5:00AM. I woke up with a list of things to do. Pack up stuff, check out, and head to the pickup point for the bus to the Great Wall. The pickup was at some station an hour away by subway. I asked the hostel receptionist how to get there. There was a language barrier, so she used a translation app to tell me which subway lines to take and where to transfer. She even showed me which buttons to press to get directions on a local app. That was going to come in handy, even though reading and typing the location names remained a challenge. The receptionist also said I could leave my luggage in the lobby along with dozens of other bags. But I didn’t want to risk it, so I decided to take the backpack with me to the Great Wall and carry it until the train to Xi’an that night.
When I started walking to a subway station, the streets were pretty empty and the city was still waking up. There was an old man out on his morning walk, and a few cars and motorcycles passing by. I breathed in the calm and chill morning air. It gave me a renewed resolve that, no matter how turbulently my thoughts were spinning the other day, today was going to be fine. I could now see things clearly and shake the irrational fear. In time, the city would wake up, and the calm morning air would give way to the bustling chaos again. But I felt ready to deal with whatever might come this time.
After half an hour, I reached the station, passed through a security checkpoint with an X-ray machine, and hopped on the subway. I was running a bit late because I had underestimated how long it would take to navigate unfamiliar streets. I thought about taking a cab, but the subway was hard to pass up at just 5 yuan ($0.70). The morning subway was packed. I wasn’t sure whether it was always like that or because of Golden Week. Uniformed officers with an armband that read “Gong An”–literally meaning “public safety”–patrolled the cars constantly. I had seen cops on public transport before, but found these officers somewhat intimidating. They exuded a stern demeanor, especially in how they confronted vagrant-looking passengers. But they didn’t care much about me or my oversized backpack on the floor resting between my legs.
I eventually arrived at the pickup point. As I walked up to the bus, a man approached me with a clipboard. “Good morning,” I greeted, and he reciprocated in Mandarin, saying something that I didn’t understand. “This is the bus to the Great Wall, right?” I asked, trying to confirm. “Qing Shuo Zhongwen,” he replied (“Please speak Chinese”). When I told him I didn’t really speak Chinese, he switched to English with a confused look on his face. The bus was already quite full. Most passengers were Chinese families with children on a day out. When the bus departed, the guide started giving a lengthy and passionate speech about the history of the Great Wall in Mandarin. He promised that he would repeat the same thing in English for a couple of foreigners onboard, but he never did. Disappointing, but to be fair, the speech was twenty minutes long. I wouldn’t want to repeat that.
At the Great Wall, we were given five hours until the ride back to the city. It was drizzling in the mountains. In a cheap plastic poncho and jeans, with a fully packed backpack, I got sweaty very quickly. Questioning my poor decisions, I walked and walked. I must have walked for the entire five hours, going as far as I could and returning to where I had started. But I could only cover a very tiny portion. When you walk on a very steep hill and look further, only to see yet another massive climb up ahead with people looking like tiny ants, you realize that you are on a structure that is bigger than what human beings normally build. The enormity of the Great Wall was humbling. In the middle of nowhere, on top of mountains, the walls just seemed to go on and on endlessly. My shoulders and back were killing me.
When I climbed down the mountain and got back on the bus, I was the last one there and the bus departed shortly after. There was nowhere to put away the backpack, so I hugged it awkwardly as we drove back to Beijing for the next two hours. The traffic was heavy. Sitting in the front, I saw the driver navigate the Chinese highway, where driving culture was different from home. There was hardly any yielding when someone wanted to merge. Whenever the bus passed another vehicle and tried to merge back, a game of chicken ensued where both drivers waited for the other to give way. The bus often drove mere inches from other vehicles while competing for the lane. No other passengers really cared about the casual madness unfolding on the road.
It was around five o’clock when the bus dropped off the passengers at the Beijing Olympic Park. The sky was grim, gray with yellowish hues, and the air was hard to breathe. The massive concrete structures showing their age under the polluted sky looked dystopian. The sight was captivating in its own strange way. But I didn’t have much time to stick around and take in the strange vibes. My sleeper train to Xi’an was leaving at 8:11PM. That meant I had less than three hours to get something to eat and start heading to Beijing West station.
