Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Turning away from the window, I looked around for someone to talk to. Jem was reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography, and Marc had wandered off to try and photograph the flatbeds in business class. This wasn’t the sort of train journey conducive to the natural striking-up of conversation. Headphones were in and eyes were closed. It would have been inappropriate to start sliding into empty seats and tapping strangers on the elbow for a chat. Another option was to stand in the vestibule in the hope of ambushing passengers on their way to the toilet, but that was about as attractive an option as being punched in the head – which would probably be their response to a weirdo hovering outside the door with a notebook and pen. Besides, maybe this journey was their only quiet time of the day, the time for parents to savour the silence and the absence of children, the time to switch off before morning meetings, the time to disengage from the speed and roar of the city. Entering that precious space would be as criminal as trying to talk to someone on the Tube. Still, I felt restless – almost enough to start kicking the back of the seat in front. The quicker the journey, the more antsy I became. Such is the paradox of high-speed travel. On the other hand, the prospect of a fifty-six-hour journey barely registered on my radar as an inconvenience. But right now, it was imperative to arrive in Shanghai on time, as I had made plans to eat dumplings and sit in my pants watching rubbish telly.

  Giving up on unearthing stories, I dug out my Kindle and began to click through the selection of books I’d optimistically loaded before leaving London. I hated my Kindle, not because I loved the smell of paper, but because I liked knowing exactly where I was at all times. The percentage was available if I looked, but it was all relative: reading 20 per cent of Fahrenheit 451 was very different from reading 20 per cent of War and Peace, and I couldn’t thumb through the pages, or wedge in a bookmark. The Kindle was also starting to look like an ugly, outdated piece of kit that was destined for the back of a bedside drawer along with my MiniDisc player and a couple of old cheque books. Incidentally, I’d given up on War and Peace on the Trans-Mongolian, and had little to no intention of going back to it unless I had a long period in hospital. Along with Catch 22 and The Satanic Verses, it was just one of those books with which I was not fated to have a positive relationship. I had almost reached the end of The Dinner by Herman Koch, when the battery died, renewing my hatred for the device. But at that moment, I noticed passengers stretching, pulling on shoes and re-tying their hair. It was just before 7 p.m., and after only six hours we were already slowing into Shanghai’s Hongqiao station.

  ‘I don’t like Shanghai.’

  Marc sank into the sofa in the lobby and scowled as he took in the opulence. ‘It’s like one big shopping mall. Just glass and neon. I hate it.’

  Unsure how to respond, I ordered a pot of jasmine tea and tried to look understanding. On the contrary, Jem and I had fallen in love with Shanghai overnight. At the station, Marc had hopped into the first taxi and zoomed off to his Airbnb, while Jem and I had taken the taxi behind, deciding to treat ourselves to a night at the PuLi, a luxury hotel in the Jing’an district. After checking in, we had gone out looking for the city’s best xiao long bao. The doughy, porky mouthfuls – otherwise known as Shanghai dumplings – were plumped up with hot, silky stock, and in keeping with the status quo, were not hand-pressed by a wrinkly ayi down an alley, but mass-produced at a Taiwanese chain called Din Tai Fung in a big shopping mall made of glass and neon. It had taken a while to find the place, after a shop assistant had appeared to know where we wanted to go and then started showing Jem hairdryers, which we could only assume was a misunderstanding of feng meaning ‘air’ and our pronunciation of Fung. Sated, we’d had a long soak in the bath, overlooking the skyline’s fairground madness, then slept under a cool white duvet while the city flashed and strobed below. Little did we know that across town, the serendipitous nature of hailing taxis had resulted in two rather different first impressions of Shanghai.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ I said. ‘Did you get to your place okay? Our taxi driver couldn’t figure out how to get here and kept ringing an English-speaking friend of his and asking her to translate “PuLi”. Got here safely in the end though.’

  ‘My taxi driver crashed.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Yep, we had a crash on the motorway after we left the station.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call?’ Jem asked.

