Train, Day the Last

I'm a day late again. I know this. That's why on this post, you get to see not just a photo from last year's today, but a video too.

Three days on a train is a long time. You can sleep, read, listen to music, drink vodka and beer, eat, play backgammon, cards, and nap. There really isn't much more. I didn't mind it so much, but the nights were slightly stifling. Sitting in the dining car for breakfast, this is how Adam felt about the heat in the bunks at night.

He may well be loading his imaginary gun to blow his brains out.

Looking out the window in Siberia is beautiful, but even that can get old since there are days worth of the same view from the windows. Most of the variety comes from the time of day and quality of light. This is a brief video of early morning somewhere east of Lake Baikal, our last day on the three day train from Khabarovsk.

A Brief Stop

This is the Chernyshevsk-Zabaikal'skiy train station, located riiiight about here. The statue is the man the station and town is named after, Nikolay Chernyshevsky. We had a quick break here last year today at around 8:30PM local time, which was hours ahead of the official train time which is on Moscow's clock.

For three days, the only time Adam and I got off the train was at brief stops, between 5 and 25 minutes, at various stations such as this one. Generally, we'd get off and stretch on the platform a bit in our shorts and flip-flops, blending into the other passengers comfortably dressed in track suits and sweatpants.

Here's another photo of the station, from a more distant perspective with the tracks and entire building in view. Maybe it's an old photo, previous to some renovations or just not well shot, but it sure looks a lot shittier than it does in my picture.

Russia, Train 2, Day 1

I like long train rides, and last year's today was the beginning of the longest train ride I took the whole trip. We left in the morning and rolled past golden hills and blue skies. Fall isn't really the most popular time for tourists to ride the Trans-Siberian, and we were going the opposite way of most tourists anyway, so it was a relatively quiet ride on our first day, perfect for a couple beers in the dining car, contemplating the passing fields and hewn cabin villages.

All Aboard

I'm a day late again. And a dollar short. Oh well, here is a photo from a year ago yesterday.

This is a Russian man named Igor who speaks no English. He wandered into our compartment looking for conversation and drinking buddies. He spoke for hours, it seemed, and all we could do was say "da" and smile and wonder what the hell he was talking about.

Igor was intent on smashing down any language barrier by constantly repeating things he said until we pretended to understand. The only thing I did grasp was "vodka", a word he uttered just before disappearing to fetch us a bottle.

Nice enough guy, I think, but I was still relieved when another compartment mate of ours got on. This guy spoke English and eventually our English-only conversation cut out Igor enough that he decided to wander back to his own compartment.

The rest of the evening involved more vodka.

Train to Donghae

Adam and I took an evening train to the port city of Donghae on the evening of last year's today. I should have appreciated the beauty of the the countryside more, but I was preoccupied with dealing with a last minute phone crisis until the sun had gone down and a genial but bad-breathed trainmaster decided to chat up us waygooks and show us cell phone videos of his wife driving in their car.

Trains, a Suit, and Africa

I'm considering changing my plans again. Instead of going directly north to France again, and doing another work exchange for a week or two like I'm doing now, Morocco is on my mind.

The idea came into my head the other day when I was saying goodbye to a couple that live in Morocco. It wasn't a very profound spark. It was more like, "Hey, they live in Morocco. I could go to Morocco."

I'm getting pretty lazy concerning hitchhiking, but fortunately Moroccan trains are cheap. Riding trains is one of the three reasons pulling me toward Morocco. I'd really like to take the overnight train from Tanger to Marrakech, spend a couple days, then take day trains halfway back up north, then east to Oujda, stay a couple days, then back to Tanger and Spain. Maybe I could even swing through Gibraltar for the hell of it. That way I can see where John and Yoko were married and check out the overseas territory that Spain is all bent up about since England won't give it back.

The other two reasons are a suit, and Africa. I've never been to Africa before, I'm a bit ashamed to say. I think it's about time I step foot on an unvisited continent, something I haven't done for five years.

Plus I have what appears to be an unfounded suspicion I can get a suit tailored for relatively cheap in Morocco. This fancy-schmancy cruise I'm taking apparently has formal dress codes for dinner. I'm already going to be the odd one out for being under 50; I don't want to be the only one dressed in duct taped flip flops and ratty t-shirts.

Nothing I've found online concerning tailored suits in Morocco is promising though. Maybe I'll just head to Morocco and ride trains and frustrate myself in futile searches for sartorial satisfaction while moonlighting in cafes filled with hookah smoke and belly-dancers. Christ, you know it ain't easy.

It's a roll of the dice right now. I don't want to spend too much cash since I don't want to be dead broke when I get home. However, if I can find a cabinmate to share the cost of the cruise with me (since I've singlehandedly paid for a twin room) then I'll be saving $800 bucks which I can guiltlessly blow in Africa.

Life's hard when you don't know if you're going to relax in southern France or travel around Morocco. Let me thank you in advance for your sympathy.

Too Easy To Enjoy?

I guess it's just the masochist in me.

I planned this trip overland to make things a little more interesting, to get a real sense of the size of this planet, and to challenge myself a bit. After all, backpacking isn't the hardest thing to do. You just need a bit of apathy and a bit of adventure directed correctly.

The original plan was to make it to western Europe via land. Check.

But when I was leaving Turkey and decided to hitchhike, it was partly out of frugality, and partly out of adventure. I did make it entirely across Asia by bus, train, and boat. Why bother making myself do the same through Europe?

It'd probably be like hiking the Appalachian trail north to south. You get the hard part out of the way immediately, so you just coast through the rest.

So I decided to hitchhike. That's harder than taking trains. And now I'm thinking about cycling through France and Spain to Morocco. That's harder than hitchhiking. And after that, maybe finding a boat across the Atlantic back to the States. At this point, taking a plane for any reason just seems too easy. That's probably harder than hitchhiking, finding a boat that will take me on as crew.

