5:00AM. I woke up to a list of things to do. First, I had to pack up my stuff, check out of the hostel, and head to the pickup point for the bus to the Great Wall. The pickup was at Heping Xiqiao station which was an hour away by subway. I asked the hostel receptionist how to get there, and despite the language barrier, 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 map that was entirely in Mandarin. So now I kind of knew how to find directions to places, even though reading and typing the location names in Mandarin remained a challenge. The receptionist also mentioned that I could leave my luggage in the lobby area 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 I boarded the sleeper train to Xi’an that night.
When I started walking to a subway station to go to Heping Xiqiao, 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 as I hurried to the station. As the air filled my lungs, I felt a renewed resolve that, no matter how turbulently my thoughts had been spinning the day before, I could now see things clearly and shake off 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 walking for about 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 (around $0.70) one-way. Despite the early hour, the subway cars were 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 all the time. I had seen cops on public transport before, but found these officers somewhat intimidating. They exuded a stern attitude, especially in how they confronted passengers in tattered clothing. But they didn’t care much about me or my oversized backpack.
I eventually got to Heping Xiqiao. The station was harder to navigate than I had expected, but I managed to find where the bus was waiting. As I walked up to the bus, a man approached me with a clipboard and tried to check me in. “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 of the passengers were Chinese families with children on a day out. When the bus departed, the coordinator started giving a lengthy speech about the history of the Great Wall in Mandarin. He promised that he would repeat the same thing in English, but he never did. That was disappointing because the speech sounded passionate and interesting. But to be fair, the speech went on for twenty minutes, so I kind of expected he wouldn’t repeat that just for the few foreigners.
After around an hour and a half, the bus arrived at the base of the Great Wall. The actual Great Wall was high up in the mountains and we had to transfer to smaller shuttle buses that ran regularly. The coordinator asked the group to convene at the base after five hours. A cable car took me to the top of the mountain. The Great Wall came into view. The path divided into two. Both directions looked fine to me, and I had done no research about possible routes, so I just picked a side and started walking. It was drizzling in the mountains. Draped in a cheap plastic poncho and wearing my fully packed backpack, I got sweaty very quickly. I was even wearing jeans, which weren’t very breathable. Questioning my choice of clothing and the decision to bring the backpack, I walked and walked. I must have walked for the entire five hours. I got as far as I could in the same direction and walked back to where I had started. My shoulders and back ached from the weight of the backpack.
Despite the nonstop walking, I could only cover a very tiny portion of the Great Wall. 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 dots, 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. All I could think about was how people in ancient times actually managed to build it. In the middle of nowhere, on top of mountains, the walls just seemed to go on and on endlessly. How did they even cut all these stones and bring them all the way up here? I also wondered how much of what I was standing on was built in ancient times and how much of it was rebuilt during modern restoration. Did some nameless person thousands of years ago lay this stone with their bare hands? I guessed that it was probably not the case, but the idea was still intriguing.
The endlessness of the structure humbled me.
When I climbed down the mountain and got back to the bus, I was the last one there and the bus departed shortly after. There was no time or space to put away my 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 observed the driver navigate the jungle that was the Chinese highway. The driving culture was pretty different from that back 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 one really seemed to care 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 with gray and yellow hues, and the air was pretty unpleasant to breathe. The massive concrete structures that showed their age under the polluted sky looked somewhat dystopian. The unique sight was captivating in its own strange way, but I didn’t have much time to stick around and take in all 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 go to Beijing West station to board the train.
Somehow an idea got into my head that I should try Beijing duck in Beijing before leaving the city that night. So I headed back to the city center and went around 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 get a translation, which read “Soup is a gift.” As I was fulfilling my spontaneous wish of trying Beijing duck in Beijing, 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 meaningful 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. My 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, probably because of the Golden Week. I roamed around looking at shops and the passersby and took the subway to Beijing West station. The subway cars were again packed with people and their luggage. 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 seriously lucked out in buying a train ticket for that night on such short notice.
I arrived a little early at the station 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 the name Xi’an come up on the screen and people started lining up. The waiting area was massive, with numerous gates showing different trains. It was only one of many waiting areas, 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 into the train. Just when the roar of the crowd couldn’t get louder and the space tighter, the gate toward the platform finally opened, and the lines started moving. To get past the turnstiles, everyone was scanning their national identification cards on the machines. But the machines didn’t do anything when I tried to 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 aren’t a part of the system.
Waiting for the train to Xi’an
The station staff took me to a machine capable of validating my passport and I was given a 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 seemed to find 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 had a good laugh about it and she eventually just moved on.
Although it had been a long day, 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. That option seemed promising because I didn’t have the luxury of staying in Xi’an overnight. Basically, my plan was to arrive in Xi’an in the morning of October 7th, spend the entire day exploring, and then sleep in the train station at night until the early morning train departed to Urumqi. I would arrive in Urumqi in the morning of October 9th. Actually, there was an option of leaving Xi’an on a late night train on October 7th, but that seemed pointless because I would arrive in Urumqi at 11:00PM the same day. There probably wouldn’t be much to do that late in the evening. In addition, I figured I’d much rather sleep on the train rather than trying to figure out accommodation. I didn’t have the energy to think about where to head after Urumqi, so I decided to cross that bridge when I came to it.
Weighing different options and trying to make the most rational decision was mentally taxing. But it was just something I was going to have to get used to, because it certainly wasn’t going to be the last time. After finally booking the train ticket out of Xi’an to Urumqi, I retired to my cabin. Despite the loud snoring from the cabinmates, the rhythm of the train speeding through unfamiliar land somehow gently rocked me into sleep. All the self-doubt and the second thoughts about chasing the imaginary roads had given way to an 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.