Sad to leave Beijing

We're sleeping at the Renaissance Suzhou Hotel tonight, it and its surroundings a far cry from Zhixin Dong Lu (the road in Beijing where we were residing last night) in all respects. Too luxurious by far and a rather lonely and forlorn supper for two. The buffet meal here, costing twenty times as much, was by no means as tasty or such fun as last night's feast in a private room at the neighbourhood restaurant with Sha and George, Sha's parents, her cousin and his wife and Rob and Sally, all of whom we're missing ever so much now that we're on to the next stage of our travels.

One good thing, though, is that I seem to have an easy Internet connection at last.

Our train ride to Suzhou from Beijingnan (Beijing South station) took 10 hours 20 minutes. We sat in our seats for longer than that, as Sha's cousin had driven us to the station in plenty of time, and Sha and George had helped settle us and our luggage in the train after a coffee and croissant on the superbly clean and spacious station concourse.

We followed our route on the map of China we'd bought yesterday. The cabin crew, in smart uniforms with red ties, provided us with bottles of cold water, hot water at the end of the carriage and a "sanitary bag" for our litter. I won my bet with George that the WC would not be a squat one. It was kept clean by a girl apparently employed to do just that job, not easy on such a full train. A snacks trolley kept coming by on which the snacks were none too edible so we ate mostly nuts. Other passengers didn't mind noisily sucking the bones of the meat in the vacuum pack bags and passing the bones around to share with their friends.

On the outskirts of Tianjin the municipality was bulldozing the little old hutongs into piles of rubble to make room for high rise office buildings and flats; it was the same story in all the cities we crossed. Cranes everywhere. The landscape was for the most part industrial, and for the first few hours flat, with dykes, rows of poplars, broad rivers or canals festooned with fishing nets. After the 3rd stop, Dezhou, more trees appeared. We crossed a tidal river with sandy banks, the Huang He. Then on to Jinan. It started to rain with heavy clouds over the rising ground. Red tiled roofs now, in a valley that narrowed, with quarries and stony hillsides, tall thin cypresses growing on them. These are the mountains of Shandong province.

After Taishan, the landscape became less industrial for a while; workers in the fields wore conical straw hats. They had shelters with reed mats on the roof for extra shade; some of these little huts were even thatched. More hills, with terraced fields full of boulders but cultivated anyhow. Few if any animals; we wonder where all that Chinese meat comes from, that's so popular.

By mid afternoon we'd reached Xuzhou, same as the other cities, slums being demolished in heaps of squalor in the midst of modern skyscrapers. A few of our noisy fellow passengers got out here and immediately started smoking on the platform. A cheerful bunch of men, but I couldn't make out a word they'd been saying. They were speaking in some dialect. A gentleman from Singapore told us that he couldn't understand them either.

A flock of white goats on the embankment, thousands more poplar trees, and now we were definitely in the south, with two hours to go: numerous paddy fields and lotus ponds visible as well as the wheat fields, the lotus cultivated for its tasty roots. We crossed wide rivers with scruffy old junks on them and I finally saw buffalos, one with a calf. We travelled at about 160 kph on average. In the cities, the red sun was now visible through a haze of fog and the outdoor air temperature moved into the 30s centigrade. We crossed the great Yangzte River, proper ships on this one, "their St. Lawrence, " said Chris, and had reached Nanjing. After that it began to get dark.

The heat was a shock when we got out of the train and so were the long flights of steps with no escalators working, as Suzhou station's being renovated. Up, down and up again, then down again, but we coped. A gentleman helped me with my heavy little case while Chris was occupied with his two pieces of luggage. The last shock was seeing the queue for taxis round two sides of a square, but the line moved impressively quickly and I successfully used my crib sheet to direct our taxi driver to the hotel. Must stop, am falling asleep at the keyboard.