On a road to nowhere

Would we make it?

Unlikely.

What would we do if we didn’t!

Something else.

Fair.

‘Sometimes in life, you just have to go for it.’ Anon.

The timings for our changeovers on the  journey from Xi’an in central China to Almaty in northeastern Kazakhstan, over 2,100 miles away …were tight.

The first train left at 8.00 a.m. No problem there, our new hotel was only fifteen minutes walk from the station.

We would arrive into Urumqi at 21.20, in just over thirteen hours time,  and our sleeper train to Yining left at 21.50.

Half an hour.

We were cautiously hopeful about our chances. Chinese trains arrive and leave on time, four minutes was the most variance we’d experienced on the fifteen trains we’d been on in our time here.

The Yining train was leaving from the same train station as the one we arrived in to, and we did know how all the processes worked in Chinese stations now.

On the downside, with only thirty minutes to play with, if we made one wrong turn we’d miss the train. Urumqi station was on the same massive scale as Chengdu and Guangzhou stations, and getting lost was definitely a possibility.  

…and it wasn’t like there were any real alternatives. There was a sleeper to Yining that left a couple of hours later at midnight, but that would mean we’d miss our bus to Almaty.

…which was our next issue.

If we made it on to the first sleeper it arrived at 07.35 the next morning, giving us twenty-five minutes to get from Yining train station across town to the bus station.

At least, we thought we had twenty-five minutes.

All Chinese trains operate on Beijing time but locally Yining had its own ideas about what time zone it was in. We knew the bus left at 8.00, but which 8.00?

There was no online booking for the ‘big red bus’ out of China anyway so the final part of our plan was simple – ‘go for it and see what happened.’

Whenever one of us started having doubts about how stressful this might end up being, we reminded each other that an extra day in Kazakhstan before we had to catch our two day train across the desert to the Russian border, was worth the risk …and then there was the real reason.

We had bottom bunks booked for the first time ever on a Chinese train, in fact for the first time since we’d left Russia.

This was a bucket list moment and from the second that booking was confirmed a determination had settled on ‘the buckle-ups’ (…’the Dorothies’? ‘The overlanders’ maybe…?surely we aren’t stuck with the ‘no flight family’?) …anyway , whatever we were called ‘something’ had been unleashed, ‘something’ that had an absolute certainty and an unwavering commitment to making sure we caught that train.

After the day we’d had yesterday we were in surprisingly good spirits when we left our hotel that morning.

Maybe it was our interaction with the police or maybe it was the call of home, we could feel the miles being eaten up on this journey, three more of these insanely long trips and we’d be back in Somerset!

We thanked the Thank U staff for taking us in at such short notice and Suitcase led the way to the train station …and credit where credits due, since the refurb in Thailand, Suitcase had been a real asset to the team effort!

We left Xi’an (exactly) on time and found our seats. We were in a six person compartment. It was more comfortable than the normal train seats with way more arm and leg room and an actual table.

Gratefully we moved in, sharing snacks with our fellow compartmenteers, the friendlier ones at least, not the slightly stern looking one who looked like her face would crack if she smiled. Theo and I both tried our best with her and right at the end I started singing something and a slight flicker passed across her stone cold impassivity. We’d have made friends and been swapping life stories if this had been the two day Kazakh sleeper.

We settled back for some high speed travel on this flagship. This train took thirteen hours when all the other on the route took between twenty-four and twenty-seven hours over it, we’d be travelling at a super mellow speed of 300km an hour a good chunk of the time.

The drama of the night before caught up with us at some point on that journey. At the beginning we played cards and chatted for a bit about the route home. When we got to Kazakhstan we were going to do the last ‘big plan’ of the whole trip, but, as the train got faster, we slowed down and then slipped away into day dreams, and finally actual dreams.

We all got a bit lively for half an hour in the late afternoon when one of us cracked open the last packet of dark chocolates we’d held onto, bought for 22p in the little shop over the road at CLI – each chocolate with a random western car logo on it (!), then, as the sugar wore off, we slipped back into our own little worlds.

The first whispers of anxiety about missing the train were easy to ignore but then my helpful brain reminded me that these tickets were expensive – harder to be quite so chilled with money on the line.

We had done two things to help our mission… talk to the carriage hostess who told us to look for ‘transfer’ signs and then looked up the Chinese characters for ‘transfer’ and written them down, but what made the difference for us was a random piece of luck.

As we stood in the queue waiting for the train to stop the man next to me looked at my phone. I had it open on our next train ticket booking and he pointed at himself. Yining he said.

The hostess and he had a quick conversation and she told us to follow him – he was catching the same train as us.

We couldn’t believe it, such a fabulous coincidence. We nodded our enthusiastic acceptance and waited, patiently, for our train to finally stop.

