Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  He picked up a platter of momos and a dish of fried noodles, and disappeared into the next room.

  Jem was thrilled with his dumplings, which, although misshapen, were delicious. After passing around small bowls of steaming rice, Jhampa ladled out the curry, which shimmered with fat and screamed with chillies. Sitting around the table in the warmth of this family was a fitting way to end our time in Tibet. But the ache of imminent departure had already settled in my stomach, and no amount of good food could ease the pain. Seeing Tibet in all its naked hopelessness had crushed me, and I welled up thinking about what it would be like next year, the year after and the year after that, its essence diluting and draining away. Jem took my hand under the table and I saw that he too had red eyes. I gave him a doleful smile and Marc looked across at us.

  ‘Don’t you two start or you’re going to make me cry, too,’ he said, helping himself to the last of the momos. We walked back to the hotel in silence, our breath curling on the night air. A low moon followed until we passed the golden roof of the Jokhang Temple, where it came to rest. The square was still open to prostrating pilgrims, banging their wooden blocks and sweeping along the ground. On we walked, the sweep growing fainter until we turned a corner and could hear them no more.

  12

  The Old Silk Road

  ‘Um Gottes Willen! Da schläft ja ein Mann hier!’

  A German woman with a side plait and hooped earrings pushed past me as I wandered out to see what the commotion was about. She was now dragging her guide behind her and shoved past me a second time, pointing into the compartment where Marc was sitting up in his berth looking confused. He took off his headphones.

  ‘What’s she yelling about?’

  ‘She’s complaining that there’s a man sleeping in her compartment.’

  ‘It’s not her compartment. I was here first. It’s my compartment.’

  ‘Keineswegs!’

  Making an educated guess as to the gist of her rant, I pieced together bits of GCSE German, trying to remember the minefield of datives, genitives and accusatives, before resorting to English to reassure the angry fräulein that Marc wasn’t going to do anything to her.

  ‘Is that so?’ she snapped, her face flushed with fury.

  ‘God, don’t flatter yourself, love,’ Marc said. He gathered up his things. ‘And don’t worry, I’m not staying in here with a bunch of uptight Germans.’

  Annoyed that he now had to drag his bags round into our compartment, Marc hauled himself up into one of the spare berths and took out his computer. ‘If someone comes I’ll just pretend to be asleep and they can share with her – or she can stand in the aisle for the next thirty hours.’

  Leaving Lhasa Vegas just before noon, we’d boarded train seventy of the journey to find Marc had been booked into a separate compartment, which implied another couple would be joining us at some point along the route back to mainland China. Much like our journey up to Lhasa, the return service carried only Chinese passengers – and now the German tour group. A smattering of Tibetan nomads had disembarked within the first few stops of the journey, standing on deserted platforms in oversized coats, their cheeks aflame in the bright cold. Guilt-ridden, I pinned back the curtains allowing the last we’d see of the Tibetan light to flood into the compartment. Contrary to China’s relentless propaganda machine, the train did little to help Tibet from remaining ‘backwards’, and everything to help Han Chinese move forward in eroding Tibetan indigenous culture and extracting what they could. Apologists who championed the construction of the train, arguing that it had modernised and revolutionised the lives of Tibetans, were the same ones who insisted the British had gifted the railways to India, ignoring that building the railways was hardly an act of benevolence towards the Indian people, rather a fast-track plan to govern more efficiently, facilitate the plunder of loot, and line their pockets at the expense of the Indian taxpayer who had footed the bill for the railways’ construction. Emerging like an umbilical cord, the proposed new high-speed line from Chengdu would help to further feed off the region. And here we were, hopping on for the ride, keeping the train in business and justifying its existence. Plugging in my earphones, I stared at the shades of navy and turquoise blending through an expanse of lake, a whisper of waves lifted by the breeze. Nothing but water and sunshine, the view was extraordinary in its beauty. Playing back my conversation with Lucy, I felt somewhat relieved by her admittance that foreigners in Tibet provided eyes and ears for Tibetans who, maimed of their own, devoured guidebooks to gain an understanding of what lay beyond their reach. And even if they couldn’t leave Tibet, it was imperative that their stories did.