Too easy to enjoy? I doubt it, but a little extra challenge never hurt anyone.

What all this has to do with a baby mannequin in a stroller with a laptop? Well, I don't think I need to state the obvious.

Hitching Istanbul to Prague: Day 2

I got a bit of a late start since I was waiting around for the free breakfast at the Art Hostel, but made it out to a good hitching spot on the outskirts of the city by 11am.

I was standing by a gas station, just across an intersection with a stoplight, right in front of a long wide shoulder. This means that cars were filling up for significant distances, traffic was slow, and there was plenty of room to pull over. Still, it took me about an hour to get picked up.

A guy in a small sedan who worked for a trucking company and spoke no English dropped me off on the road just past Slivnitsa, right by a cop that was just standing in the middle of the road - a country road in America, a highway in Bulgaria - and stopping cars randomly by holding up his palm.

My ride said that the cop was no problem when I mimed a question about the legality of hitching in Bulgaria. I walked past the cop and asked if "avtostop" was okay. Definitely not.

I had to walk a half-mile down the road to get out of his sight to hitch. I stood across from a small gas station that got zero business as I stood there. I had my monocular handy to scope out cars as they came down the road from where the cop was. I was afraid of having my thumb out as the same cop drove by. One can only imagine how much fun he'd have busting a tourist for hitchhiking after he just told me I can't hitchhike.

I watched a three-car passenger train rumble past behind the gas station and kind of wished I was on it. It took me another hour to get a ride in a tiny yellow bucket of a Fiat. The top of the passenger seat was bent backwards, and in the backseat there was a small pile of clothes and fifths of booze of various levels of emptiness. The woman was friendly and sober though, and the first solo woman to pick me up.

She dropped me off a couple kilometers from the Serbian border. I hoofed it down the side of the road, the passenger train passing me once again as we'd overtaken it in the yellow Fiat.

I arrived at the border sweaty and walked up to the toll-style checkpoint. A Bulgarian guard wanted to know what was in my travel guitar case. All the border guards want to know whats inside my travel guitar case; it could definitely be a gun.

"Are you a songer?"
"No, I'm bad. I just play for fun."
"Can you play it?" Which wasn't as much of a question as one might think. I played a few bars. It was well out of tune.
"You're not a good songer."
"I know."

He let me go, and I walked over to the Serbian side, where I was spared the indignity of embarrassing myself with my guitar again. I walked about a hundred yards before I realized I saw no Serbian stamp in my passport. After the scare in Kazakhstan, I thought this might be a problem and walked back and asked a guard if the ghostly outline I had just seen was in fact the Serbian stamp. It was, and apparently the mostly non-existent stamp was good enough for government work.

I walked a bit, and waited a bit for the next couple kilometers. There was very little traffic, and no one was stopping. I was eating chewy gummy worms and sweating my balls off, and told myself that if I got to Dimitrovgrad without a ride, I'd just take a train. That's the perpetual fear when hitchhiking: after a certain amount of time, you convince yourself that a ride will never materialize, despite your odds of getting picked up after one car passing are exactly the same as after a hundred cars passing.

It's very easy to convince yourself of the hopelessness of the situation, and even easier to forget all despondency as soon as a car stops, and one almost always does.

The train passed me once again.

On narrow part of road just before Dimitrovgrad, a cargo van with an empty trailer clattered to a stop. It was about 3:00PM, and the driver, Drago, said he could take me all the way to Belgrade.

I had trouble staying awake, but caught some great songs on the radio during my lucid moments. The Dire Straits, a retro-80s hit, FatBoy Slim. Drago stopped for a bit to sleep as well.

At 8PM, Drago dropped me off on the side of the road near an ramp leading to the city center. I had brochures from the hostel last night that directed me to another amazing hostel after another hour, perhaps, of hauling my bags around town.

The place was like a cool attic hangout, and the only people there were two cute British girls, fresh out of high school, who cooked me food and fed me grapes as I lounged on the sprawling bean bag chairs like a Roman. It might've just been the London accents, but they further impressed me by being able to hold a more intelligent conversation than most women my own age.

An Australian guy showed up eventually. He had been on the train from Sofia that I had passed and been passed by several times throughout the day. It turns out hitchhiking isn't as inefficient as some may think.

With the sore shoulders, full belly, and few drinks in me, I had to hit the hay early since I knew I'd have a long day of hitching in the morning. A bunch of American cyclists showed up and I just didn't have the energy to meet any more new people.

Again, I wanted to stay and explore Belgrade, but as least passing through is better than flying over.

A Train Slideshow Movie

I really enjoyed the trains in Turkey. The ride from Erzurum to Kayseri was better in terms of comfort (an empty 1st class cabin rather than an empty 2nd class cabin) and scenery, but I didn't take many photos from that. Here are photos from the train from Kayseri to Istanbul, with the song I listened to over and over again, since it seemed to fit my mood perfectly. It was a fantastic ride.

Sick, For Once

It had been about six and a half months of traveling with nothing worse than mild hangovers and early stages of colds that fizzled out when I finally started feeling bad. Not a bad run.

It was also right after Jamie and I got off the ferry from Kazakhstan and were standing around on the sidewalk outside Baku port, waiting for a couch-surfing friend of his to pick us up. We had no idea how long it would take, and as we were standing on the sidewalk the headache, bodyache, sorethroat, and general flu symptoms that had been minor enough to ignore started getting stronger.

A semi-truck stenciled with the seductive eyes of a woman pulling a hijab across her face turned in toward the port, and a young man walked by with a baby rabbit in a box, sheltered against the wind. Cars kept zooming by on the one-way street, and it seemed like our ride would never come.

It was early in the day still. I just wanted to shower in hot, hot water and go to sleep. Jamie was joking that he would get in nothing but a Benz or BMW, and that the each approaching luxury vehicle was bound to be ours.