  Marc shrugged. ‘No point, I’m all right and I don’t think my sim card’s working properly.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘It was like something out of Grand Theft Auto. He was weaving from lane to lane at about eighty miles an hour while everyone else was doing about forty. It felt like a car chase, but we weren’t chasing anyone, and no one was chasing us. I don’t get scared that often, but there were no seat belts in his beat-up old car, and then suddenly we went sideways into another car and bounced off it. The cabbie stopped, literally in the middle of the motorway, on the central reservation bit. I thought there was going to be a massive fight but they weren’t arguing, just swapping details, so this kind of thing probably happens all the time. In the UK you’re supposed to get out and I suddenly realised that I was still sitting in the back, in the dark, and that any second someone could plough into the back of us. So, I got out, and my driver was standing there chatting for about ten minutes. He didn’t stop the meter or anything and then he got back in and we kept going. When I got to my Airbnb I told him I wasn’t paying for the journey after he’d crashed into someone, and we had a big argument that neither of us could understand. Then he grabbed a guy off the street to translate, and got him to tell me that he was going to call the police. He started getting more and more irate and I just thought: “This is brutal and not worth the seven quid”, so I just paid him and then went into my jail cell.’

  ‘Jail cell?’

  ‘My room is like a little underground prison cell. The host is nice but she’s got this windowless room that’s like the servant’s quarters or something. And it’s got nothing in it apart from a single bed and a DVD player, and she keeps trying to give me DVDs, and I keep telling her I don’t want to watch DVDs, I just want some sunlight in my room.’

  ‘I wish you’d called us or come over for dinner,’ I said, pouring out the tea.

  ‘Nah, it’s fine, I went out into the street just to get away from the room, and these two Norwegian students went past on mopeds, so I stopped them and asked where I could get some food. They told me they were off to some proper little party street, so I hopped on the back of one of their mopeds and they drove off, and then said that it was a street where I could get burgers and pizza and there’d be no Chinese people, and I was like: “Mate, I don’t want that at all! I want some proper Shanghai Chinese food,” and the guy said: “Oh, I don’t know where to find that, we’re going to an Irish bar,” so I got off and walked around a bit on my own. I found this wee place, but then I made the mistake of ordering, you know, that nice-looking chicken in soy sauce with coriander, and it turned up fridge-cold and dripping with blood. I knew when I sent it back that the guy was thinking “You fucking foreigners.” I don’t like Shanghai.’

  Our hotel room was bigger than our London flat, had a sunken bath, a bed that could fit four people, and complimentary beer in the fridge. I quite liked Shanghai.

  ‘It’s not like Beijing. Beijing felt like Glasgow, it had that raw, working-city feel.’ Marc sipped his tea. ‘Anyway, it ended up being quite a decent evening. Anything was better than sitting in my jail cell feeling depressed.’

  I had thought of asking Marc if he wanted to come up and check out the view from our room, but suspected he might smash his camera over my head. Instead, we finished the tea and decided to get as far away from the glass and neon as possible, winding our way across the city to the ancient water town of Zhujiajiao.

  On my travels, it had become apparent that development and modernity posed a direct threat to the enjoyment of many travellers, disgruntled that the worl
d should adapt and progress at the expense of their own pursuit of the exotic. This was no criticism of Marc’s loathing of Shanghai – which was swift to change after we ran him a bath, handed him a beer and left him to wallow in salt crystals while we went for a swim at the spa – but the realisation of a distinct trend that had emerged from eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. Granted, most of us don’t travel 5,000 miles for Starbucks and KFC, but it was abhorrent to some that Chinese people might like the odd Frappuccino and some hot wings. While I could have ridden on trains with chickens and farmers who would make for a great Steve McCurry-style Instagram post, I preferred the new trains and their soft mattresses. I liked riding alongside families watching soaps on their phones, and chatting to students in English. One was no less China than the other, and both had their own stories to tell. But there was a constant yearning for the authentic – whatever that meant – and a need to seek out the China of movies, where old men with catfish moustaches smoked opium pipes in antique shops to the sound of mandolins. Like Marc, I baulked at the idea of arriving in Shanghai and heading straight to The Tipsy Fiddler to neck a pint of Guinness with Erik and Andreas from Oslo, but I couldn’t see the offence in a city’s pursuit of its own dreams. ‘Modernised’ was a dirty word for everyone but the inhabitants of that city, for whom modernisation meant employment, prosperity and greater peace of mind. The modernised city didn’t lend itself to the sexy narrative that travellers needed to recount on their return, but the modern was as key as the ancient when it came to understanding the evolution of a place and its people.

