Alison got up early to go and see the change of guards at Tiananmen Square. I had been thinking of joining her, but felt too tired. When she got back around 5 a.m. after having walked there in the rain, only to find she was too late to see it, I was glad I had chosen to stay in bed.

This morning I had decided to go to the Summer Palace. I hadn’t really intended to go, but after hearing the others talk about it (they had all liked it better than the Forbidden City) I decided I should go there instead of going to the markets and the Temple of Heaven as I had planned. I went together with Yvonne and Nancy. We didn’t feel like going by bus, but to save some money we took the subway to the station closest to the Summer Palace and then taxi from there. The trip took about an hour. The Summer Palace used to be the hunting grounds of the emperors, and it is quite a large area around the beautiful Kunming Lake. It certainly has a quite different kind of charm than the Forbidden City. It is a beautiful area with parks, foot paths, temples etc. From the Buddhist Sea of Wisdom Temple you get a really nice view over the lake and the area in general. One of the most famous sights at the Summer Palace is something called the Long Corridor. This is a beautifully painted 700 meter long corridor, not inside a building, but situated by the water and with no walls. It is made of wood, and each beam has a different motive (mythical scenes). A lot of it was whitewashed during the Cultural Revolution, but it has since been restored. There is also a corridor with small glassed windows with painted flowers on them. After having had some problems finding a taxi-driver who understood where we wanted to go (although we had brought with us the name and the address of the hotel in Chinese characters, you have absolutely no chance of getting where you want without that), we eventually got on our way, with a chauffeur who thought himself to be a race car driver. 

In the early afternoon we all met in the reception of the hotel to carry on our journey. We travelled in 3 taxies to the station (not the one close to the hotel) to take the overnight train to Xi’an. The train would arrive in Xi’an early the next morning. It was a large and impressive station. Kath had bought our tickets well in advance. We settled down on the floor of the smelly waiting room while we waited for departure, with our luggage all around us. It got very crowded because for those travelling on hard seat there are no seat reservations, so they have to run for it. We would be travelling on hard sleeper, though. Two of our four train journeys would be by hard sleeper, and two by soft sleeper. According to Kath, this train was the best of them all, in other words the hard sleeper on this train might be of a better standard than the soft sleeper on another train. After the doors opened we were led along by the crowd down a set of stairs to the train, and then we had to walk along the train all the way to carriage 13. At every carriage there was an attendant standing in attention at the entrance, in light blue and brown uniforms. That a carriage is a hard sleeper means that there are no normal compartments with a door you can close etc. Instead there is this long narrow corridor with ”cubicles”. There are 6 beds in each cubicle, and about a meter between the two rows of beds. There is a little table, and two thermoses of water that can be refilled next to the entrance. Those who have the lower bunks, must tolerate that their beds are used by everyone until bedtime. The main colour of the carriage was blue. In my cubicle there were 4 Chinese men and a woman (one of the men were a teacher at the University of Xi’an, he was the one who told that he would lose his job if he got more than one child, the woman was an editor of a book teaching English to the Chinese). Alison also shared her cubicle with Chinese, the others had two cubicles to themselves. 

There was a (bad) restaurant car on the train, and carts were rolling by now and then, but we had brought with us what we needed (instant noodles, fruit, water and a lot of junk). There was nothing to do but hanging around, talking, reading, resting. Some were playing cards. The lights are turned out around 10 p.m., so then everybody must go to bed nicely. The carriages are locked at night so that no intruders can get in.

The landscape outside was a study in brown and green, beautiful with a red sun hanging above it all. Strange then to lie on the bed (I had the middle bunk) with my hands beneath my chin and looking out on the landscape and the sunset. One of those moments where you take a time-out and savour the moment (here I am, in China, on a Chinese train, seeing a Chinese sunset). 

At the Summer Palace