From Switzerland to Viet Naam, overland, 2005. Part Six: Beijing to H Ni The Beijing-Ha Noi Express after 5p.m.

Beijing time. Well, I've been on the train an hour, we're heading south and... it's got colder and it's started snowing again. According to the Chinese TV weather forecast last night, it should have been about -4C in Beijing today. I think it's a little warmer than that, but it's still very cold. There are beautiful icicles which have formed on the trees that I can see. ************ One thing to say about this train is that the corridors really are for 'corridoring'. They're very narrow -much narrower than the ones on the TransSiberian- and it's almost impossible for two people to pass - certainly not two medium-tolarge sized Europeans. There ARE small seats, but it was like playing musical chairs when I tried to sit there. The Oriental travellers are already lying on their bunks (hence my attempt to sit down in the corridor), but there is constant traffic between the carriages.... I'm half expecting to be marshalled to the end of our carriage by a team of joggers, but so far it's just been about 20 train attendants walking (in step?) to the restaurant car, having settled all the passengers into their compartments. The corridors really are for walking, not at all for doing what I'm doing now, which is trying to make myself as slim as possible and looking out of the window. But as my only alternative is to go into our compartment and climb onto the top bunk at a quarter past five in the afternoon, I'll stay outside here as long as possible, risking the irritated grunts of all these people training for the Boston Marathon..... The friend of one of the men in my compartment is already asleep and several others are in their pyjamas, squeezing past me in one direction or the other to go to the loo or the washroom to clean their teeth. ....I've just been joined by two young girls from one of the compartments who are pretending to have a conversation with me. They talk to each other and to me, listen to my non-existent reply in perfect Chinese, then one of them agrees with what I (haven't) said, the other disagrees, then they both turn back to me to listen to my obviously-much-appreciated response. I can feel my grin has stretched to watermelon proportions. They're really very good. It's a sophisticated update on conversations with invisible friends that many of us invented when we were very small; but these young ladies are probably in their early teens. Some of those men changed into their pyjamas before we left Beijing West Station. Perhaps they have to work early tomorrow morning... or do they know something I don't? Outside in the middle of nowhere, in the passing countryside there are firework displays every half kilometre. The TET will carry on until 23rd in various forms, as I think I might have said before, but the first week was the most important period, which finished on Tuesday and people -most of them anyway- went back to work on Wednesday. I'm waiting to cross the Yangtse... I haven't looked at a map I'm ashamed to

say, but I've been told that the train should cross the Yangtse, so if it does, I'm looking forward to seeing it. The two young girls think I'm playing something similar to their game, because I put my MP3 on pause between the bits and pieces that I'm recording, so I seem to be having a conversation with a nobody... ********** I had to switch back on again: I need to go to the LOO, so I've just been up the corridor. The toilet's nice and clean, but it's of the Turkish variety. I had experience of the type when I was working at Borgo Piave in Lazio in about 1970, teaching English to the Italian Airforce. The officers had sit-down loos, but the erks, the other ranks, had to squat. They're very hygienic, but I'm not at all sure how I'm going to manage one on a train which is... pretty smooth, but nevertheless, shaking about a bit and where there are no visible means of support... no handles, which we DID have on the various Italian Air Force bases. My balance isn't what it was 30 or 40 years ago, so if I disappear down the plug-hole, you'll know what's happened to me. Once more into the bog, dear friends, once more.... ********* Well, the toilet worked out OK in the end. My initial worry was of overbalancing and toppling backwards and, already projecting the 'worst scenario', trying to clean myself up enough to be an acceptable companion for the rest of the journey to Ha Noi. I did an Edward de Bono and, wearing my '7 Hats', came up with an interesting half dozen solutions to the first problem... all of which proved sadly useless when it came to problem No. 2: having used two hands to ensure equilibrium, where did I acquire a 3rd hand for the very necessary paperwork? Which meant that my half dozen solutions to problem No.1 were OK as far as they went, but they didn't go far enough. Setting aside the possibility of 3rd Party intervention, I decided to sacrifice a perfectly good handkerchief, which I soaked in warm water in an empty plastic pot noodle bowl, placed within easy reach on the floor. The details might be of use to anyone else in a similar plight who finds it difficult to get out of a rigid thinking mind-set. Whatever you do, don't even consider moistening present-day toilet paper - it just doesn't hold water.... ************** We've only stopped once so far, in 3 1/2hrs... and it occurred to me that, apart from these huge, huge cities, we're passing through other cities that are certainly much larger than Coventry, but the train doesn't stop, it just goes straight through. I think it was in the China Daily yesterday -or perhaps I heard it on the news- that there are prizes offered -money from the government- and that there are 183 towns, each of them working away to become classified officially as "a metropolis". That will give them more money, more prestige, and more appeal, they believe, as far as attracting foreign investment is concerned.... .....foreign investment that will arrive in a very strange series of ways. Italy, for example, is going to pay... not really a lot of money... $1.53 million to China, to offload some of its carbon dioxide emissions.... one of those cynical... well I think it's cynical, anyway... attitudes: I don't have to get rid of my lot, I'll farm the money out to the developing world, who at the moment don't have any

