoggy metropolitan China, a stark contrast to the sparsely populated land of the blue sky that was Mongolia. We alighted the train at Beijing Railway station to a balmy 8 degrees and were severely overdressed for our walk to the hostel. We quickly dumped our bags, changed into more appropriate attire and headed out to sample some local cuisine. We had no real plan other than to wander and follow the locals, and we found their local hang! We named it ‘The Red Curtain’ after the thick plastic red curtain at the entrance. The lunch hour was winding down, but there was still plenty of hustle and bustle. We were seated at one of the unusually low tables and given an English menu as well as a laminated menu and a marker to create our own order. That was all well and good, but the laminated version was entirely in Chinese. One of the kind waiters noticed that this was going to be a problem for us and came to our rescue to do our ordering for us. The meal that followed was unlike any other we had experienced, the strange explosion of flavour hinted spice yet left a sweet aftertaste, and we ate and ate trying to figure it out. In the end we could not finish it all and left with every intention of returning to sample more (which we did several times). That evening we ventured to the street market and were mesmerised by all the delicacies on offer, skewers loaded with scorpions, seahorse, starfish and other strange insects that we were not game to try. We filled up on pork and chicken, fried dumplings and toffee apples instead.
The next day we visited the Forbidden City, and whilst in was full of incredible architecture, large squares and gardens, it was more full of Chinese tourists and selfie sticks. We hurried through the last section to meet Manuel and his dad, who had joined him on his travels. After a delicious local lunch we all hired bikes to explore the city. Beijing has beautiful hutongs (lanes and alleyways) which are full of local oldies cooking in the street and children playing as well as an incredible network of cycle lanes and over the next few days we whizzed around the city faster than you could walk or drive. It turns out that you have to get permission from the government to buy a car (a small effort to curb the huge pollution problem), you basically enter a ‘lottery’ and your chances are one in about 1000, you could be waiting for years! You do not, however, need permission to buy any electric vehicle, scooter, or any of the strangely small ‘car meets scooter’ things we saw sharing our bike lanes.
We made the obligatory visit to the ‘fake’ mall, which is actually a real mall just full of fake merchandise. We mad our way stealthily through the calls of ‘lady you want bag?, mister you want Rolex?’ and decided we could play the game. We had done our research. We left feeling like we had robbed them – a pair of ‘Vans’ trainers, a ‘smart’ watch, a ‘G-Shock watch’ and a ‘Hermes’ handbag for a grand total of £50. A bargain for ‘real and authentic products’.
Of course one cannot leave Beijing without checking out the Great Wall. And of course we had to visit the day after a huge snow fall. It was like walking into a fairytale! Snow covered trees, large winding paths, viewpoints that look out into misty nothingness! It was a shame that you could not see the large extent of the wall as it twisted its way around the mountains, but perhaps this worked to our benefit as we were able to carry on without noticing the dramatic inclines that we were trudging up, although our legs were certainly feeling it!
After a week stationery it was time to be on the move again and we were excited to be catching a bullet train to Shanghai, reaching speeds of up to 315km/hour, cutting the 1200km journey to around five hours. However, our trip totalled to about 17 hours! We arrived at the station at 9:45 to collect our tickets for the 11 o’clock train only to be told that we hadn’t actually booked them and the next available train was at 1:45pm. So we hung around in Starbucks making use of the fee wifi. We then decided to find some kind of luggage storage so we could walk around a little more comfortably. We went upstairs to the departures lounge and found what we were looking for. We also found that there were severe train delays. Information could not tell us why they were delayed, more of a language barrier than unhelpful staff. We waited and watched the departure lounge fill up and fill up and I will never again complain about how busy Waterloo station gets when there are delays! With no information and fear of missing our train we continued to wait along with everyone else. At about 2:30 we collected our bags and barged through the crowd to our gate to wait there and at about 3 o’clock there was some movement. An official lady walked past us and we showed her our tickets and were told to ‘go, go, go’, we crashed through the crowd and found ourselves running along the platform. What a waste of time! We then sat on this incredibly fast bullet train going nowhere for over an hour, watching the train on the platform next to us arrive and then depart again. Finally we were on the move, reaching top speeds of around 18km/hour. It was slow going and I was trying to avoid the maths equation of how long it might take us to cover the 1200km. We lost track of time, but at some point we felt the train rumble underneath us and watch the speedometer slowly climb to the 300+ speeds we had been promised. In the early hours of the morning we chugged into Shanghai Railway station and having missed the last tube, negotiated a taxi to deliver us to our hostel and a much needed bed!
Shanghai was a buzzing metropolis of ultra new world meets old European. Our first morning (actually nearing lunch after our long travel day) we ventured out for coffee and found that the European style buildings are not just attractions for tourists but for newly weds having their wedding pictures taken. We literally walked past about seven couples posing for their pictures and if this wasn’t odd enough, when they were done the lovely ladies would hitch up their dresses to enable them to move on to their next location only to reveal jeans and trainers underneath! This seemed to occur everyday and made for entertaining coffee drinking viewing. We explored The Bund (the waterfront), taking a very trippy underwater tram that made us feel like we were entering the world of Willy Wonka and marvelled at the futuristic world on the other side. Over the next few days we explored tiny lanes in the French Concession, made some quirky purchases from local boutiques, paid too much for beers in a western bar and sampled cheap and delicious local street food.
On our last day we decided to take the quick way to the airport- the Maglev Train. We thought 300km/hour on the bullet train was quick, but the the Maglev (deriving from magnetic levitation) had promised 400km/hour over a six minute journey. By golly we were flying! It felt like a giant straight roller coaster and we could barely make out the Shanghai landscape as we sped past.
Overall, our Chinese experience could be described as delectable, alluring, energetic and unexpected!