When Jamil finally showed up, he was in fact driving a Benz. A slightly older model, but Mercedes nonetheless. I got my shower and got my nap, and woke up feeling good enough to head out of the house to have dinner downtown and hang out at his girlfriends apartment.

That was a mistake. The good feeling I had after the nap didn't last long. I suffered through dinner in a brick-walled restaurant by fountain square, and when we moved to his girlfriend's bohemian pad, I just took a nap on a mattress in one of the high-ceilinged, empty rooms while everyone else drank cheap wine, beer, and chatted by candlelight.

The next day I went out with Jamie, Jamil, his girlfriend, and one of her roommates on a little day excursion outside of Baku. I wasn't up for it, but felt I had to participate in some sort of social role since I was taking the hospitality of a stranger.

It was a bit exhausting but turned out to be a good choice. We made an unscheduled stop at a showy mosque on the side of a busy road, and waited forever for the girlfriend's roommate to finish taking pictures and asking questions. He was some sort of young journalist.

We made another stop to trudge across industrial wasteland to try to find a large sculpture of Lenin's head out behind some refinery. We didn't find it, but stumbled upon an old Soviet tank graveyard, and crept in past the rusty fence to take pictures, climb over the rusty hulks, and generally fuck around. We waited again for the journalist kid as he ran back to take more photos of shit he could've taken pictures of when we were there the first time.

We finally made it to our original destination: Qobustan, home to a bunch of petroglyphs carved onto ancient rocks in what used to be a verdant forest thousands of years ago, but what was now just rocks on a hillside. It was interesting, but underwhelming.

Then we went to see some mud volcanoes. The pressure of natural gas below the surface caused gray mud to bubble up to the surface and occasionally fart its way out in bubbles and burps. We tromped around for awhile, and I got mildly splattered with mud when I was standing downwind of one little volcano that Jamie threw a rock into.



The journalist kid was last to get the car once again. I hadn't been too keen on trudging all around the Azeri wastelands, behind factories and over dirt hills painted in rust and grays and browns, and his journalistic dalliances had took up a lot of time. Just doing his job, can't complain too much, but I was still sick and had plans to meet a friend for dinner in town that had to be delayed, and was tired and still felt miserable.

I was feeling better when I met Paul in fountain square, splattered with mud in the only pants and shirt I owned. I especially felt better when we decided to eat Indian food. God, that shit is good, and I hadn't had it for too long.

Paul was a champ and paid for the dinner, an outrageous $50 with a couple of beers each. We caught up on our travels. I last saw him in Yangshuo, and now here he was again, living in Baku for an engineering internship making more money on per diem allowances than monthly wages.

The next day, Jamie hit the road early, hitching back to London. I walked around the old city in a state of renewed flu misery while Jamil was out at work. I took in the old sights and tried to enjoy the beauty as best I could. The city was truly a sight for sore eyes after eight days in Aktau, even in my feverish state.

I half-napped in a public toilet, and walked along the promenade which is paved with stones that are exceedingly bright and painful in the sunshine. I went to the top of the Maiden's Tower, and took photos in the alleys of the old town. I did my best.

By the time I got on the train that night, after fearing Jamil wouldn't be home in time to let me in to pack up and make the train, I was ready to sleep. It was a Soviet train, with tiger-print benches and mattresses with a maroon floral pattern straight out of the Victorian era. I had a kupe cabin to myself. It was sparse and simple, but clean and and even had memory foam pillows. I really indulged myself and took two pillows since I had the whole thing to myself. I regret only that I wasn't well enough to drink beer by myself.



I fell asleep to the rocking of the train, and woke up near the Georgian border free of fever and sickness.

Best Trains Ever

I entered Turkey from Georgia by the black sea. There are no trains up there, so I had the good sense to take a bus - of which there are plenty in Turkey - to the nearest train station.

This meant a 9 hour bus ride from Hopa - an alleged hooker town according to my young Norweigian friend - to Erzurum overnight. The bus was new and clean, but it's still a bus.

We stopped about every 30 minutes, and the open door letting the cold air in kept waking me up. It was miserable. I got dropped off in the middle of the night at an empty bus station in Erzurum, and got hosed for 10 Turkish Lira for a 5 minute cab ride to the station since I had no idea where it was and it was 3:30AM.

This is the situation I left when I got on the train at 5:30 in the morning. I had unknowingly bought a first class ticket for about $40 for the 16 hour ride. I had my own cabin to myself, with a little fridge and sink. The car attendant made my bed and gave me snacks. The train was modern and new and clean. There was a rug on the floor.

The window was enormous and crystal clear. It's surprising how big a difference something simple like a large, clean window can make to the enjoyment of the countryside.

And the countryside itself was spectacular: craggy mountain passes, muddy rivers, rolling hills with tongues of lingering snowfall.

The dining car was a bit overpriced, but beer and food were available, and I ate and drank since I brought no supplies with me.

I met a German kid who also had his own cabin, and we chatted in the dining car and I kicked his ass in chess due to an egregious oversight he made that gave me his queen. That seems to be the only way I win chess games.

I didn't want to get off when I arrived in Kayseri, bound for Cappadocia. The train was that comfortable and nice.

After my time in Cappadocia, I was happy to get back on the same train, the Dogu Express, Kars to Haydarapasa in Istanbul. It's not that I didn't like Cappadocia - it was fantastic - it's just that getting on a train is a real pleasure. The feeling of movement, the knowledge that you're going somewhere and all you have to do is sit back and read and rest, the luxury of space and being able to walk around.

I rode second class to Istanbul, about $20 for an 18 hour ride. My cabin could sleep 4 people, but I had it all to myself.

The best part about Turkish trains is that evidently, no one takes them. That means there are no crowds, no rush, no crammed compartments.

The second class bed wasn't quite as nice as the first class, but it was all to myself. Who can complain?

The car was second to the rear, in front of the first class car. The window was still big, the landscape was still pretty, though more development was obviously to be expected as we approached Istanbul.