  Zhujiajiao was built on canals running off the Yangtze river. Wooden bridges looped from one bank to the other as boats glided below, dragging wisps of willow in their wake. Dating back to the fourteenth century, when the town was a trading hub, it was still very much a place to trawl for knick-knacks – from gold-tipped chopsticks and fridge magnets of the late Bin Laden, to live hairy crabs and floral fans. A confusion of alleyways tricked visitors into getting lost down lanes, where women flash-fried fermented tofu and steamed mountains of char siu trotters, the slam of cleavers sending flecks of honeyed skin to the walls. Pet shops sold fishy-smelling terrapins crawling over each other in buckets, and hamsters burrowing in sawdust, while a few lanes along, a jeweller laid out freshwater pearls still stuck to the goo in their shells. Down one backstreet was a shrine to Michael Jackson featuring two photographs of him from the 1980s, his silver glove in a silk-lined box, and an ‘I Love MJ’ coffee flask, all of which was guarded by two stuffed wolves snarling at onlookers. Fat corgis waddled around in the sun, gnawing at scraps of pig ear from the gutters, and nipping at tourists. Elderly women wearing conical straw hats and loose, mid-calf trousers, wheeled their bikes along, grocery bags swinging from the handles. Zhujiajiao was the antithesis to the techno-fizz of downtown Shanghai.

  A few twists and turns brought me past a temple and onto a quiet street of guesthouses hung with cages of coloured birds, tweeting and beating their wings against the sides. Peering into a pair of open shutters, I saw a man as old as the earth wearing a baseball cap, preparing his lunch. He caught me spying, put down his bowl of rice and potatoes and shuffled to the window, his skin soft like silk and his mouth missing all its teeth. A number of residents still lived here, their laundry drying in courtyards parked with cycles, which endowed the little town with more spirit than if it had been preserved solely as a relic for tourists to enjoy. And yet I had an uncomfortable feeling that this had all been carefully curated to appeal to nostalgia. The town was a popular spot for newly-weds, a number of whom were posing on the bridges and enjoying the novelty of quaintness in a city like Shanghai. It would come as no surprise if every evening, after the last visitor had left, the bridges were dismantled, the canals drained, and the sound of birds switched off in a control room.

  After loading up on suede notebooks, chopsticks, and a stash of hand-painted postcards, we took a boat along the town’s canals with a middle-aged Chinese couple. It was a warm day, and the lady’s white make-up had begun to run in rivulets down her cheeks and neck. Worried that her face was melting, I looked on in sympathy as she pulled out a handkerchief and began to dab her upper lip. Seeing me stare, she began chatting, and asked if we’d tried the fermented tofu, a speciality that smelt like a foot infection.

  ‘It’s very famous in the south, they eat with spring onion and congee in Guangdong province.’

  ‘Is it a delicacy?’

  She waved her hand and screwed up her mouth. ‘Have you heard of Three Squeaks?’

  ‘Three squeaks? No, what on earth is that?’

  ‘New-born mice. Tiny, tiny,’ she said, pinching her thumb and index finger together. One of her eyebrows had now begun to slide away.

  ‘They cook new-born mice?’

  She laughed. ‘No cooking. They alive. First squeak, you pick up with chopsticks. Second squeak you dip in chilli. Third squeak you put in the mouth.’

  The gruesome image made me feel suitably ill, but also strangely hungry, so we disembarked for lunch before heading back into the city. While stepping out of the boat I asked the lady if there was a special name for the boat in Mandarin. She turned and asked the boatman.

  ‘Tourist boat,’ he replied.

  ‘Tourist’ is a bad word. Covering every cliché – from wearing Crocs and bumbags, to travelling by the coachload – ‘tourist’ is a label from which ‘backpackers’, ‘travellers’, ‘wanderers’, ‘adventurers’, ‘explorers’ and ‘vagabonds’ are quick to distance themselves, most of whom are usually men. But ultimately, if you’re visiting a place for pleasure and interest, you’re a tourist. I had no qualms about being labelled a tourist. Nor, presumably, did the millions who descended upon my home city every summer, to whom I took a natural and instinctive dislike. It was in every Londoner’s DNA to feel the surge of rage – and pleasure – at spotting a tourist standing on the left of the escalator who simply had to be ploughed out of the way with a ‘sorry, could you stand on the right, please’. At its core, the problem the world over wasn’t the presence of tourists so much as the way in which they chose to embrace their new surroundings. Wearing plastic bags over feet so as not to catch anything from a temple floor, fondling in a hotel pool in front of children, and referring to locals as ‘natives’, wouldn’t curry favour, but a vague attempt to blend in and observe wouldn’t go amiss.

