Hilarious Catastrophe

We boarded the train at Urumqi, western China to travel to Almaty, Kazakhstan.

We had been on a 3 week tour of western China from Xian to Urumqi. That day we had said goodbye to the other members of the tour group as their bus left for the airport. They said similar things to our friends back home—how brave we were to travel independently through central Asia and how they hoped we wouldn’t get kidnapped.

Before boarding the midnight train, the tour guide had invited us to her home to have dinner with her parents and brother, his wife and baby daughter. They were all Uighurs, an Islamic minority living in that area of China. We caught a taxi to their apartment complex and approached a woman passer-by who had a mobile phone. We gave her Selena’s phone number and soon we spoke to Selena and told her, ‘We are here at the front gate’.

Selena appeared and took us into her parents’ apartment building. The stairwell was in darkness and we groped our way upstairs. At the door, we removed our shoes and Selena appeared with a dish, jug of water and towel. We ritually washed our hands three times then dried them, as is their custom before eating.

The lounge room had a colourful carpet, a large coffee table and a few chairs. We could see the open door to the kitchen where Selena’s mother had been preparing hand-pulled noodles for the soup. The large coffee table where we were seated with Selena’s father was covered in fruits, sweets, nuts, cake and flat bread on small dishes. Selena and her parents urged us to eat, but seemed to eat little themselves. Her father is a semi-retired anaesthetist and her mother a school teacher.

We had seen tension in the Uighur towns of China. There were many soldiers carrying rifles on the streets and armed personnel carriers. We had been warned by our Han Chinese guide not to go out after 9 pm. However, the people welcomed western tourists. They are discriminated against by the ruling group in China, the Han Chinese. In 2009 there were riots in Urumqi and 200 people died. In October this year, a car was driven into Tiananmen Square in Beijing and set alight, killing 5 people. This has been blamed on the Uighurs.

We spoke to Selena’s father and family with Selena translating both sides of the conversation. They were intelligent and likeable people. Selena’s mother gave us gifts before we left their apartment.

We left for the station, and waited in a queue outside where a Han Chinese official in a small sentry box was checking passports and train tickets. She waved us back—‘no you can’t go through to the station yet.’ We understood her message even though she was speaking Mandarin.

We sat on the ground with our small bags and waited in the dark with other would-be passengers. Finally we were allowed into the station building. ‘Make sure you go to the first class waiting room. If you aren’t allowed in, show them this,’ Selena had told us and written something on a piece of paper in Chinese characters. When we tried to go into the first class waiting room, the female attendant, looked at the paper, and shook her head. She took us downstairs in a lift to another huge waiting room where cleaners were washing the floors with buckets of water and mops, so that we had to lift our feet as we sat waiting. A Pakistani couple were getting the train too and chatted to us. His accent was upper-class English. ‘You will enjoy travelling through the ‘Stan’ countries—we did that last year’, he said.

We boarded the train and found our sleeper. It had two lower and two upper berths and we had it to ourselves. At the end of the carriage was a samovar, or hot water urn. We had already travelled on three overnight trains in China. There was no buffet car, but we had come prepared with coffee, dried noodles soup and fruit. There was a squat toilet at one end of the carriage and a western style one at the other end. We crossed the Chinese border the next morning and stopped soon after at a small station in Kazakhstan. The train remained at the station for 5 minutes. When we asked our carriage attendant, who only spoke Russian, how long we would be at this station, he replied, ‘chas’, and held up one finger. I looked it up in the phrasebook--one hour. Barry decided to take the opportunity of the delay to change some currency as we had no Kazak money. He said, I’ll walk into the town. You stay here.’

He had only been gone five minutes when the train started slowly moving. It kept moving out of the station and I jumped up and ran down to the carriage attendant who was playing cards with some other men in a compartment at the end of the carriage. He communicated with hand gestures that the train was going out and coming back and that we would not leave the station for one ‘Chas’.

At a siding the bogies of the train were changed over from the Chinese to the Kazak gauge. I didn’t relax and kept watching out the window. A young woman came into our compartment and chatted to me using the phrasebook. She was returning to her home in northern Kazakhstan. She was 31 and had 3 children. Her name was Golina. I heard this girl’s name several times in the following months, it means ‘pomegranate blossom’. She and her sister were travelling with a young boy with serious physical handicaps. I think he was Golina’s son. He was lying on the seat in their compartment next to ours and had a swollen head and extremely stunted legs. He looked to be about two years old.

At the station, Barry had returned to find the train gone! He approached a local woman who didn’t speak English, but she dialled her English-speaking daughter on her mobile phone. The daughter explained that the train wheels were being changed and the train would return soon. The woman at the station, to demonstrate this, jumped down onto the train track and pointed at the two different widths of tracks—pointing at one and saying ‘China’ and at the other, ‘Kazakhstan’.

The train returned to the station. I peered anxiously out of the window. My heart started beating normally again when Barry got back onto the train and my ‘guide’ was once more in control, ready for another four months of travel adventures.

Diane Ryan

December 2013