I met no one this ride, but got to recline in my bed, reading Atlas Shrugged, and occasionaly entertaining some of the few other passengers with my presense as a foreigner.

Great views, cheap tickets, empty cabins, smooth rides. Turkish trains have been the best yet.

Urumqi - The Good and The Bad

In an interesting dichotomy, Urumqi is the place I found most interesting in all of China and the place where China really pissed me off the most.

Urumqi is interesting because it is probably about as diverse as China gets. It's the capital of Xinjiang (New Frontier) Province, and it's home to the Uighurs They're the region's largest minority, people who have been living in the area for thousands of years. They're largely Muslim and central Asian -looking. In Urumqi and the surrounding areas you can also find Manchu, Mongolian, Hui, Kazakh, Khalkhas, Xibe, Tajik, Russian, Tartar, Daur, and Uzbeks.

According to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Museum, "Since the modern times, the various nationalities in Xinjiang resited against foreign aggressions together, worked hard for development and unity together, and all these composed deeply-moving patriotic chapters."

In fact, the museum insists on ethnic harmony so often throughout the museum, you know it's a lie. Uighurs generally don't get along with Han Chinese, and for good reason. I met an Italian girl doing human rights research concerning the Chinese and the Uighurs as soon as I arrived in town. The Chinese government flatly denies Uighurs driver's licenses, passports without unpayable collateral, and forces Uighurs to study Chinese, among other things.

Urumqi's most appealing aspect is easy to see: It's the diversity of people. After the general homogenity of the rest of China, stepping off the train into the streets of Urumqi was a feast for the eyes. So many different faces and features from the long history of multi-ethnic land were everywhere. The women were stunning and beautiful in a way I had never seen before. The men seemed to have stories written into their eyes and mustaches that I couldn't even begin to imagine. It was my introduction to people of central Asia, full of enigmatic faces that look somewhere between European and Asian.

The best part about Urumqi was the people I met and the food I ate. The wide range of cultures and ethnicities hugely expanded the choices of food, already amazing as Chinese food is great. I ate a lot of great Uighur food - kebabs, round disks of bread, samosas, all sorts of lamb.

I would've gone crazy in the city for the eight days I spent waiting for my visa if I hadn't met Laura. An Italian, she was staying at my hostel, the only other westerner. She speaks Chinese and introduced me to Eunice, who introduced me to Jane, two Chinese girls who speak near flawless English. I spent time with them singing karaoke, playing Scrabble, dancing, drinking, eating.

I also got to meet Manus, the Irish owner of the only expat bar in town which happens to also be one of the only places to see Uighurs and Chinese coexisting happily. I went there nearly ever night I was in Urumqi. He's got a great corner on the market, there's nowhere else to go. He fleeced me and an British couple in poker one evening. He deserves a bit of pleasure though, he's been in Urumqi for a decade.

What drove me crazy about Urumqi was what had been driving me crazy about China throughout all my travels in the country: too many people, nothing organized, astounding inefficiencies.

I arrived on a Saturday, intending to apply for my Kazakh visa on Monday. I found the visa office Monday morning only to be informed by these helpful signs in Chinese and Uighur that it was closed until Wednesday.

Laura informed me that the offices were closed due to some software upgrades. Fair enough, I thought that might mean some decently paced service when I went back on Wednesday. I think it was actually closed for International Women's Day though, a national holiday in Kazakhstan, falling on Monday.

What a stupid holiday by the way. Now don't get all riled up ladies, I'm for equal rights and treatment for the fairer sex, but isn't giving a group of people a special day completely contrary to the point of equality and acceptance? Laura was incredulous when I said I'd never heard of the holiday before. I think she just wanted some chocolates from me.

Wednesday was worthless. I waited in a frantic crowd of Kazakhs and Uighurs for four hours. Everyone was trying to shove their way to the front of the seething mass of humans and force their way into the steel doors on top of a low cement stoop. The Chinese guards seemed to enjoy screaming and pushing people away. I was told to come back the next day. I demanded to talk to someone in English and at least get my application form, and I was let in briefly. The office was warm and empty and could've fit at least half of the mob outside. I got my application and left.

The next day, Thursday, I came back and the guards let me through after having me wait in the surging crush of humanity just so I knew who was in charge. I guess sometimes it's good sticking out as the only westerner in Asia. You get noticed, but usually it's not for a beneficial reason like skipping the crowds at a visa office.

I was told to come back Monday, which I did. I took a reciept they gave me to a bank, paid, and brought it back and was told to come back at 4PM to recieve my passport back. My bus left for Kazakhstan at 7PM, plenty of time, I thought. I had to get a bus because getting a train ticket to Kazakhstan proved to be as simple as getting the visa. The special ticket office was only open certain times, and none of those times was when I tried to go there. I asked at my hostel about having a travel agent get my ticket. They couldn't even tell me where a travel agent was. Par for the course in China when it comes to simple logistics.

I waited from 4PM to 6PM. No one was at the counter in the office. I knocked on the glass and asked when I could expect my visa. I showed the beautiful office assisstant my bus ticket. She told me that the supervisor wasn't in. When is he coming back? 'I don't know.' Where is he? 'I don't know.' I got it at the last minute. I'd been imagining, to my horror, what it would be like to throw away my bus ticket and spend another night in this city - Laura had left by this point, and I'd said goodbye to my other friends as well.

I made it though, with enough spare time to pick up some food for the trip. I settled into my bunk, happy knowing that I was moving again, that I had gotten a good time out of this city that also harrassed my patience. I felt like I had nothing left to take from it.

Surviving Another Train

Urumqi is the most remote city in the world, by distance from an ocean. It's actually the middle of nowhere. But for some reason 90 trains over 10 days had no sleeping compartments, and no seats. I can't believe I put myself through the hell of standing in hard class again.