  Kneeling up on the carpet, Jem pulled out a map and spread it open across his berth to examine our onward route. After almost seven months on the rails our adventure was winding down: from this point on we were heading back to London. Although Marc hadn’t travelled on the Trans-Mongolian, we’d vetoed taking that train for the second time. The thought of spending another eleven days eating dill and dried noodles was too painful to consider. Instead, we’d plotted a route via the old Silk Road, climbing up to Xinjiang province in northwest China, then crossing the border to Kazakhstan, travelling up Russia, and home through Europe. Our original and more ambitious plan was to travel down from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, where the Trans-Asia Express would have taken us from Tehran to Tabriz, and across to Ankara and Istanbul, from where it was easy to wind through Eastern Europe. But days after we’d made enquiries, a spate of terrorist attacks by Isis and Kurdish separatists along the southeast Turkish border had suspended the service indefinitely.

  That night, we left the curtains open, unwilling to shut out the Qinghai skies. Wherever I travelled to, I always left knowing I could return, but there was a finality to the way in which we were sweeping across the soundless plateau, as though we were the last audience to catch the show before it closed. The moon was at its fullest, rolling along the ground, illuminating the origins of the Yangtze river, which shone like strands of silver against the black. I’d fallen asleep knowing that someone else was likely to arrive during the night, and woke the following morning to find a heavily pregnant Chinese lady lying in the berth below. Easing down the side of the bunk so as not to wake her, I peered out into the corridor and found her husband asleep, upright on a hard seat that he’d pulled down from the wall. The couple had boarded in the middle of the night and the German woman had refused to let him into her compartment, locking the door. After patting the poor man awake so he could move into her now-empty compartment and claim his berth, we took ourselves off to the dining car where we found the German group eating Knäckebrot and cheese. Every crunch of the flat dry bread sent a spasm of sadness through me, as I watched them reject the fundamentals of what made travel so wonderful: surrendering to the unknown; forging relationships; relinquishing home comforts and discovering new ones. What had kept our journey alive and moving was the constant clash of the familiar with the unfamiliar, catching us off guard and keeping us alert. As I spooned up my bowl of congee and pickles, I saw now that those fundamentals mirrored my relationship with Jem. When we got engaged we thought we knew everything there was to know about the other, but over the previous seven months we had constantly surprised ourselves, as we adapted to changing surroundings and tackled new challenges, discovering traits in each other’s personalities that could only be invoked by the dynamics of travel.

  Coming from a country as small and insular as England, it wasn’t surprising that we were still unable to gauge the sheer size and scale of China. Refusing to leave the country without visiting the Terracotta Warriors, Marc had insisted we travel from Lhasa to Xi’an – instead of back to Xining, from where we could have connected to Turfan and Urumqi in the northwest. Arguing that it was insanity to come this far and not visit the sculptures – ‘It’s just two stops after Xining’ – he’d convinced us to double back on ourselves to get to the city, which had looked on the map like it was a couple
of thumb-widths away, but had added an extra ten hours to our journey – about the same time it would have taken to fly home to London. From Xi’an we set off in drizzle, driving for an hour out of the city before arriving in rain, to find a traffic jam of taxis, coaches and guided-tour groups, which further dampened my mood.

  In 1974, a group of villagers were digging a well when they discovered fragments of the first warrior, unearthing one of the archaeological wonders of modern history. Concealed in subterranean structures made from earth and wood, the warriors were gathered together in partitioned corridors paved with bricks. A light wooden roof was then covered with fine soil, which had kept an estimated 8,000 warriors and their horses, chariots and weapons hidden for more than 2,000 years. The construction of the mausoleum was thought to have been ordered by Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, to guard him in his afterlife. Housed in three different buildings, the warrior pits were now essentially active archaeological digs. To get to them required walking through a village selling plastic replicas of the warriors, along with warriors on mugs, warriors on T-shirts, and warriors on aprons, with models of the warriors guarding the doors of each shop. Self-defeating in its layout, the village did nothing but lessen my enthusiasm at each step until I arrived at the pits, with no interest in going in.