  Now, as we stood on the platform at Longyang Road station, waiting for the maglev to approach, I had no shame that we were about to embark on a ride to tick a tourist box. To onlookers, it was obvious that we were the only three passengers travelling to the airport without luggage. The magnetic levitation train to Shanghai Pudong International Airport was the fastest train in the world, and we wanted to ride it for the thrill of travelling at 268 mph. I couldn’t think of a better reason. It was the same reason why Space Mountain had the longest queue at Disneyland. In the absence of wheels, the train was pulled upwards by powerful magnets, leaving a gap of around 8–12 mm between the magnets and the guideway that essentially allowed the train to fly, owing to a lack of surface friction. As the train entered the station, I edged towards the doors, nudging a few kids out of the way, before darting in and trying to figure out which seat would feel the greatest impact of the speed. Scrambling around, I eventually settled on a forward-facing seat by the window and waited. Like an aeroplane, the train tilted up ever so slightly and began its seven-minute journey across the city, the force pinning me to my seat. From the window, I could see the track curving above the motorway, and felt a pang of horror as it swooshed around the bend, blocks of flats blurring past. It was impossible to look at any building or car for more than a split second before it was gone. A lady sitting across from us looked up from her phone as we took photos of the overhead speedometer. As we sailed into the station, she waited by the door with us and smiled.

  ‘A lot of Chinese families come on a Sunday afternoon to do the same thing.’

  Stepping down, we hov
ered around on the platform until our fellow passengers had vanished into the terminals, before boarding a different carriage – much to the amusement of the train attendant, who smiled and waved. We were soon hurtling back into the city having discovered the best way to pass fifteen minutes in Shanghai.

  Marc was furious. Dumping his rucksack on the floor, he yanked the sleeve of his T-shirt and wiped the sweat from his face, which was now the same hue as the rose in our compartment.

  ‘Guys, this is not good enough.’

  We had arrived at the station with just over ten minutes to spare before the train to Xining, and still had to collect tickets, go through security, find the platform, and board. Having caught trains for almost six months, we had breezed in, safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be a problem – and it wasn’t. Admittedly, I could barely breathe, and needed a bottle of water after having belted down the platform with less than two minutes to departure, but we were on board and on the move. Catching trains had become second nature to us now and I enjoyed spicing up the day with the thrill of a chase. But Marc was not amused, and was now drenched in sweat and loathing. Looking at the floor, we took a stern telling-off, which ended abruptly when Marc finally stopped to look around the compartment. ‘Wow, this is nice, man.’

  So far, Marc’s Chinese train experience added up to nothing more than the train to the Great Wall and the bullet train to Shanghai. He was yet to ride the long-distance trains with their soft-sleeper berths, carpeted floors and pretty gold curtains. There was even a pair of towelling slippers for each passenger. The long-distance trains he’d taken in India aimed for a similar set-up, but the most they managed was four berths, grime-ridden floors and broken fans. This was luxury by comparison. Forgetting his rage, he turned around a few times, patting the berths and pulling back the curtains, pleased with his surroundings. It was just before 9 a.m. and the train was due into Xining at 5 p.m. the following day. Covering almost 1,550 miles, the train would arc across the country through Nanjing, Xi’an and Lanzhou, before arriving in Xining. This was the sort of train journey I lived for – a mobile camping trip. Under normal circumstances I hated everything about camping: the lack of showers, the lack of sleep, squatting in the dark, spiders in my shoes, and grass in my tea. But somehow train travel adapted the best bits, and from within the cosy confines of my berth I could change into woolly socks, unpack bottles of stewed peaches, sip hot tea and watch the landscape swell and shrink. Jem had put on his dad’s old long johns, I’d pulled on my thermal leggings, and Marc, watching us both, had eventually given in and got into his own thermals. We looked like a third-rate cycling team.