We were four minutes late into Urumqi (sods law), but we were first off the train and set off at a good pace along the platform.

Twenty-six minutes to go.

We had already agreed that if there was an escalator option we would take it rather than carry Suitcase down the stairs, sensible for backs and knees but torture when you are in a high speed chase across a VERY large train station.

It was one of those moments in a comedy movie where all the action stops for the man with a zimmer frame to cross on the zebra crossing, and then… everything starts up again.

Twenty-three minutes to go.

Our guide, having taken the stairs two at a time, waited at the bottom of the escalator, with a very slight air of impatience, turning as soon as he saw us step off and we shot off after him

After half walking, half jogging down two long corridors we emerged into a part of the main station where we could all see signs in Chinese and English saying ‘Transfers’.

Nineteen minutes to go.

We were weaving our way through crowds now, we could see ‘Transfers’ were being directed to the right up ahead but our guide was looking for something else.

He stopped and talked to one official who directed him in one direction and then he spoke to another who shook his head and directed him back the way we’d come.

Fourteen minutes.

We were torn as a group, we could see the ‘transfer’ sign ahead but our guide was heading back in the opposite direction. Not easy.

My gut went with local knowledge and at least we wouldn’t be on our own if we missed the train. Rosa and Theo weren’t so sure but we all turned and went in the direction he’d gone.

Had we lost him?

We couldn’t see him any more and then his hand shot up in the air, he was over by a lift.

Eleven minutes to go.

There was a mob of people around an official who had the lift door open but was only letting people in once they’d put their ID on the scanner.

The lift filled up and left.

We were close to the front now… but checking our ID wasn’t as simple as taping it on a machine. He indicated for us to go in the direction we’d just come in.

Our fantastic guide spoke in rapid Chinese to the guard, pointing upwards, pointing back the way we’d come…pointing at his watch and then up again, the taller train official nodded and took our passports.

Eight minutes to go.

He methodically taped in each passport number as he allowed the next eight people with easy tappy ID through into the lift. It disappeared from view as he started on the last passport.

Six minutes…

(WHY DIDN’T WE HAVE EASY TAPPY ID!!!)

It took one minute and thirty seconds for that lift to come back down. Wherever it was taking us it better be real close to our train…

The guard let us on when it arrived – the other four places filling up behind us.

We went up one floor and the doors opened onto a platform with a train next to it…our guide pointed to the train and smiled.

Is this it?

Zhè shì huǒ chē ma? Rosa said it in Mandarin, and he nodded…

We stammered our thanks to his retreating back, with a quick wave he was off running along the platform.

Our carriage was two up from the point where we arrived in the lift. We hurried up the platform and showed our tickets to the woman stood patiently at the door. We had time to say hello to someone lying in one of the bottom bunks (er, we’ve booked that actually!), put our bags under the seats, and the signal came to leave.

That, was close…

We sat down and had a good look at our tickets before we confronted the woman, who did look very settled in, and discovered that China had defeated us. We had one bottom bunk and that would have to do.

Theo and Rosa both offered to go up top…I pretended to argue but my resistance was feeble at best.

‘No really, one of you should have it…’ ‘well, if you’re sure : )’

We settled down in our bunks and noticed our companion was watching a Kazakh soap with some pretty dramatic sound effects. It was hard to miss to be honest because our travel companion liked her tv action loud. 

…and at this point in our journey our stories differ. We all have different accounts of what it was she was watching, Theo was clear it was a Russian chat show, Rosa thought she was probably scrolling through her Instagram account, but to me it sounded pretty full on! Full of swords and deathly slicing, some fabulous terrified screaming and plenty of passionate clinch scenes with lots of guttural protestations of love…and then there would be some swirling weather noises before we went back to a bit more slicing and screaming.

Whatever it was she was watching after half an hour Theo had had enough.

‘Headphones or off.’ He said in his best Russian. Which when translated turned out to actually mean, ‘could you turn that down a bit please?!’

She turned it off and we all fell asleep.

The train shuddered to a clanking halt at 5.30. No high speed sleek-lined beauty this train. This was a straight off the shelf Thailand ‘rattle and shake’ model – and me? I liked the noises they made, it felt personal and more friendly somehow.

Despite how loud the noises had been, I was the only one awake in our compartment. I looked at our map app and saw we were really close to Yining. Maybe we’d arrive early…

I thought about arriving in Kazakhstan, going back to the same hostel with all its cats and our lovely room (…and that washing machine).

We wouldn’t have long there but each time we’d gone back somewhere familiar we’d had a sense of re-connection and completion.

