Now on the train. We departed PEK exactly to the minute (1302 to be precise) and are now whizzing along through the Chinese countryside. Fortunately, the rails seem to follow the roads (or vice versa) so we are not out in the middle of the countryside, but zipping through small towns and villages and seeing all modes of road transportation in between. Overloaded minibuses, with huge amounts of boxes on top, farm tractors, men with bicycles loaded with woven paniers of chickens, local buses packed out, men pulling handcarts full of vegetables, the Chinese Walking Tractor, which is a noisy one stroke engine which can be attached to any old cart – belches forth smoke in best all polluting fashion.
Now in Xian – been to see the Terra Cotta soldiers which are always just amazing – about 6000 of them (only one third unearthed so far) and each one of them with different facial characteristics. And tonight, the ordeal of the Tang Cultural Show – a foretaste of what will be dished out come Olympics time (of course you can buy all the O. t-shirts, caps etc already). This is a garish dinner show – TOO MUCH China for me…. wudda been happy in my room reading a book !
Our hotel has a box in the lobby where you can deposit your “Customer Delight Form”… not sure if I shall take advantage of this. And the mineral water provided in the rooms is called Robust Water, which gives me mental strength at least.
Anyway, it is late at night here, September 9th and I must away to bed, as we leave early in the morning on the train. A long silence for you all – mainly due to long work days and general exhaustion of traveling mainly by train and then the depressing scene at home, so all in all, I’ve been wiped out. September 11 2001, had happened.
Being about as far away from New York as you can be, was really the best thing, as we have not suffered the overload of news that the rest of you have had. But the first two days were spent in a kind of limbo, as we had the basic scene and then were totally incommunicado for 2 days, so there was a lot of angst amongs everyone, in case anything worse (hard to imagine) had happened.
I got the news barely three hours after it all happened, which just shows how amazing modern technology is. I was woken at midnight, on the Chinese train by our chief guide, an amazingly switched on young man called David, with whom we have worked for many years. He just thrust his cell phone at me and said “Call the office NOW – New York has been blown up” !!! Not quite believing such a scenario, I was soon brought up to date with the full awfulness of it all. I in turn woke Eszter, our lovely Hungarian Expedition leader and we sat in shock for a while trying to work out what was to be done. We had visions of the whole lot wanting to abandon train, in the wilds of Western China, but the fact that they could not get into the USA was going to rather nix that. Somewhat fortuitously, we already had a meeting scheduled after breakfast next morning with them all. We were now out of even the Chinese cellphone range. Neither of us slept much that night as it all began to sink in.
Anyway, having walked them through how to fill in the immigration forms for Kazakhstan, which are only ever printed in Russian, we bit the bullet next day. Kind of “Oh by the way, we have something else to tell you..” Of course there were tears and blank horror and we had the thrill of crossing the border from China into Kazakhstan to take their minds off it. I had kind of roughed out a speech for Ez. to say, as she insisted as Exped. Leader that she should do it, whereas I wudda have rather done it myself, but she got through OK and then had a weep at the end. Of course, they had many questions and we had told them that they knew everything we knew, so we had to get on with traveling. The office in Seattle had already called the emergency contact numbers that we have for all the pax, just in case we have a problem, and ascertained that all was well with everyone they knew at home, so before we even told them anything, we said that all was OK there – certainly helped and I was glad that I had thought to have Eszter say that.
Next two days were tough, without cellphones, so of course the strain of not knowing was telling. There was one woman in a market who realized we were Americans and just ran her ringers down her face to imitate tears. Such a simple gesture, but I just had to disappear for a few minutes and get my act back together. We managed to wind up our agents enough so that when we reached Almaty, the capital city of Kazakhstan, we were all taken directly to a hotel, which had amazingly enough managed to lay on a bank of extra phones and gave us all their computers to read emails on and a huge screen TV showing BBC World, so for the first time we were able to see what we had only been able to imagine. That was certainly traumatic.
More tears then and tears of relief too, when they spoke to people at home – the phone bills were astronomic of course but they wudda paid double happily. TCS came out smelling like a real rose on the strength of that and we were truly walking on water !! No one wanted to leave us, or even hinted at it and although we were going to end up only about a hundred miles from the Afghan border, we all realised that we were basically very safe and that life had to go on and there were sights and sites to be seen, so daily life swang back into action. It was just a very tough couple of days.
timothyvalentinestravels 