  Our plan was to save the main pit until the end to guarantee the wow factor, and we began at the second and third pits, unsure what to expect. Dimly lit, they echoed with the babble of visitors and lost friends waving and yelling at each other across the room. Edging towards the perimeter, I peered down over the wall, expecting to be floored by the sight of thousands of figures, only to find four pottery horses and a few headless warriors in a ziggurat. Wandering around, I came across Jem, then Marc, looking as confused as I was. Moving off to the next pit, we found piles of limbs and faces covered in sticky notes, and some plastic sheeting. We agreed that the main pit was probably the place to be. Contained within an aircraft hangar, the entrance to the pit was bottlenecked with hundreds of tourists in wet weather gear, shaking off umbrellas and pushing the smalls of each other’s backs in a futile attempt to move closer; in a country of 1.4 billion, every inch was important. The Chinese had succeeded in earning a universally bad reputation as international tourists, with one of their own vice-premiers – there were four for some unknown reason – bemoaning the way they conducted themselves abroad, carving their names into heritage sites, crossing roads at red lights, and stealing airline cutlery. But as we waited among the crush of visitors, it was clear that this behaviour wasn’t saved up for their holidays – it was standard practice.

  For more than half an hour, we shuffled between pushy children and grandmas as vicious as they were small, all the while looking down at our feet and trying not to glimpse the warriors before the big moment when they came into view. As we neared the front, I kept my eyes low, then whipped my head up and looked out across the clay corridors, only to find we’d been funnelled in through the back of the hangar by a member of staff trying to manage the crowds. The vision was certainly impressive in its ability to be anticlimactic beyond the realm of all expectation. Furious, we were now shoved up against a barrier, looking onto a patch of decapitated figures wrapped in cling film and a few numbered plastic boxes. The other thousand or so warriors stood with their backs to us. It didn’t bode well that I was standing witness to apparently one of the greatest modern discoveries, but wishing I’d stayed in bed at an inner-city Ibis. But it was better to have come and leave disappointed, than to have not come and be disappointed, imagining I’d missed something worth being disappointed about. The warriors weren’t fully unearthed, so it was really one of the greatest modern half-discoveries, the rest covered in soil and maybe buried underground. Nor were the warriors terracotta; they were more a washed-out peach colour.

  Pushed along by the crowd, I tried to pinpoint what was so underwhelming about the figures. For a start, looking down on the six-foot-tall warriors did them a disservice as it made it impossible to see them eye to eye, and appreciate the delicacy of their faces – each one unique. Every photo I had seen had been taken from within the pit, cropping out the sections that were under construction, suggesting the site was in a state of completion, and the warriors taller and more imposing than they were.

  ‘Imagine,’ said Marc, cradling his camera against his body, ‘two thousand years ago the Chinese were building the Terracotta Army and the Great Wall while we were scrabbling round in the dirt.’

  The discovery of the Qin emperor’s warriors made for a compelling tale, but to me, the more intriguing story was what had happened to the small group of farmers who had stumbled upon them. Swooping in to claim their land, the government demolished the village, displacing the residents with meagre compensation, most of which was alleged to have been swiped by officials. Four of the original farmers were hired to sign books for tourists at the gift shop, earning a monthly pittance, with some of the men deemed to be imposters. But it wasn’t a story that anyone around me would have cared for. Piling up books, mugs, postcards, coasters and wind-up toys, every visitor had made their mark with a selfie and a V sign, taking away souvenirs of their visit that they’d look at for no more than a day before it would all be shoved into a drawer and forgotten about.

  Nowhere is out of bounds. No matter how remote or dangerous a destination, you can be sure to meet someone who has not only been there, but has married a local woman, fallen foul of the police, spent time in prison, and has the scars on his upper arm to prove it. AJ was one such person: the Shantaram of Xinjiang province.