We’d had an email from someone who was worried about the hell we would be putting ourselves through doing all that tedious travel home without the ‘adventure’ part of it keeping us going, they’d suggested we fly home, we’d done it after all…or if not us then Rosa at least so she wasn’t put off travelling for life (…‘that ship has already sailed mum’, her only comment when I’d read her the concerned email).

Well, so far we had gotten the balance between different and the same just about right and by the time we reached Almaty we would be well over half way home…the end might not be in sight but we knew when we’d start seeing it now.

I woke my sleeping beauties at 6.45 and they stumbled down their ladders and out to the toilet.

Our train had been on a go slow since the early morning clanking halt and we were going to need to get a move on if we were to arrive at 7.35.

We did our idiot checks and positioned ourselves and our small mountain of luggage by the door, once again ready to be first off the train.

Yining only had one exit and we knew where it was. The bus station was an eight minute drive away.

We ordered a DiDi as we got off the train and went out to meet it – past two huge, beautiful and slightly surprising statues of peacocks at the entrance to the station, how had we not seen them last time we came?!

We managed to let our driver know just how much of a hurry we were in and he got right into the spirit of the thing, and did some really nifty driving.

As the clock in his cab ticked over to 7.54 with three minutes still to go before we arrived we all knew it was going to take a miracle to get us on that ‘big red bus’.

We pulled up with a theatrical squeal of brakes (theatrical or imaginary?) and taxi man leapt out and asked someone where we needed to be – he’d really taken this on!

He helped carry our stuff over to the bus entrance and a man came running towards us.

‘Almaty, Almaty?’ He asked…

‘Duì, duì!’ we replied (…yes, yes!)

We all followed him round the corner to the entrance of the bus station, which was locked.

Our little timing miracle had happened. In Yining time it was 6.00 in the morning and no-one was going anywhere until the bus station opened at the eminently sensible time of 7.00 a.m.

Thankful farewells with our last Chinese DiDi driver and we sat down to wait.

We did some swift translation to make sure this was the ‘big red bus’ to Almaty, lots of nods and gestures towards the ticket office, and then Rosa and I went off to get some supplies for the journey.

On the way into China this bus had taken us eight hours …so if we did leave Yining at 8.00 we could be cuddling up with cats by four o’clock that afternoon.

Mr Almaty came with me into the train station when it opened, just after seven local time. He stuck with me all through the queue, had some quite serious negotiations on our behalf with the official selling the tickets, and we were in.

Luggage put through the scanners we were led out the back, past what looked like the shiny big red bus from last time…to a slightly less shiny, slightly more beaten up, big red bus. We thought nothing of it and when we set of half an hour earlier than we were expecting, we settled in to say our own personal goodbyes to a China that we all had loved way more than we thought we would.

We stopped a couple of times on the way out of town to pick up people and goods and then we went, South.

The border was West.

I kept this interesting piece of news to myself for a while but after forty minutes of solid southerly driving I thought Theo and Rosa might want to share in the intrigue of it…where were we going?!

Part of our answer came ten minutes later when we stopped on the edge of some agricultural land and picked up some sacks of grain and beans and an elderly couple.

Looked to me like this might be the local version of the ‘big red bus’.

After this pick up we did start to head west but there was no more road on the route we took, we literally fell off the map.

We definitely were not headed for the border.

I wondered briefly what might be in the ‘sacks of grain’. If our arrival at the bus station had triggered a plan, a long time in the making, for a smuggling run across the border? ‘The foreigners’ the cover they needed to smuggle the opium/swords/gold/recipe books for oil tea/collective works of Mao/copies of the I Ching – out of China.

Was the previous evenings ‘soap session’ affecting me?

…or was this real!!

I kept expecting us to turn North and join the road to the border crossing but we stayed steadfastly on roads that didn’t exist, heading for a border crossing that wasn’t on the map.

How that bus coped with  roads that were at best gravel and worst craters with bits of road in between was a bit of a miracle in its own right, and certainly a reasonable explanation as to why it wasn’t quite as shiny as its twin.

We stopped to drop a couple of people off in the middle of well, not much, and I got my chance to show Theo and Rosa where we were on the map.

We all came to the same, quite sensible, conclusion – we must be going to a different border crossing.

On our way into China there had only been one crossing point open and that had only opened for the first time since Covid two weeks before we were due to cross. Our online searches though, meant we knew that along the length of the Kazakhstan/China border there were seven designated border crossings.

My smuggling drama having not really taken hold with my family I went back to studying the map to see if there were any clues as to our route, and then we turned a little north and west and joined a normal road.

A much more likely route to a border checkpoint.

Let’s hope it let foreign nationals out.

As we approached the border line on the map I actually recognised the border crossing from photos. This used to be the main border before they’d built Khorgos, it was used much less now that the huge place had been built, but clearly it was open now as well.

