China 12: Luoyang express
02 November 2009 posted by John McCarthy and John Wyver

John McCarthy on the train from Tai'an to Luoyang:
10.56, Sunday, Tai'an: Ning won’t brook any malarkey. The train for Luoyang is pulling in and will be away again in four minutes, exactly. So we are ready poised with the load, suitcases, camera, rucksacks, tripod, monitor, pot noodles and cakes equally distributed among us. The train is still moving when Ian and I make a move. The Platform Guard (in splendid uniform) and the Policewoman (slightly less splendid attire) turn sharply, warning us back. The train stops and now there’s no holding us. Or there wouldn’t be but for the matching brace of officials who emerge from the train to exchange pleasantries and sheaves of papers with the first pair.

Two minutes have passed: will we get everything on in time? The bottleneck opens, we plunge in and as the train judders out of Tai’an (ten minutes after its arrival) we are bundling all the clobber up on to the top bunk in our four-man sleeping compartment. Ning and Zhouing (we can now say the name of The Representative of The Inviting Authority with casual aplomb – well almost, at least it’s better than,’Erm Joey?) are in another compartment up the corridor.

It’s not exactly plush but it is pleasant enough and there is a thermos flask that we can fill at the cauldron at the end of the Pullman carriage when we want tea – or pot noodles. Later in the day we even manage to shoot a piece-to-camera.

12.40 Tengzhou: This is a big town. Large areas of tenements are in the process of being knocked down – presumably for redevelopment with swish new blocks. Re-cycling would appear to be high on the agenda as I can see a team of men at one block ripping pout metal shutters and window frames and stacking them on a lorry. At another they are carting away wooden doors. A few blocks on there are just utterly empty shells awaiting the demolisher’s ball and chain. And that’s not far behind. Then it’s a wasteland of rubble. Here though there are people again, though only two; an old man and a boy. The man is shovelling rubble into a sack which the boy holds open. A couple of other sacks are already filled.

13.05 Zao Zhung: Ning appears to advise that if we want lunch in the restaurant car, now’s the time. We decide against it – saving ourselves for a pot noodle beano later. Throughout the journey staff trundle trolleys up and down; there’s one not far off your British style, packets of snacks, cold soft drinks and warm beers, then one offering fruit and salad items tightly wrapped in cling-film and then there’s a kind of bin holding ready-made meals. Occasionally a bloke appears with a desperate look trying to flog small, blue, squeaky toy bears.

14.15 Xu Zhou: Another longish wait, though there don’t appear to be many passengers getting on or off. It’s the first place where the back streets near the railway look like slums, rubbish in the streets and algae covered ditches running through them. Once again they are knocking down old blocks of flats, many of which have fully barred windows even on the fifth or sixth floor.

15.19 Dang Shan Zhan: A short stop and we are on our way again through the countryside. Little tricycle carts, rusted so they blend in with the earth, stand in a ring like pioneer wagons drawn up on the American prairie, waiting for their owners to finish work. There must be larger scale, mechanised farming elsewhere but the land on either side of the railway line, looks to be broken up into smallholdings, with people working away with hoes and long-handled forks and spades.

16.04 Sjhou Hou: A mile or two out of this station the train slows and I see, surrounded by a little copse of trees, a mound with a standing stone at its centre. The inscribed stone, looks just like those stele we have seen in some of the temples – particularly at Dai Miao in Tai’an and the Confucian temple in Qufu. On the bank in front of the stone is a circular pattern in red and pink – made up of flowers I think.

17.12 ????????: Missed the name of this place but as with other smaller towns there were a number of rectangular ponds, quite weedy but presumably some sort of fish farm. There were one or two anglers squatting round them looking morose. Fishermen too dot the banks of the much bigger rivers that we cross every now and then. We catch one timeless scene of a man punting his skiff across a wide, mist-shrouded reach. And twice we go over wide canals where enormous barges are underway, loaded to the gunwales. In a country this size and with the amount of goods they must have to move around I’m not surprised to see that much more freight is moved by rail and by canal. Given the roads are not so good and are populated by lunatics like our Qufu driver; I imagine the insurance is better on track or water too.

18.03 Kai Feng: Ning advises this was the capital of the Song Dynasty. We have our pot noodles with some warm beer. Not the best meal of the trip, but okay.

19.06 Zheng Zhou: John W (reading authoritatively from the Rough Guide) advises this is the capital of the Train Age and is China’s most important rail junction, with a population of three million, a nice museum, some good bars and bugger all else.

20.58 Luoyang East (28 minutes late): Ning advises our stop is in ten minutes and it’s time to get our gear together. If we’d been on a plane for this long we’d be over Copenhagen by now. But as it’s snowing in Beijing we wouldn’t have been in a ‘plane anyway.

21.03 Luoyang: We fight through a throng of taxi touts (some of whom are suggesting – rather crazily we feel – that they could transport us and our luggage on motorbikes) to our van and get to the hotel. We get a meal – and quite a good one – even though it is after 10.00. Then the usual frustration of trying to get the internet connection to work......then bed.

John Wyver adds a mostly visual footnote: Tai'an station, I have to report, has little of the magic of Beijing East. It's an astonishingly ugly block built perhaps in the 1980s, but there are nonetheless the kinds of signs and advertising hoardings that keep westerners amused.

I am particularly pleased to find this one, which seems to suggest that while all rail passengers may be equal, some are most definitely more equal than others.