  We first saw him sitting at a table on his own, eating a bowl of hand-stretched noodles, when we stopped at a roadside joint for dinner. More precisely, he was chewing on one long noodle that was coiled beneath a scattering of coriander. With the exception of the emperor’s mausoleum, which was the only reason why most tourists came, Xi’an was a gritty, friendly city, where everyone went quietly about their business, whether it was selling boxes of puppies at market or pouring pints of Boddingtons at a pub. Marc and Jem had left me writing in the hotel, and had gone off on their own for the afternoon, confessing when I arrived for dinner that they’d almost bought a bulldog puppy, but realised we wouldn’t get him over the Kazakh border where he would inevitably be left behind – or eaten. During this discussion about whether or not we could have hidden the puppy in a rucksack, AJ had interrupted to ask if we were going to stay in Xinjiang on the way.

  ‘It can get kinda edgy round there,’ he said, holding his chopsticks with the claw that only Chinese people used, and I was desperate to master.

  ‘In Urumqi?’

  ‘Urumqi, Turfan …’

  ‘What do you mean by edgy?’ Jem asked.

  ‘You’re foreign, you’ll get stopped. They’ll ask you for money, bribes, tell you they’re going to take you to the police station. You need to keep a wad of cash on you to, basically, pay people off.’

  ‘Would you advise against going to Xinjiang then?’ I asked, biting into a dumpling that exploded between my teeth sending hot stock dribbling down my chin.

  ‘No, I mean, I lived and worked around there for five years, spent a couple of nights in the cells sometimes. Just be prepared to be stopped and asked all kinds of things, and you should just say yes to everything.’

  ‘Even if they ask if I want to go to jail?’ Jem asked, rubbing his hands in the cold.

  AJ ignored him. ‘Don’t drink. Don’t carry alcohol, but do carry cigarettes cos, y’know, they’re great currency. I was always kinda poor, handing over cash, but you know it’s just how it is there. And your beard,’ AJ said, pointing his chopsticks at Marc, ‘that could get you some attention.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my beard?’ Marc asked, his hand going protectively to his face.

  ‘They have a no-beard policy there now, it’s a clampdown on the Muslim-minority Uighurs. It’s not like an open thing, but the government is definitely putting a stop to the call to prayer, and headsca
rves, and so on.’

  ‘Most people just think I’m Israeli.’

  ‘I am Israeli.’ AJ finished his noodles, wiping his mouth and throwing an orange-stained napkin into the bowl. ‘It’s a pretty cool place, you guys stay safe.’

  The three of us sat staring at the table, waiting for our noodles, which were still being stretched and swung in the open kitchen.

  ‘Mon, you need to get yourself arrested, I could get some great photos of you in jail,’ said Marc.

  ‘Or maybe you could get us all arrested with your beard.’

  ‘I don’t want to shave off my beard. I quite like my beard.’

  ‘Are we still going to go?’ Jem asked.

  Previously reluctant, I realised now was the time to come clean about my misgivings on travelling through Turfan and Urumqi. ‘I read that there had been a combined bomb and knife attack in Urumqi last year.’

  ‘Where in Urumqi?’ asked Marc.

  ‘Um … the … train station. Apparently, it was an attack by Uighurs who then stood at the exit with knives after people fled the bomb.’

  ‘That’s so messed up. What are we going to do? Which route are we going to take back?’

  ‘We could flip a coin,’ said Jem. ‘Heads we get blown up by Isis, tails we get stabbed by a Uighur.’

  For the next two days, Marc wavered between wanting to shave off his beard and not wanting to shave off his beard, eventually deciding that if we were going to get stopped, arrested, mugged or stabbed, it was unlikely to be the result of his facial hair and more because we were three wealthy foreigners carrying expensive cameras and equipment. On the train to Turfan we were sitting quietly in our compartment, a cosy little hub with camels embroidered on net curtains. Marc was editing his photos, while Jem was reading Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road, and I was typing up some notes, when a big, round face appeared at the glass. Pulling back the door, the woman walked straight in, pointed at my computer and started chatting away, smiling so hard that the apples of her cheeks looked like two actual apples.