It was reassuring (if slightly dull) to be going along a normal road towards the border (rather than my imagined version which had us careering across gravel at high speed before the sniper squads caught us).

We arrived and all filed out of the bus with our luggage and walked into the main building.

There were so many Chinese officials everywhere, and they were curious, nearly all of them got a look at one of our passports by the end.

They started by taking it in turns to ask us official questions about where we’d been, the purpose of our visit to China, and where we were going next, but before long they were just passing our passports around amongst themselves and asking us what we loved about China.

Friendly though the atmosphere became there was still a level of officers who didn’t look and didn’t engage, ready to be ‘efficient’ if necessary.

The two most friendly border guards showed us the way out as we were, inevitably, the last through. We stood outside waiting for the (very) thorough bus inspection to finish.

We waited for long enough that we all needed the toilet, and they even allowed us back through to use their toilets (although they took our passports of us, just to be sure!)

The big red bus finally came and it was goodbye China – hello, wasteland.

There were buildings being constructed and parts of road – but in between, our driver, a seasoned off roader, was having difficulty.

Three times we stopped – the longest for forty-five minutes, and it looked to us like he was waiting for the next bit of road to be built.

Seriously!

There were tractors and diggers moving gravel around and not much else going on. There were no people telling him to stop, at one point he moved ten feet and stopped again! 

It was really hot in that bus, and each time we’d been stopped for fifteen minutes or so the general population of the bus would get restless and the driver would let us outside where we’d make sure the mum with her two children got first dibs on the little bit of shade the bus created, then he’d call us back in again and a mile or so later we’d stop again. 

After just over two hours we made it the three miles across no-man’s land – the much smaller, much less impressive, Kazakhstan border buildings came into view.

Why had we been stopped in those three locations so long? Was someone tunnelling up under the bus and collecting, or delivering something…?! I literally could not think of any other explanation…

The Kazakh officials were no less thorough checking all our passports and stamping us in to Kazakhstan. Outside we spent another thirty minutes stood in the heat waiting for border force, Kazakh style, to search our bus.

I needed the toilet again by this point and was directed to a small, half-built concrete rectangle twenty metres away.

The smell hit me as I walked towards the door, a door that didn’t close properly. There was nothing in that concrete box except the smell, a lot of flies and a hole in the floor. I fought off the flies to get close to the hole and minded where I trod. Not everyone had aimed accurately at the hole…

Back by the bus the search continued – we stood in the shade made by the building and wondered if the other shiny red bus was in Almaty by now.

Eventually we were let back on and whatever our driver was hiding had made it through…we were in Kazakhstan.

Maybe now we would get going,  but no, we were still on dirt roads so there wasn’t much ‘’going’ to be got, and  after an hour of hard core bus bouncing we stopped for dinner.

A good hour spent in a resort type place with a swimming pool and huts for people to stay in, in a dry, barren scrubby desert. Maybe it was the Centre Parcs of Kazakhstan, I tried not to think ‘and they are welcome to it’, but it wasn’t easy…

Theo helped a group of guys whose car wouldn’t start but it turned out they were seriously drunk so his willingness to help get the car started slipped away as he realised just how drunk they were.

A brief search of the resort showed us they had one mega quality yurt …and the people who could understand the menu seemed to be enjoying their lunch. We sat in the shade and ate bread and peanuts in their shells and I found a five leafed clover.

Which are even luckier than four leafed clovers apparently – maybe our being on the bus had been the lucky break this group of rebel war lords had been waiting for…maybe they’d ride up on their dragons any minute now and do away with the evil tyrant and rescue someone from something with a quick flick of their swords (had I fallen asleep or did I have a touch of sun stroke?!)

We didn’t arrive into Almaty until 7.30 that night, with the time difference the eight hour journey had taken over thirteen hours. I managed to persuade the driver to drop us at the end of our road a fact not really appreciated by my tired, hungry and grumpy family so we all had a bit of a melt down – we all used the ‘storming off’ energy to get us the ten minutes up to the bus stop.

We walked into the hostel and two cats helped defrost the atmosphere and by the time we’d signed in we were back on speaking terms…

Probably as good as anyone can expect after thirty-six hours of nonstop travel. At least we had a couple of days now before the journey to Russia.

We started to unpack and Rosa told us she wasn’t feeling well and we could see it in her face now there was light, flashbacks of our delayed trip into China last time we were here – was this Covid again?!

She got into bed and I went to the local shop and got some honey and lemon and extra paracetomol, while Theo cooked rice and dahl.

We watched a couple of episodes of Brooklyn 99 whilst we ate and by the time sleep came we were back to loving each other again…