I won't linger on that unfortunate experience too much. It was similar to my first terrible train ride. I spent the first night crammed in an aisle of sweaty stinky people, catching no sleep. I went to the dining car in the morning for over 24 hours, paying for food and, in between meal times, paying for the privelege of having a seat, 20 yuan each time. Best three dollars I could've possibly spent at the time.

There were a few notable parts to this ride though. One was that the dining car served no beer. I was able to play some games with Uighurs on the train: the simple game of Sevens with a family in my assigned car, and later in the dining car with some other strangers, plus pente with a young kid who was evenly matched with me, except for his father telling him where to put pieces to beat me.

Something I noticed about Chinese people that really pronounced itself throughout these games is that many Chinese don't possess the concept of waiting turns. You can see it in "lines" at train stations, and each time I played Sevens - a game where players take turns laying down cards - there was at least one guy, usually older, who kept putting cards down out of order, no matter how many times the other players told him how stupid he was for forgetting about turns.

The train cars were the standard scenes: humans crammed without dignity against each other, people sleeping on the filthy floor underneath seats, visible only by their protruding feet, and complete apathy toward any posted restrictions: spitting, smoking, littering.

The greatest abomination of the ride came when we were approaching Urumqi through the vast beautiful wasteland of western China. The train had emptied a fair amount so that most people had seats.

A car attendant began sweeping up all the trash that had accumlated on the ground like revolting leaves in a foul autumn. Processed "sausage" wrappers, greasy foam meal trays, fruit rinds, cigarette butts. The sight made me happy. I appreciate order and cleanliness, and the joy of seeing something wrong made right.

A great mound was forming, and passengers began to help him by sweeping under their own seats. The mountain of trash gradually moved down the car from one end to the other, and the floor became visible.

A warm stench of rot faintly wafted through the air from the old upturned garbage, but I ignored it, preferring to rejoice in the act of cleaning. My pleasure didn't last long. When the trash mountain finally reached the far end of the car, the attendant, with the help of other passengers pushed it into the vestibule and out the open door, scattering two days worth of 100 people's garbage out into the air as the train rushed through the desert.

It was truly revolting. Not just a slovenly passenger throwing a box of trash out of the window, but an employee of the train line, a representative of the government, and a citizen of the land he was polluting had just scattered dozens of pounds of trash across the land, and the same thing was presumably happening in the fifteen other cars of the train, and on the other 90 trains over the next ten days that came this way.

It was the easily the most appaling thing I saw in all of China, and that's no small claim.

Xi'an

Xi'an is the end, or the beginning, of the Silk Road. If I had given that any thought I probably would have been more excited to be there. But I arrived to a city of cold, unrelenting, soft rain. The train station spit me out into a crowd of people milling about the city wall.

I trudged through the rain to find a hostel I checked out online. These two things would be the theme of my brief visit to Xi'an: trudging around the city, and cold rain.

I stayed in the 7 Sages Hostel. It's in a beautiful complex of traditional Chinese row houses. There are circular doorways, and clean white-washed walls and gray paving stones. Sadly, because of the dreary, miserable weather, the courtyards and open spaces were unenjoyable.

I heard so many good things about Xi'an when I was passing through China last year. But arriving there, I wasn't very impressed. But to be fair, I didn't really try to explore much. I learned, too late, that it's possible to rent a bicycle on top of the mammoth wall that encircles central Xi'an and spend a couple hours cycling around. I learned, too late, that it has some pretty lively nightlife. I spent my nights at the hostel, in the near-empty bar/restaurant butchering songs on my guitar.

What I did do was slog through the gutters and poke around the train station until I found the tourist bus to the terracotta warriors. Later, I slogged right back to the train station to wait in line to buy an onward ticket to Urumqi, just to be told there was nothing available.

Also, I slogged through the rain to an outlying bus station to pick up tickets to Xin Jiang, a small city I was told doesn't exist by a woman at the local bus station and two people at my hostel. My friends living in the city would be upset to hear their home doesn't exist.

The problem was that people thought I was looking for a bus to Xin Jiang province. No one even heard of the small city - different, obscure characters made it's name, and it's a place so inconsequential that there is no reason to hear of it. I guess I don't blame them. I finally got a ticket to visit my friends for two days.

I also slogged through the rain to hunt down a smaller train ticket office, armed with a piece of paper explaining what I needed in Chinese. I thought there had been some sort of mistake at the station when the clerk told me he couldn't give me what I wanted.

I was willing to try alternate trains and times, but I was to discover, quite clearly after having a hostel staff member translate for me on my cell, that on the 9 trains per day that go from Xi'an to Urumqi, there wasn't a single bed for ten days.

That's 90 trains without a goddamn bed. I wasn't willing to get up first thing the next morning just for the chance to book a bed ten days later. I wanted to get the fuck out of China. All the people on the train to Beijing, my wasted days in the capital, the hordes of humans everywhere, and now this: no beds or even seats to Urumqi, the farthest city in the world from an ocean, literally the middle of nowhere. It was all getting to me.

I figured I'd get it over with. I booked a standing seat in hard class. Another 40 hour ride in a steel tube of sweating humanity. The sooner I was to get out of China, the better.

The Train!

I actually had a seat for the first couple of hours. I was crammed onto a lightly padded bench with women who kept hocking grotesque loogies into a tissue, and kids who slept like contortionists.

Then the first stop came, and the rightful owners of the seats kicked us all out. They were mostly students, as I had the terrible fortune of traveling during the end of China's Spring Festival. Everyone was going back to Beijing from their hometowns. The population of the car actually doubled at that first stop, as if it wasn't crowded enough. Then at the second stop at midnight, even more people crammed on. It was inhuman.

I recently read an amazing book on India called Bombay: Maximum City. The author mentioned that in India, there are limits to how much livestock may be shipped in one car on a train. There are no such limits for how many humans can cram into a car, and I suspect it's a similar situation in China.

