Huoche

So 42 hours is a long, long time to spend on a train.

But under the circumstances it was actually a lot of fun.

The term "hard seat" conjures the image of a bench of squished souls, tossed to and fro with their crammed baggage as the locomotive rumbles through rough, outdoorsy terrain. But the seats here more closely resembled those in an airplane, if they were attacked by an interior decorator with an armchair vendetta and a lavender fetish.

Seat assignments are rarely adhered to as passengers hop from one perch to another, chatting and eating and pulling apart their luggage—my favourite was the oversized, shapeless, bungee-corded plastic Hello Kitty bags—to search for some travel-related necessity.

For some reason both trains I was on were oversold, which meant the aisles and spaces between cars were crammed with people standing around, smoking outside the toilet or perched on the counter beside the sink.

At night, the place starts to look like the aftermath of either a wild orgy or a scene of bloodless carnage. People sit, slump or lie wherever they can, leaning on each other, feet propped up on the seat across from them, or simply sprawled out on newspapers on the floor.


The whole contraption is like a rolling, multi-day house party. It’s also an excellent arena for awkward encounters if you don’t know anyone, can’t speak the language and are literally the only foreigner on the train: For almost 90 hours, round trip, I was a constant conversation piece, and I didn’t have a clue what the conversation was about.

My trip to Urumqi, I lucked out and was sitting with a bunch of cackling, perennially entertaining women who all worked for a cosmetics company in Shanghai. One of them had her six-year-old daughter with her—an adorable, cherubic-looking kid who turned into a demon about 20 hours into the ride.

Luckily she was terrified of my lack of Chinese language skills and left me alone once she got bored of playing with my camera, so I was spared her temper tantrums and random head-butting.

On the way back I was sitting with attractive Chinese hipsters who were too busy reading manga (or some hipper, Chinese version thereof) to pay me much attention.

The passing landscape was wild. The weird thing about living in Shanghai is that my primary

impression of China is ultra-urban, with all the modernization/Westernization that entails. It’s easy to forget that most of this country is nothing like that.

Zipping through province after province

on a 4,000-kilometre trajectory through the country, we passed rolling hills, rocky cliffs teeming with bulldozers and supply trucks, nuclear power plants and patchwork farmland tended by people wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and using simple implements that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Pearl S. Buck novel. Beautiful and fascinating and puzzling if you’re me, and are mostly ignorant of wh

at you’re seeing save for the odd poorly worded question to your fellow passengers.

But very cool, all the same. I just wish I were better at taking photos through a dirty wind

ow as my train rolls along at 135 kilometres an hour.