Ticket to Ride Read online

  I am standing by a fence lined with pink flowers and what appear to be purple cabbage plants, pondering whether they are indeed cabbages – as this would be quite strange – when I meet my first Chinese rail fan. His name is Jangei and he works for China Construction Bank, he says. He has spiky hair, a green jacket, checked shirt and a hurried, twitchy manner.

  Jangei blinks, rubs an ear, shifts from one foot to another, and tells me, 'I come here by high-speed train. Much more comfortable and fast than before. From Shanghai to Beijing in five hours.'

  Before this fast line opened in 2011, the journey would have taken double that.

  'It's much easier for us to get every place now,' he says, brushing an eyebrow, as though troubled by a fly.

  How much did his Shanghai–Beijing ticket cost?

  'Oh about five hundred, something like that,' he says, jutting his jaw.

  He is talking about 500 yuan, which is about £50. This is for an 819-mile journey: 6p a mile.

  'It is very big change for us. Beijing to Guangzhou, used to be twenty-four hours,' he says. 'Now eight hours.'

  This journey, from the Chinese capital to Guangzhou, a city in the south, is the longest high-speed rail line in the world, covering 1,428 miles. Further tracks beyond Guangzhou are planned southwards to Hong Kong, possibly to be completed as early as 2017, thus creating a symbolic link between the centre of Chinese power and the former British colony, where demonstrations against government control of the media and other aspects of life have been held so often in recent times.

  'Now I think China will change very fast,' Jangei says, holding still for a moment. 'Politics…' he adds mysteriously. His voice trails off. 'We have a good government,' he comments loudly. Then his eyes dart behind me. 'I think it is very dangerous,' he says in a quieter voice. 'This is our government place. In Tiananmen Square, if we talk politics, or something like that…' He does not complete the sentence.

  He twitches and pauses. 'Facebook, you know, it doesn't work around here,' he says, as though that explains everything. 'Come – let's go for a beer.'

  We walk down a dark, tree-lined side street; the light has dimmed rapidly. As we do, Jangei asks me if I am a journalist. I say I'm a tourist. He casts a sideways look.

  'Here. Inside,' he says.

  We are at a shop with a single fluorescent light; a sign saying, BEER, COFFEE, DRINKS; and hanging strips of plastic in the doorway, as at a butcher's. Jangei is shiftier than ever; his conversation seems to have been leading up to this point.

  I go with the flow.

  We enter a grimy, cramped space with an empty counter and a fridge. A hunched woman known to Jangei wordlessly ushers us beyond the fridge into a windowless back room with pistachio walls, another fluorescent light, and a red rose in a vase on a small table with a circular board marked with colourful symbols. This board appears to be a drinking game. A sticky, laminated food-and-drink menu is produced. Jangei jabbers to the woman, who disappears and returns with two bottles of Budweiser. She opens these and Jangei fills a small tumbler with beer. He downs the tumbler in one and bangs the empty glass. I copy him. He wipes his hand across his mouth. He has stopped fidgeting and now holds a steady stare. There is no one else in BEER, COFFEE, DRINKS, and this is its only room.

  'Ganbei,' he says. This, apparently, means 'cheers'.

  Our 'shots' of Budweiser proceed quickly, with me following Jangei's lead. The bottles won't last long.

  Jangei talks about his family: 'I have a child. If I have a second one, I lose my job. I would like to have a second one, but one is also good.'

  He engages in a bit of chit-chat. I tell him about my train journeys planned for China. Jangei tells me he wants to travel by train from 'London to Roma, or something like that'. Washington DC is another place on his holiday list. I mention that I once visited Shanghai. He asks me which hotel I stayed at. 'That is very expensive hotel,' he says, seeming to consider the matter.

  We finish our beers.

  'Tea,' says Jangei. 'In China, when drink beer, must have tea. Tea means friendship.'