The floor was covered with sunflower seed and peanut shells, and people were squatting in the aisle, nestled up against others doing the same. The "No Smoking" signs were blatantly ignored, and people were constantly shuffling up and down the aisles somehow, picking out patches of floor among the writhing masses.

Even the snack carts came through, with the vendors yelling at everyone to make way which somehow they did. At one point during the sleepless first night, I was offered the corner of a seat as a kind student squished in to his friends to make room for me. It was enough to rest one ass bone on, but not enough to sleep.

Stop after stop during the night, people shuffled on and off. I read Emperor: Gates of Rome almost entirely through. It's a bad book. A pulp, substanceless imagining of Caesar's youth, but it was all I had, and I was grateful for it.

I somehow made it through the first 12 hours, alternating between perching on a seat corner, standing with my hand on the overhead luggage rack to keep from getting knocked over, reading, and listening to music and carefully conserving my battery power while vainly trying to catch some sleep.

Around 11AM I pushed my way through the next car towards the dining car, where I was gambling on sitting down and eating something. It took me about 15 minutes to get through one car, and there were four more to go. I decided to wait for the next stop and walk down the platform, but then a snack cart came through, and I followed in it's wake to the dining car. I was the only foreigner in five cars of Chinese, with probably 150 people in each car.

I'm not trying to brag that I was a foreigner getting a "real" Chinese experience. I want to admit I was the only idiot stupid enough to take a standing ticket during Spring Festival. It was truly miserable.

I did get a seat, after squeezing through the hallway. I ordered a pork and pepper dish, and drank beer for a couple hours until I was too tipsy to stay awake. I thought I should get up because I was taking up space at a table that could be occupied by paying customers, and I did. Then I realized that everyone else at the tables were sleeping, and I sat back down and tried to nap.

I spent about 24 hours in or around the dining car. I knew my luggage would be safe, buried under a mountain of other people's belongings back in car 17. No one was going to run off with it. No one could possibly run.

The closed the dining car for the employees meals, and I stood around the toilets in between cars with everyone else until it opened for dinner. Then I ate with a fat businessman who called himself John Forest, and a woman with her young niece and the grandma. John Forest told me I could sleep in the dining car for 30 yuan. Sounded good, but then he recommended I find another seat - there were none - because his friend was coming to sleep here. I waited for awhile, it was around 9PM at this point, and I was tired. I had finished the book, and a Chinese girl was happily listening to the exotic Western bands I had on my MP3 player, and killing my battery as she ran the video.

The cute little girl I'd been sitting across from finally warmed up to me, a foreign white-devil, and I made faces at her. Then her grandma started clearing out the bags from under the table for some reason. Then the little girl was squatting underneath, pissing right on the dining car floor. John Forest just laughed when I gave him a surprised look. People were still smoking everywhere, even the employees. Earlier I had seen meal attendants loading trays with pre-made meals, just stacking the uncovered cartons on top of each other. God knows where the bottoms of those cartons had been, but they were now resting on food someone would eat. So much for sanitation.

I left big fat John Forest, not entirely sadly. He was really fat and didn't even push all the way over in the seat. I was on the edge, almost like the night before when a student gave me a corner of his seat. I crept into the next car, a sleeper car which was kept clear of the riff-raff of the poor people crowding the area between the cars and sleeping on the floor of the dining car, which don't forget, the adorable little girl had just pissed on.

For some reason, probably because I'm white, they let me into the hallway of the sleeper car, and I sat on a fold down seat until the wee hours of the morning when a car attendant finally told me to get lost. It was cold, and not conducive to sleep, but I had space, along with the crippled guy who was laying down on the floor next to the heater. I think they just felt bad for him so they let him lie.

I had breakfast in the dining car and got out around 8:30AM and made my way back along the platform to car 17, where my bags were. I stood for another three or four hours, watching the grim landscapes roll by, industrial slums fighting for space with highly farmed paddies and terraces. A friendly Chinese student was talking to me, and he was interesting at first - I learned an average salary out in the provinces was 1000 yuan per month, about $150, but as an electrical engineer in Beijing, he was hoping to make 3000 yuan per month - but towards the end of the ride, I had no patience for anyone. I listened to music as my battery finally started dying, and finally arrived into Beijing West Station, glad to step off the train, and walk for really the first time in two days.

Catching The Train

The train ride to Beijing was far worse than I thought.

To start the trip, I missed my train. Five minutes before the train leaves, Chinese railway employees close down the gate to the platform. I arrived four minutes before the train left, thanks to a wonderful traffic jam.

The woman standing by the gate, refusing to let me through, helpfully observed, "The gate is now closed." The train left, and so did my chance of having a seat for the next two days of travel.

I spent about five hours playing Zombie Splatter in a smoky Internet cafe among Chinese gaming geeks and girls watching dramas online. Staring at the screen clicking thousands of zombies to death with shotguns and Desert Eagles was a sort of release for the smoldering rage I felt for missing my train and losing my seat.

I got on the evening train prepared to stand for the next 40 hours. I rushed through the gate along with all the other suckers hoping to get a good spot to camp out. I knew it was going to be bad when I saw people clutching tiny folding seats in the line. There were hordes already prepared to clog the aisles.

I was lucky just to shove my bags up on the overhead luggage shelf. People soon filled in and bags were crammed under seats, on tables and laps and between legs. There were families crammed into the wash cabinets between the cars, and people were squatting in between other people's legs.

It was bad, but it got worse.

More Good News!

In more good transportation news, China seems to be on some sort of nationwide spring holiday. That means that transportation is at a premium. There's a lot of people in China, by the way.

I asked the receptionist at my hostel about train tickets to Beijing. She made a phone call and reported that for the next week, there is only standing room available. Beijing is another two day trip. I was looking forward to a nice comfy bunk to relax in. Now I was being told that I'd be lucky to stand for two days unless I wanted to kick around this town for over a week.