"limitations" or demands made on them, they just have to do the best they can, while I can sit in my Italian.... whatever it is... and get my cows to fart... until the cows come home and... I'm still doing something for the ecological well-being of the planet. Incidentally, ecological well-being of the planet and farting apart, I have just had a superb meal here on the train... really very nice indeed. In the restaurant car... took one photograph and... "Hi!"... that was the guy who sat opposite me while we were eating. Ciao. ************** Coming overland has shown me again just how small the world really is. Even if I had no problem with flying, I would never like to meet a different culture except via boat, train, road (with certain caveats) or on foot. 'Nature' and people are what the world is all about. Technology is a means, NEVER an end. ************** It's a quarter to nine a.m. local time. There's no more snow, but the fields look like Chinese water-colours, under constant rain. BUT.... ...we're going along beside -I'm pretty sure, it's- the Yangtze River... unless we come across something even wider in the next couple of hours! This reminds me of a play I did at the Butts, donkeys' years ago... I played a young IRA gunman, who was a bit of an intellectual... I got shot... with a real pistol, actually... the wadding of cardboard hit me in the chest each evening and I had a bruise... I remember the guy playing the special policeman used his own (official) revolver, which really surprised me, because I believed all our policemen were unarmed at that time... Anyway, the young IRA gun died singing about: "Li Po also died drunk... He tried to embrace the moon in the Yellow River..." and 'Bang!' I was dead on the floor.... I don't think my singing was all that bad! The Yellow River... So, 24 hours more... no less than that, 23hrs... and I'll be in Ha Noi. ************** Today's the 18th of February and I've been on this train for about 31hrs. Only by having seen baby water buffalo today do I realise that I've never actually seen photographs of them. They're so indicative of South East Asia. You see photos of water buffalo either working or calmly lying down waiting to be called to work, but I've never seen a baby one. This afternoon I saw one with its mother... and just now there were two cows with their offspring... I haven't seen many, but obviously it's the right season to see small ones... with one parent and... well, I don't know what else to say, except that it came as a real surprise and I needed to readjust my visual memory bank. ************** It's at least the 6th time this has happened... we've just gone through a city with surface area of Zurich, but harpooned with hundreds of high-rise buildings, so there must be a population of at least 5 million, but it's not considered big enough, or important enough, for the train to actually stop there. ************** Having spent those days in Beijing and now getting an impression of the back yards in these huge cities, there's something else that has struck me as very

surprising... as we move through the countryside, the rural areas in Southern China, the peasants (although that's hardly the right word) seem to be much better off, live much better, be better organised than their brothers and sisters in the big towns. So I now understand what was being said in the interview on the Chinese News the other day, when the man from Citibank said that distribution of wealth was very, very important and that city-dwellers had to be brought up to the level of the others. ************** It's 9.15p.m. local time and we're just pulling out of Nanning... a place we pulled into a couple of hours ago. We were than asked to get off while the train was cleaned and station attendants took us in a crocodile to the waiting room. One very attractive English-speaking lady eventually came along and said: "Yes, certainly, you can go out of the station through that door over there. There's a restaurant just across the road... " But we had to make sure we were back inside at 9 o'clock. However the door proved to be very firmly locked, although they did unlock it to let 2 or 3 Chinese people get out. But they wouldn't allow anybody else to go, I think, probably very wisely ... I didn't see how or when the Chinese came back, but at least they had been able to communicate with people, because after the pretty lady disappeared, nobody else could actually speak to us in any of the European languages on offer. ************** According to my ticket, that I've just looked at, we're due at Dong Dang across the border at 3 o'clock in the morning, which seems rather late... so, unless we have another long hang up going across the border into Viet Naam, it's a bit of a mystery... We've got back onto the train again, because they had locked all our compartments up with our luggage inside (we'd been told to just take our valuables with us), so they couldn't have done a lot of cleaning... there were only 3 carriages left of what had started off from Beijing, which was quite a long train of 17 or 18 carriages. So there are only 3 left, unless we pick up some local ones down here... but the sad thing is we won't pick up is a restaurant car. So it's back to my Spelt biscuits, some nuts that I bought and a bottle of water. Perhaps we'll be able to buy something at the border....