  The menu is confusing; I order a cup of the cheapest tea. Shortly afterwards two steaming pots of tea arrive. I look again at the menu: these pots are 230 yuan (about £23 each), rather than £3 for a cup. I look at Jangei again. The bill for all of this will be more than £50, the price of a Beijing–Shanghai train fare. His manner has changed. He's super calm now, with a quizzical expression, as though he's trying to read my thoughts.

  I tell Jangei I won't pay the full bill as I only ordered a cup. His mood switches once more. He turns angry. He makes a show of throwing some yuan notes on the table. 'So I will pay for the tea!' he says.

  I place 200 yuan (£20) on the drinking-game board. Jangei looks at it and shrugs. I leave and he follows into the front chamber. I cross through the butcher's strips of plastic. He steps halfway out to watch me go and I turn to take a picture of him in front of BEER, COFFEE, DRINKS. He darts inside before I manage to do so. This is the last I see of Jangei.

  I have, I realise, just been conned by a Chinese rail enthusiast (of sorts).

  China: it's a long way to go to catch a train. From Macedonia to Beijing is about 6,600 miles. On these rail journeys around the globe, I'm going to do a fair bit of leaping about. But that's the way it is with rail interest, as I'd discovered from my friends back in Kosovo: you select each trip and savour the ride, like dining out at a series of good restaurants. Charlie, Mike, Johnnie and the others collected their train journeys over years, building up a back catalogue of experiences. If I am to get into the 'train zone', if you like – if I am to approach Boocock levels of train Zen, though I cannot quite see that happening – I won't do it in one great go. I need to bide my time: hop here and there; take to the tracks and see where they may lead. Besides, I don't want to suffer rail fatigue by setting off on one enormous journey. I intend to come to each trip fresh, with a sense of adventure as I walk down the platform and step on board.

  Heading to the Far East so early in my quest, however, I have an aim in mind. The spread of high-speed tracks in China has been one of the transport tales of our times. Throughout Europe, lines are linking up – there are EU plans for a trans-European high-speed rail network with 'corridors' of tracks – but the big rail story, where you can really see the future of trains, is in the People's Republic of China. Or so it would seem, based on the pace of construction of bullet-train tracks and shiny new stations. With centralised control – and, crucially, nobody daring to get in the way – a vast new web of lines has come into being in the past dozen years. The country almost appears to be gripped by the kind of 'railway mania' that swept Britain in the mid nineteenth century.

  Into the haze

  Beijing to Xi'an

  At Beijing West station, the morning after my encounter with 'Jangei', I'm about to find out what it's all about. I show my passport to a female officer in a blue uniform and a peaked cap with a hammer-and-sickle symbol, and step into a cavernous hall with neon signs indicating a KFC and a McDonald's. At first glance, it might be a station just about anywhere in Europe. There's a disappointing international conformity. Then I notice all the noodle shops. In between the familiar fast-food logos, long rows of colourful stalls sell stacks of noodles in plastic pots as well as boxes of tea, bottles of liquor and vacuum-wrapped packets of Peking duck. I go to one and buy some beef and onion noodles; it's possible, I've been told, to heat the noodles using hot-water taps positioned between the carriages. There is a rite-of-passage feeling to this purchase. Passport: check! Ticket: check! Noodles: paid for! Ready to go! I'm about to become just another one of the massive country's 1.3 billion noodle eaters.

  Signs are, usefully, in both Chinese and English: LUGGAGE ATTENDANT… BOOKS… STORE… VIP WAITING ROOM. Security is tight, with guards with jackboots and guns keeping an eye on matters. There's a reason for this. Earlier in the year, knife-wielding terrorists believed to be seeking independence for Xinjiang (or they could have been Uighur Muslim
s, a Turkic ethnic group, no one is quite sure) killed 29 people and injured 140 others at Kunming's train station. This event shocked the nation and authorities brought in airport-style ID and ticket checks at stations across the country.