Due to the good grace of my masochistic tendencies, I was about to get a standing room ticket. I fortunately decided to think about it and I wandered to the train station to inquire there, just for shits and giggles.

They had a seat for tomorrow, which I promptly bought. It's a hard seat, the lowest class. It will be for two days with people crowding the aisles, and probably with chickens clucking around under the seats and babies crying and people spitting on the floor, but I guess it beats standing for two days or twiddling my thumbs in Kunming for a week.

I eagerly anticipate more good fortune.

No Contest!

I'm on my way overland to Beijing. I spent yesterday on a bus, and yesterday night on a train. I get on another train tonight. I'm in Bangkok now, and tomorrow morning I'll be in Vientiane. I get my second Chinese visa and then it's a bus for probably two days until I get to Kunming, China. In Kunming I get on a train for two days to Beijing.

The worst part about Laos is the absence of trains. I can't believe anyone would willingly take a bus in Asia when a train is available. Even sleeping next to a smashed cockroach exoskeleton in the overheated top-shelf coffin on the tracks between Hanoi and Hue was better than your average bus ride.

Bus drivers in SE Asia honk incessantly at absolutely anything animate in the road ahead of them. Awful local pop music blares out of speakers that you have no control over, and if you're extra unlucky, they also play the horrific videos that go with the songs and you can't pull your eyes away. Don't ever count on getting sleep on a bus.

When you corner, inevitably at too high a speed, you slide in your narrow plastic seat and slip over the armrest. For some reason, buses are extra rattly on what seem like decent roads. I don't know about other people, but when I sit too long my shins start hurting just below the kneecap. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it happens nonetheless.

Long distance trains, on the other hand, do not honk at all or corner too fast. They don't stop every ten minutes to pick up more people - in fact, traffic stops for them - and you will never slide out of your bunk or seat.

I'm not going to say I sleep great on trains. I usually can't get to bed too early, and wind up only getting really great sleep just before I have to wake up in the morning, but I can still sleep a bit, and at the very least laying on a mattress in my own berth with my legs stretched out is heaven enough.

It's no contest for me. I took one sleeper bus into China, and woke up in a multi-mile traffic jam with a Mongolian playing cards on my lap because my bunk location made for a good table. I'm gonna have to take a sleeping bus through Laos to get to the border, thank god drugs are so easy to come by there. I've talked to people that have just gotten off such buses in Laos and have nothing good to say about them. Some girls even said they got shoved into a multi-person bunk with a stranger.

I'll deal with it of course, but I'm going to be looking forward to getting on the train for two days once I get to Kunming, enjoying my personal space, the smooth ride and gentle rocking, the restaurant car with cold beer, and something at the end of the line worth traveling to.

Night Train to Saigon

Nobody calls Ho Chi Minh City Ho Chi Minh City. I'm sure there's a better reason than the one I've figured out, but for me Saigon just sounds better.

While waiting on the platform for the train in Hue, a young Vietnamese man walked up to me and pointed to my camera, slung across my shoulder.

"Camera. Canon. Cheap."

"Really?" The camera cost about $500 less than two years ago. Even being old and worn, it was worth at least $150, not cheap by any Vietnamese standards.

"Yeah. Fifty dollar. This old, maybe forty dollar."

I grunted in amusement.

"Yeah, forty dollar." And he walked away. I couldn't for the life of me figure what his motivation could have been for so unexpectedly making such an obviously wrong statement. Could he want me to sell him my camera for a low price? Did he have some shitty knock-offs he wanted to sell me? I had no idea.

On the train, Adam and I busted out our respective instruments and began playing - terribly, as we always do. We had the cabin to ourselves for the time being, soft class this time. A curious Vietnamese wandered in and watched me play guitar and then took it from me to play.

He spoke no English, had terrible brown and yellow teeth and an easy smile, greasy hair and fingers thick and rough from a life of hard work. His left ring finger nail was black and thick and horrible looking, but he played a bit, and wasn't bad. He made eating and drinking motions but we declined. He seemed quite drunk already, even before he showed up with a beer at noon.

The landscape was amazing. We rolled past the coast, high above and caught breathtaking sights through open spaces in the wall of greenery: waves crashing below us on hidden beaches, the front of the train bending around curves and into tunnels 200 feet above the water.

We ate a pretty wretched meal in the dining car. It looked like it hadn't been remodeled since the orangeish-brown wood panels were last in style. The 70s maybe? The view through the big windows and the adorable little girl across from us made up for the bony chicken and tepid cabbage.

She may have been the cutest kid I've seen in all of Asia, and Asian kids are far and away the cutest kids I've ever seen. I made faces at her and stuck chopsticks up my nose, which she really seemed to enjoy. She dug a camera out of her mom's bag and sorta knew how to use it enough to photograph me with my mouth open mid-bite.

Our drunk greasy friend wandered in now and again. He was definitely drunk now, and reeked of incense and dank smoke as he'd lean in just a little too close to me as I was playing, and later trying out some Vietnamese phrases from the back of the guidebook. He was unforgiving with pronunciation: sigh-GONE? sai-GAHN!

I napped and listened to Lady Gaga. I've become smitten; I guess I never paid attention to her music the last billion times its been on the radio and sound system at clubs. Weird. When I awoke the air was still crisp and clear above the ocean to our left, and hazy and golden with the sun trying to fight through the mist-wrapped mountains to our right.

In the evening, our cabinmates finally showed up. They were a couple escorted on by their older family, a cluster of smiling wrinkled faces who grinned and shook our hands when they heard we were American.

"Me too," the guy said, settling in. "We're from St. Louis." He spoke with the high nasally voice of a Vietnamese, so he wasn't born there. "This is my hometown," referring to the village he and his diminutive wife had boarded at.

She said they'd been married for ten years, so when I said they looked so young to be married so long, they volunteered their ages as I'd hoped. She was 32 and he was 38. That meant he was born in 1972, during the war, which would explain why he was much darker than most Vietnamese, with curly hair. His dad was a G.I.

