Strangely normal
Travelling to Tibet by train
Although it shouldn’t, this all feels strangely normal. Just like when I was a boy, I’m awake in the middle of the night, peering out of the window while everyone else in my cabin is asleep, excited to know where I am and to see what’s going on outside . Except that this isn’t like all those couchette journeys I did as a kid, because oxygen is being piped into the train’s ventilation system above me, and we have spent the last 5 hours trundling along at over 4,700m of altitude on tracks built with refrigeration systems underneath.
The train to Tibet is an engineering marvel. It rises to over 5,000m and because the tracks are built on permafrost, the ground under them needs refrigeration in summer to stop it from melting and the tracks from buckling. It took 100,000 workers 5 years to build the line, costing a whopping US$4.1 bn.
But for the traveller, it could be any Chinese sleeper train. Staff come through with food trolleys every 20 minutes or so, and a civilised peace reigns over the passengers in the hushed luxury of my soft sleeper coach. It’s all a bit more crowded down the train in the hard sleeper coaches, and then there’s the full variety of society packed into the hard seat coaches – a group of Tibetan women with their colourful waistbands and braided hair, Muslim men with their traditional Hui Hui white hats, and people lying across two seats trying to get forty winks. The exit doors are blocked by bags of God knows what piled high.
I am very lucky to be sharing a cabin with Jon, Faye and their 8 year old son Harry. They’re from Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, and they speak good English. We spend the hours chatting about lots of different things. Jon is convinced that England is a “rich country” (my attempts to explain to him that we are broke fail), and I discover a lot about China today – why everywhere including the countryside seems to be a building site, and the amazing growth that Shenzhen has experienced. Faye is now a full-time Mum, but she used to be a theatre director, and Jon is a senior company executive in AI. Harry is incredibly self-contained and well behaved. Shenzhen is the Silicon Valley of China, and they are in the middle of it. It all seems very exciting and dynamic.
Apart from the striking scenery outside, the one noticeable giveaway that this isn’t any old train is the long lectures given by the railway staff in the corridor every 4 hours or so. The topics range from housekeeping such as how to request additional oxygen if you feel unwell, to a guide to the unusual animals outside (sheep and yaks), and the building of the railway.