  In waiting room number ten – not for VIPs – I take a seat next to a shop selling toy bullet trains, Hello Kitty watches and pictures of revered Chinese generals. My train has a final destination of Baoji, although I will be disembarking after about six hours in Xi'an, just to the east of Baoji. This is to be the first stop-off on my speedy tour of China, travelling from Beijing to Xi'an, then onwards to Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai and back to Beijing, completing a giant circle. It's a total distance of about 2,500 miles and I'm doing it in a week. Having only ever visited China for a day or two before, it's an introduction to the complicated country from the tracks up: fast, fast, fast, all the way.

  Everything moves quickly.

  This includes my fellow passengers heading for the ticket barrier. The Chinese notion of queuing does not, it is fair to say, correspond with the British. An announcement is made that the train is boarding. The entire population of the waiting room arises and bulldozes towards an automatic barrier that does not work if you have a 'manual only' ticket, as I have. I back out through the football-stadium-style crush, being treated to a rich assortment of what can only be Mandarin Chinese curses, find the 'manual only' ticket gate, give my 'manual only' ticket to the 'manual only' inspector, who is wearing a natty peaked cap with a red-andgold band, and make my way to a sleek, eel-like train with CRH written on its side. This stands for China Railway High-Speed. It is electric and this particular train is a G-class running on a standard gauge track (for those who really want to know).

  I'm in second class, in a blue seat with a polka-dot pattern and a window view. The passenger next to me sits down and proceeds to tuck into a McDonald's chicken wrap and hash browns. He sips a McDonald's coffee and ignores me. He's wearing a leather jacket that he never removes, plus a pair of heavy-framed tinted glasses. There is, I cannot help feeling, something sneaky about him.

  We depart at 08:10, precisely on time. And as we venture, swiftly, towards Beijing's suburbs, I begin to get a sense of the sheer size of the country – as well as some of its pressing problems. It's an eye-opening start. Through my window, inhuman tower block after inhuman tower block soon appears, rising murkily through a haze of orange-brown sky. This haze, I quickly discover, never goes away. Sure, there had been smog at Tiananmen Square, but it's only now, as we slide out of the city, that its pervasiveness strikes me. In this cindery gloom, the blocks – many of which are still being built and are surrounded by cranes – look especially forbidding: ugly, unrelenting, soul-sapping and all very Big Brother. What's it like to live in the shadowy suburbs of Beijing, gazing out across the misty cityscape – one of 1.3 billion people in a country where speaking out too much might land you in prison or cause you to simply disappear?

  I raise this here as, in the run-up to my visit, I have been following an Amnesty International campaign to highlight the plight of more than 220 lawyers and activists who either went missing or were detained for speaking out about human rights earlier in the year. The Chinese Communist Party paper, The People's Daily, had recently accused them of being part of a criminal operation to 'undermine social stability'. Lawyers from the Fengrui law firm, based in Beijing, had been rounded up – including the prominent lawyer Wang Fu, who text-messaged friends to say that her house was being broken into late one night. This is the last anyone heard of her. Fengrui had been defending human-rights activists as well as the prominent Uighur academic Ilham Tohti.

  Happy train travels! Seeing China from its high-speed tracks seems somehow to take you a step away from usual tourist affairs – the pandas, the pagodas, the Great Wall – and closer to the reality of life viewed from your window. Amnesty International's assessment of China runs thus: 'The authorities continue to severely restrict the right to freedom of expression. Activists and human-rights defenders risk harassment and arbitrary detention. Torture and other ill treatment remain widespread and access to justice is elusive to many. Ethnic minorities including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians face discrimination and increased security crackdown. Record numbers of workers have been on strike demanding better pay and conditions.'

  Fume-bellowing factories, tumbledown warehouses, ramshackle junkyards and electricity depots zip by as we begin to gather pace. The driver shifts smoothly through the gears, and the train begins to float along. A digital monitor at the end of the carriage shows our speed: 290 kmph (181 mph). Yet more grim Manhattans of concrete and steel arise, before we break into farmland with long, thin, rectangular plots of land.

