22/8/25
At 2am we stopped at Minxian. The train was delayed by half an hour. Finally someone joined us. A woman and her child. She was noisy and fairly inconsiderate to our sleeping. Leaving the door open as she sat on Frankie’s bed and rummaged noisily through her suitcase. Getting used to such behaviours was impossible for us.
We were woken by the woman getting up in the morning. She happily banged the tub of baby formula on the table and opened the blinds. What she wanted to do was apparently top priority. Perhaps if there were other Chinese speakers it would be a discussion.
When we did decide to “get up”, which meant moving to the lower bunk, we looked outside to see a dramatically different landscape. The terrain was now desert steppes, snowy peaks in the Qilian Shanmai mountain chain appeared occasionally in the background, camels roamed. Houses were built from light coloured clay. Bone dry was an understatement. The train had started heading west. On our right the vast Badan Jilin desert extended before our eyes.
Our fellow passengers were noisy. Another woman and child tried to board in our compartment but only the upper berth remained so they swapped with a young man. A 6 year old could travel for free. This resulted in overflowing carriages of children. The woman in our apartment would occasionally become violent towards the young girl she was travelling with. Pinching, slapping and shoving her head. We looked on, devastated, and unable to act.
Once in a while an attendant would turn up at the door and carry out some kind of weird filming operation of the compartment while narrating something. The other passengers ignored her, and we couldn’t understand. Staring out of the window yielded nothing but an endless scene of rocky ground, punctuated by the occasional town.
Food trollies were pushed up and down regularly. TV tray style ready meals, snacks and a trolley full of fruit and vegetable. Outside was sometimes like a moonscape, mounded up rocks and soil that looked manmade but couldn’t possibly be. Sometimes it just looked like sand. Huge fields of wind turbines and nodding donkeys were occasionally visible. China was creating a large energy complex in the region. From our window we could see the Lanzhou to Xinjiang high speed rail line that terminated in Ürümqi. Unlike every other high speed line, it was heavily under utilised. Beset by problems, caused by the terrain, from the outset. Extreme temperature changes and high winds limited the maximum line speed.
The sound of children dominated. There were so many in the carriage it was ridiculous. Poking their heads round the door to incite interactions with us. Their parents largely ignored us. We happily played along. Jonathan spoke to a boy who was sitting outside the compartment. He was from Kuche but studying in Chengdu. He wanted to follow his father and work in the petrochemical industry. When we stopped at the next station people boarded who didn’t “look Chinese” at all.
The Sun slowly set on the day. The young girl in our compartment became more familiar and started playing games with us. Just before bed she demanded more food and got into trouble with her grandmother. She was subjected to another weird round of aggressive, playful punishment. Somehow it culminated in her receiving some bread.
Settling into bed, we knew another round of snoring was to be coming from the woman. There should be a penalty for that sort of thing. Grating sounds of raspiness were a form of torture.