Silk Road by Train

Xi’an being the easternmost terminus of the ancient Silk Road, it seemed a nice adventure to at least travel part of the way West.  The most affordable option was the overnight train K591, a mere 23 hours to cover the 1800km to Dunhuang.  We took the “soft sleeper,” despite double the cost – it was either 2 sets of upper and lower bunks in a closed compartment versus 2 triple-stacked without doors…

The accommodations were actually nice, with good blankets and enough space.  The window views made you feel small as the vast steppes, desert, and the craggy mountains rushed by.  The villages, so isolated in distance and time, make you wonder why anyone would stay, as the train and world still rush by.  The engineering was impressive – the thousands of km of track, much over passes, on bridges and sheer mountainsides, and through tunnels.  The Chinese have built and are continuing an amazing and probably unrivaled infrastructure.  Yet 23 hours was an exercise in patience.  Closed doors didn’t necessarily keep out the irritating cigarette smoke nor the nasty expectorating and spitting noises.  Some of the passengers operated only on one volume – loud.  Luckily we had a good cabin mate.  I don’t know how she did it, but she startled up from dead sleep around 4AM and hurriedly disembarked, nearly missing her stop in some dark place.  The distant sunrise was amazing, the freezing night giving way to warm orange red glow.