  Television screens in the carriage show Communist Party officials attending a press conference, then flashing cameras at the unveiling of a new car model at what seems to be a trade show. Neighbours behind me slurp noodles and crunch on prawn crackers. The smell of both fills the air. Mobile phones ring. Tweets bleep (even though Twitter is also banned in China). Elderly men noisily clear their throats in a manner that would be unacceptable back home. During one especially violent spell of coughing, it's as though a hacking competition has begun. If they weren't so dreadful, the lung-wrenching, guttural sounds could almost be considered comical: it's as though I'm in a carriage full of human bullfrogs (with twenty-a-day smoking habits).

  After a stop at Xinxiangdong, I take a walk along the train. There appear to be four classes of carriage. These consist of 'business class' (extremely comfortable, fully-reclining, scoop-shaped seats, with slippers provided), 'premier class' (ruby-red leather seats with satin-esque throw cushions, not fully reclining), 'first class' (similar to premier, but not quite as fancy), and 'second class', where I am amid the hackers. There may also be a 'third class', as some carriages seem to have seats with slightly less legroom, although I may be imagining this and, as my Chinese is limited to ganbei, I'm having to rely on what I see.

  The train has 15 carriages in total including a buffet car. Here, I buy a 'VIP Executive Ready Meal' – the noodles can wait. This VIP lunch comes in a moulded plastic tray with sections that contain salty beef and potato, sticky white rice, sweet and sour chicken, spinach (or something like spinach), and a thin vegetable soup. A toothpick is provided with toothpick written on it. The price is 45 yuan (£4.70). I sit at a red wooden table, opposite a middle-aged woman in an aquamarine-and-sequin outfit who is slowly eating sunflower seeds. She nods, smiles and pops a sunflower seed in her mouth, looking out at a little river cutting through paddy fields. In the middle of this river a white stork stands dead still, not bothered in the slightest by the bullet train. I try my VIP meal. It's spicy, pleasingly strange and makes a happy change from overpriced, cardboard sandwiches back home. We pass Luoyanglongmen, then pause at LingBaoXi. I nod goodbye to my dining companion, and return to my second-class seat.

  The man with the tinted glasses has vanished – and so has the guidebook I left in the pocket on the back of the seat in front. Maybe he took it. Maybe someone else did. Who needs a guidebook anyway? Cartoons flicker on the television screen. Factory stacks and cooling towers scud by. The train sways gently as we hit 300 kmph, then creep upwards: 302 kmph, 303 kmph, 304 kmph… This top speed is 190 mph, although the trains could go as fast as 219 mph, were it not for speed restrictions. A head conductor of some sort skips down our carriage – she's wearing a burgundy miniskirt and knee-high boots and has a microphone hooked to her ear, as if she is about to appear on The X Factor. Outside, a car factory, a shanty town of corrugated abodes and a dusty plain appear in the mist. Then a massive construction site emerges, as though a whole new city is being built.

  Amid this hive of activity, the train slows and stops. We have arrived in Xi'an, in its 'North Business Development Zone'.

  I know this because I have been met by Sally, my contact in the city, and she's told me so. I've arranged to be collected at the station, shown round for a day and taken back to my next train. This
is sightseeing on the quick, but it's not just the sights that interest me.

  'This development zone, we do this because of the railways,' says Sally, who is, I soon learn, a single mother, originally from Inner Mongolia. She's short and well wrapped up in a scarlet scarf, even though it's not all that cold. She wants to tell me… everything.

  'High-speed trains come in 2012. It is half the price of flying to Beijing: 515 yuan.' This works out at £54. A journey on a slow, overnight sleeper would, she says, cost just £31.

  'Around the station we are building. High-speed trains make China change. Everywhere is smaller. Everywhere is connected, like a big family. There are more choices for different holidays. Everyone has the right to enjoy their free time. In China you have first-tier cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing. These have become very expensive places in the last fifteen years. Then you have second-tier cities: Lanzhou, Taiyuan, Yinchuan, Qinghai and Xi'an. Deng Xiaoping [who led China from 1978 to 1992], he developed the south of the country, because it was close to the ports. Now develop north of country.'