On a People’s Train from Urumqi to Beijing
August 2, 2006
Frugal Traveler
By MATT GROSS

It was a slow day in the railway ticket office in downtown Urumqi, and as I walked up to the counter, where there was no line, I was feeling lucky. Then the ticket clerk pronounced the two syllables that every traveler in China dreads: “Mei you.” The literal translation is “don’t have,” but the phrase can imply anything from “That simply does not exist” to “I’m afraid of foreigners; maybe one of my braver colleagues will step forward to help you.”

In my case, the ticket clerk meant it literally: Tickets for tomorrow’s T70 train to Beijing from Urumqi, the capital of China’s far western Xinjiang province, were sold out. No seats, no sleepers — nothing was available for four days. My only option for tomorrow, she explained (with the help of my taxi driver, whose elementary English complemented my elementary Chinese), was to buy a hard seat on the 52-hour ride ... to Shanghai.

I hung my head and covered my face with my hands. What had I gotten myself into? I had flown in from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, only an hour before, on a $199 fixed-fare China Southern Airways flight, and did not particularly want to stick around Urumqi. After two and a half months of racing across the globe, the end was dangerously close. If I got stuck in Urumqi, I might miss Beijing, Shanghai or even my flight to San Francisco. I could have flown to Beijing for an extra $75, but I longed for the 48-hour train ride there, on which I hoped to get a people’s-eye view of life in the People’s Republic.

As I fretted, however, help arrived in the form of Huo, a blue-uniformed security guard who overheard my plight and, apparently out of sympathy, offered to sell me his own ticket — a hard sleeper, the second highest and most popular class — for face value: 631 yuan (about $80 at 7.9 yuan to the dollar). Worried it might be a scam, I flipped through my indispensable Langenscheidt dictionary and asked the clerk if the peach-colored ticket was “legitimate.” It was, she said. The next day at 2:19 p.m., I would begin my journey to the capital.

But first, Urumqi. After checking into the grand but soulless Kunlun Hotel (51 North Youhao Road, 86-991-440-411; 320 yuan), I made for the spanking-new Museum of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (25 yuan), which details the province’s role in the Silk Road trading system and its gradual rise as an “Inalienable Component of the Great Motherland.” The museum struck me more as a propaganda machine designed to gloss over the repression of the local Muslim Uighur populace by the ethnic Han Chinese.

From there I wandered modern Urumqi, a sprawling grid of skyscrapers and highways that China wants to make its gateway to Central Asia and the Middle East. Cranes loom over building sites, the streets are abuzz with traffic and people, Arabic script crowns street signs, and both the Sheraton and Kempinski hotel chains are opening in the near future.

Though readers dismissed Urumqi as just another big Chinese burg, I found it stimulating after sleepy Bishkek. As night fell, crowds bustled around the food stalls outside the shopping malls on Youhao Road, gnawing goat kebabs (1 yuan apiece) and picking through platters of crayfish in a place that is farther from the ocean than just about any other city on earth.

At another market in the Uighur part of town, the mood was more somber but the food just as exciting. I tucked into deliciously gamy roast lamb (60 yuan per kilo) served with naan bread, then watched a weird scene involving a stolen computer, a repentant thief and a drunken cop — which ended with my running for the highway and grabbing the first taxi I saw (base fare: 6 yuan). I needed a drink myself, so I went to Fubar (1 Gongyuan North Road, 86-991-584-4498), a dim, friendly saloon run by Western expatriates, where I met a European businessman working on the Sheraton project. Why build a Sheraton in Urumqi?

“Honest to God,” he said, “I have no idea.”

Neither did I. While fun for one night of random encounters, Urumqi had little else to offer. The next day, I boarded the T70 just before noon (trains throughout the country run on Beijing time) and located my bed, the middle bunk in a set of three facing another set of three in a car with 20 such sets, all open to the corridor. Crowded? A little, but also spotless, modern, cozy and friendly. As the train rolled eastward, I met my neighbors: a husband and wife in their 50’s returning from a visit to his brother; a woman who ran a plastic-bag factory in Urumqi; a hip-hop-loving teen about to start his freshman year at a university in Beijing.

Slowly, families began to set up temporary households. Thermoses of tea were filled with freely available hot water, children swung from the bunks and recited multiplication tables, and the rods that ran the length of each wide window were draped with damp towels in a pastel rainbow of blues and pinks. As much as I could, I tried to adapt to their rhythms, slurping spicy instant ramen instead of buying 15-yuan meals of rice and vegetables, and preparing for bed at the unconscionably early hour of 10 p.m. But soon after the lights went out, I was swaddled in fresh white sheets and the smooth train rocked me gently to sleep.

Early the next day, as passengers padded about in rubber sandals and sipped their morning cups of tea, my bunk slowly became a zoo. People would seek me out: the children to stare at this rare blue-eyed traveler in their midst; the adults to practice English and meet a real life American. With an Urumqi high-school teacher, I griped about the problems that both China and the United States share, like housing, health care and politicians. With An-ran, a gap-toothed 8-year-old comedian, I sang Chinese nursery rhymes. And when people asked why I was in China, I invented a story about how I’d saved money, quit my job and was circling the globe alone — thus reinforcing the stereotype of Americans as rich and indolent. (My countrymen, I apologize.)

By afternoon, everyone was comfortable enough with my presence that I could barely wander the corridors without being asked to join a game of cards, or sit on a bunk and listen to a Uighur man strum energetic folk songs on his two-string guitar. The 48 hours went by quickly. There was always something happening, whether it was the Dushanbe shoe salesman who came by to chat, a toddler to exchange funny faces with, or the 20-minute station stops, when half the train seemed to rush outside to buy some strange local melon.

During the rare quiet moments, I would glance up from my reading — Gogol’s “Dead Souls” — and gaze out the window at the ever-changing landscape. What began near Urumqi as a wide desert landscape — its desolate beauty a master class in yellows and browns — turned into a more traditional Chinese panorama: terraced hills furrowed with squiggly paths, gently fading into mist-shrouded mountains. Finally, as we neared Beijing, the fields of corn and wheat were increasingly interrupted by factories and office parks, and the fog that had lent the mountains their mystical aura became instead a smoggy haze that blotted the sun and trapped the heat. Luckily, the train cars were well air-conditioned.

Still, after two nights in such close quarters, we were all a little tired and smelly. (A few women somehow managed to maintain fresh looks.) As the train inched toward the capital, new friends exchanged business cards and phone numbers, while a half-dozen people stopped by to remind me to consolidate my belongings.

After stuffing my toothbrush and uneaten packets of ramen in my bag, I sat by the window to get in a few final pages of “Dead Souls,” and came across these apt words spoken by Gogol’s itinerant hero: “To have a look at the world, at people’s daily round — no matter what anyone says, it’s like a living book, a second education.” So just before noon, I arrived at Beijing West Station, an unshowered but happy graduate of the T70 University of Chinese Studies.

Next stops: Beijing and Shanghai.