My six hours in a hard seat on train K1041 from Xi’an to Lanzhou could have been the trip from hell, what with the six hours in a hard seat. I’ll never know, as the day before departure, I got the message that the service had been suspended. I nearly ignored the message, as it was all in Chinese: it was my first booking made on the China Rail app – it could easily have just been a reminder. Getting my train cancelled at the last minute did worry me, because the Chinese rail system is notoriously busy with tickets selling out as soon as they go on sale. Not so, it seems – I was able to book an equally hard seat on train K367, departing just two hours later than my original booking. My next worry was that my booking would not be recognised, because China Rail has my name quite scrambled in its system, with my middle name as my family name.
No need to worry – after a short trip on the subway, I was at the Xi’an Railway station. It is 100 years old, but modernised inside. I had an hour to kill, so wandered around – they had a couple of old trains to look at, had breakfast (more dumplings). Getting to the train was easy – line up, have my passport details checked against the system (no tickets issued here) and go to the platform.
The seats were hard, just a thin padding, with not much room. This train had a set of six seats on one side of the aisle (three facing forward, three back) with four on the other side. There was a tiny table that came half way out, and we were sitting so close together that moving my feet meant a negotiation with the person facing me. So, less than ideal, yet I had a great trip. First off, there was scenery – the land is flat all the way across from Qingdao to Xi’an, but not far west of there, the hills and valleys start, and there are rivers. Almost every square foot of flat land not used for building is cultivated – I saw lots of corn, apples and other plants I didn’t recognise. Towards Lanzhou, it looked very dry, but they got water from somewhere for growing crops.
The main thing that made it a great trip was the company. For the first couple of hours, there was me, a fellow in a blue shirt and a young guy stuck to his phone on my side, with another young guy opposite, and an older couple beside him. The man looked like he’d been out in the sun a lot, was a bit reserved, but his wife was the opposite – pointing things out to him and me, laughing a lot, stirring blue shirt. She’d say things to me that I couldn’t understand, so blue shirt got a job as translator – he and I both used our phones. At one point the aunty told me off for not being able to speak Chinese, and then later I unintentionally insulted her (sort of) by saying I was old – she’s 69! Really didn’t look it.
Blue shirt got off, and soon after a fellow in the seat behind me (black shirt) was asking the young fellow opposite me where I was from – the word Xīnxīlán (shinsheelan, Chinese for New Zealand) started getting passed around behind me. After a while, black shirt and his mate came and sat beside me – we had quite the chat, it’s surprising how natural communication is using your phone to translate, a bit like online chat, although he had some English. I never did learn what they do, but they had just been on a trip round the south of China.
A couple of hours before Lanzhou, he and his two mates took me off the train for a smoke – we returned to find the opposite seats occupied by a mother and three kids (the boy was six, the elder girl had just graduated college). The boy was quite the brat - kept fighting with his sister of the cellphone and screaming - but at one point he wrote something on the phone for me (in Chinese, of course). Sweet. Conversation continued with these new people, with the mum curious as to why I was single, is it hard to find women in New Zealand. They didn’t really hold back in the questions – politics and religion were both on the table.
Distance Xi’an to Lanzhou 630 km
Total distance since Shanghai 2560 km
Thankfully, Lanzhou has a subway, so getting to me hotel was easy – it would have been a lot easier had I left the right exit. Instead, I was faced with streets with the pedestrian crossings fenced off, brick walls where google told me I could go… What should have taken less than 10 minutes took an hour. I was very pleased with my hotel location, once I got there – Zhangye street is a big deal shopping street in Lanzhou, it has been pedestrianised for a couple of blocks, and in the evening, there’s a market. My street runs off it, and it is also pedestrianised, but it is lined with restaurants and food stalls take over at night.
My first choice of meal was so bad, I don’t want to talk about it, but I ate well every other time. Strangely, I didn’t have the traditional Lanzhou beef noodle soup – the very thing I came here for – but did have a delicious beef, potato and noodle dish, some great skewers (not exactly sure what they were – translate said they were small lamb loins) and a Thai dish (I have no idea when I’ll see the next one) which tasted a little too much of mince.
I was in Lanzhou for three nights, I found it a very relaxing place to be, particularly on the smaller side streets like mine. One problem was that my hotel seemed to be in a black spot in terms of China Telecom, so to use data on my phone, I had to find a coffee shop. Hardship! The first day, I could only find Starbucks. That actually is hardship, as their coffee tastes of nothing. I had seen a place called Doke coffee, but it took me until the second day to work out how to get into it – it’s a lovely upstairs spot, with two great cats. Maybe it was because I was nice to them that I was given my coffee as a treat. I also found two craft beer places - one in the same building and the other beside the skewer place.
The only touristy thing I did was go to the very brown Yellow River a couple of times, the second time to visit the Waterwheel Garden Park – these massive things were used to irrigate, with up to 250 of them extracting water from the Yellow River for the past 400 years. Each one would irrigate about 50 acres. Of course, being a park, there are sculptures.
Cheers!
Although I'm not an expert, I can vouch that Mr Noodles on George St Dunedin does a fantastic hand pulled spicy beef noodle soup which I think is similar to the Lanzhou style of the dish....
The mum was right in thinking how a charming man is still single :D