The couple liked to talk, usually at the same time, which made it harder to understand them than just their accents alone, but they were enthusiastic. They were going to spend a month and a half with her family in Saigon before going back home to St. Louis.

"You can eat twenty-four hours," was his reply to my question about what he most liked about Saigon. He offered to give us his cell number so he could take us out to his favorite places, which would've been great, but we eventually all got to bed without exchanging numbers - or names - and the next morning at 5:30AM, we arrived in Saigon and they were gone with their boxes before Adam and I packed up and disembarked. I foolishly thought the train was going to arrive at 5PM and Adam foolishly trusted me, so we were caught a bit off guard.

The best thing about Saigon manifested itself almost instantly. Honest cab drivers. We got in, told him where to go, and the meter came on automatically, and it counted up at the right pace, and we arrived at the backpacker ghetto of Pham Ngu Lao happy as clams, a first after getting out of a cab in Vietnam.

Night Train to Hue

Because we bought our tickets a bit later than we should've, we were stuck on the top level sleeper in hard class. This was the first time on the trip that the term "hard class" has truly been appropriate.

There were six beds per cabin, and they were actually hard. A thin mattress quite inadequately covered the metal and wood plank I was on. Furthermore, there was about two feet of head space. I couldn't come close to sitting upright.

I threw my bag up top and spotted a big cockroach twiddling its antennae at me from the light fixture next to my face. I smashed it with a shoe and brushed it under the bottom bunk.

There was one other tourist in our car. I saw her on the top bunk of her room when I was moving my bags past, so when she was later standing in the corridor looking out the window I struck up a conversation.

"Stuck on the top bunk too? It's pretty tight up there."

"Mmm."

That was as interesting as it got. She was French, traveling before starting a shiatsu massage course in Hanoi, had terrible English, and was exceeding dull and difficult to talk with. I gave up.

As the train began to roll south through the outskirts of the city where people were still on the sidewalks selling shoes and food for blocks and blocks, Adam and I stumbled our way through the jammed soft- and hard-class seats to the dining car.

Pho noodles, while delicious and cheap and everywhere in Vietnam, are a terrible choice of cuisine to serve on a train. I soon found out why the dining car tables were greasy as the rocking of the carriage sloshed the broth over the edge, nearly ruining the game of cribbage Adam and I were playing while we drank beer.

The night was now fallen and at the next stop, our cabin filled up with the other passengers. Besides Adam and I, a woman got on at Hanoi and slept on the middle bunk until three adults with three children piled in. There were nine humans in a cabin the size of a modest walk-in closet.

I made faces at the little kids before reading, finding myself the only one awake after awhile, so I turned out the lights and put my ear plugs in, and spent the night rolling around on the bunk.

I woke a little before we arrived in Hue. It was early enough in the morning for the sun to still be merciful, and I watched the peaceful countryside roll by. The greens were still damp and sleepy and the air was still hazy. There was a solitary farmer under a conical hat hoeing a rice paddy, here and there were stained above-ground tombs, clusters of cement houses flecked with the colors of laundry and sporadic paint, and lines of cyclists waiting on dirt roads for the train to pass.

Hue station was aptly described by Paul Theroux as like a forgotten birthday cake, a French confection left to sit. When we arrived, we fought through a crowd of taxi touts and walked towards a cafe for breakfast. Upon seeing us, two women leapt up and ran towards us, screaming for us to eat at their respective restaurants.

The taxi driver overcharged us as usual. He wanted 60, Adam said our guest house's site had said it would be around 30. I asked for the meter.

"Same same," he said, a phrase that irritates the hell out of me, a horrid catchphrase I first encountered in Thailand.

"Okay, same same. Meter then."

"Same same."

"I know, let's use the meter if its same same."

"For 50."

We agreed, and while we were driving the piece of paper covering the meter fell off. The ride would've been about 25.

"I thought it was same same," pointing to the meter at our guesthouse. He gave me a look that was asking for a punch in the face but we paid him and forgot about it, one more crooked driver willing to lie to your face.

The Hue I found was different than Paul Theroux's Hue, both of them. I didn't expect the chaos and war of his first visit, but I did expect something of the sleepy city with open kitchens and locals with memories of bad times that he wrote about five years ago.

I shouldnt've though. After all, I was a backpacker staying in the insulated world of hostels and Lonely Planets. Adam and I spent the day by hiring a couple of motorcyclists to drive us around to the Citadel, pagodas, and tombs, looking at slick cobblestones and decaying decadence. It got old quick, but the riding was fun.

Interestingly, our main driver Duc called his little tour operation Hue Easyriders, and even had a vest with the name embroidered. I asked him if he saw the movie which came out about the time he was born, in 1969. He didn't even know it was a movie.

We spent the evening drinking free beer at our hostel, then I won trivia with an Aussie named Lisa (what European country is Chisinau the capitol of? Cape York is the northern most point of what country? what color is 0 on a roulette wheel?). Actually we tied a solo player, all of us with 15 of 30 questions right.

Then a whole group of us went to dinner in an open kitchen family restaurant, the one part of my time in Hue that could've been in Theroux's book. The family kept cash hidden in a washing machine outside their bathroom, and in the bathroom was a bucket full of water for flushing, a sink full of a wet sweater and jeans, and their toothbrushes and combs.

Back at the hostel, happy hour was still in full swing, two for one drinks, and at $1 a drink, that meant trouble. I drank Leg Openers, a sweet tangy cocktail with passion fruit pulp with a Belgian I had seen in Hanoi. Adam had another patch shaved into his head by his Canadian trivia partner, punishment for a wrong answer earlier in the night.

It was a crazy night that I won't describe in detail for the sake of those poor souls involved, and for some reason I wound up with this phrase written in my notebook, in someone else's hand: Fruitshakes & Cigarettes.