Somehow I got it into my head that I should try Beijing duck in Beijing before leaving. I was in Beijing. So Beijing duck–it only made sense. I headed back to the city center and went around to different restaurants asking whether they had Beijing duck. But few people understood me and I didn’t really know what it was called in Mandarin. Through trial and error, I somehow found a restaurant that had it on the menu and managed to order it, with broken Mandarin and a lot of pointing at the menu. A waitress kept insisting I order soup, even though I kept saying that I didn’t want it. And the restaurant staff looked confused and chuckled. After a minute, they managed to pull up a translation, which read “Soup is a gift.”
I looked out at the busy street outside and smiled for the first time since my tumultuous arrival the day before. I felt okay. In a few hours, I would be on a night train to Xi’an and would take the first step toward Dublin. It still felt so far away but at least I was starting to move in that direction. The overwhelming pressure to keep moving felt much more manageable. Maybe I got used to it. The trip had begun the day before, but it was only then that I really felt it was happening and that I was in it.
Darkness was already falling on the city and the streetlights were coming on one by one. There were Chinese flags everywhere for festivity. I roamed around, looking at shops and the passersby, and took the subway to Beijing West station. The subway cars were packed. Everyone was probably traveling home at the end of the holiday week. When I got off at Beijing West station, the crowd was even more massive and their thunderous roar filled every part of the enormous station. Looking at all the people, I realized that I had really lucked out buying a train ticket for that night on such short notice.
I was a little early, and when I went to the gate printed on my ticket, the sign above didn’t even say Xi’an. Only after an hour or so did Xi’an come up on the screen and people started lining up. The waiting area was massive, with numerous gates showing different trains. And it was only one of many, each completely packed with the crowds. The number of people was truly astounding. As the departure time approached, even more people joined the lines and there was no place to even walk around. So I started seriously wondering how everyone would fit in the train. Just when it seemed the rumble of the crowd couldn’t get any louder and the space any tighter, the gate toward the platform opened, and the lines started moving. To get past the turnstiles, everyone was scanning their national identification cards on the machines. But the machine didn’t scan my foreign passport. So I had to go all the way back, join another line, and talk to the station staff. Life is complicated when you’re not part of the system.
The station staff took me to a machine capable of validating my passport and I was given the green light to proceed. After following the sea of passengers, I could finally see the sleeper train getting ready to depart on the track and hundreds of people busily walking up and down the longest platform I had ever seen. I got to my cabin and unpacked my stuff. My cabinmates found it interesting that I wasn’t Chinese, but soon didn’t care much about it. After some time, the conductor turned off the light and slid the door closed. Before she did, she explained something to the passengers but I didn’t understand what she said. She asked whether I understood. I just smiled and shook my head. She tried to explain it one more time but that didn’t make it any easier. The passengers laughed, and she gave up and just moved on.
It had been a long day, but I couldn’t sleep just yet because I needed to plan the next steps from Xi’an. So I went into the narrow hallway and slouched on a foldable seat and started coming up with some ideas. My next stop after Xi’an was going to be Urumqi. It just seemed like a good step toward Central Asia. I would have loved to stop at some other cities before Urumqi but my gut said that there wouldn’t be enough time. Most trains to Urumqi were already sold out, but there was one available on the morning after next. I liked that. Basically, my plan was to arrive in Xi’an on the morning of October 7, spend the entire day exploring, and then sleep in the train station at night until the early morning train departed to Urumqi on the 8th. I would arrive in Urumqi on the morning of the 9th. Actually, there was another option of leaving Xi’an on a late-night train on the 7th, but that seemed pointless because I would arrive in Urumqi at 11:00PM on the 8th. There wouldn’t be much to do that late in the evening. In addition, I figured it’d be better to sleep on the train than try to get accommodation. I didn’t have the energy to think about where to head after Urumqi, so I decided to cross that bridge later.
Weighing different options and trying to make the most rational decision was taxing on a tired mind. But I was going to have to get used to that, because this certainly wouldn’t be the last time. After finally booking the train ticket from Xi’an to Urumqi, I retired to my cabin. Someone was snoring, but the rhythm of the train speeding through unfamiliar land gently rocked me into sleep. All the self-doubt and the second thoughts about chasing the imaginary roads, at that moment, gave way to the uplifting realization that I was actually making my way through China. For the first time, I was beginning to make peace with my choices and the foolish pursuit on which I found myself.