Into China

10am on Monday morning, and we are 7500km from Moscow and only 350km from Beijing. 4 hours to go. Everywhere you go on the train this morning, people are smiling, cheery, more friendly than ever. We're almost there, and after nearly a week on the train, we're almost getting off and getting back into the real world.

Last night's border crossing exercise was, like everything else the train has done over the past week, timed to perfection, arriving in Zamyn Uud on schedule at 1910, leaving there at 2035 and crossing into China (where the China Unicom SIM card I picked up on ebay a few weeks ago started working, and I was connected to the world again for the first time in three days - hooray!)

There was a scheduled four hour stop at Erlian in China where the wheels on the train had to be changed as China has a narrower guage than the rest of the world. This process involved the train being taken away to a big shed, the carriages lifted up on a big crane (with us all still inside it peering out the window), the old wheels taken off and the new wheels put back on. After what seemed like a herculean exercise, we left Erlian bang on time to the minute, at 0057.








And now we're battering south through the Chinese countryside, approaching Beijing.














Moscow seems a long long time ago, far longer than six days ago, and certainly more than half the world away. Since then my life has operated in a small cocoon of my cabin, with occasional forays to the buffet car or onto a station platform somewhere, time spent watching the world pass by out of my window. I've become totally institutionalised, and now I'm only four hours away from rejoining the world and having to play an active part in it. Exciting, but a little bit scary as well.

Oooooh, how very Shawshank Redemption !