Little Miss Tour Guide

My girlfriend is currently working as a tour guide, taking groups on the Trans Siberian Railway from Beijing to Russia. She emails me regularly with her travel log and writes so well that it feels like I'm there with her. It's a good read and I thought I'd share. Here is her latest email.

BEIJING:
I lingered at the hostel for as long as possible before
resigning myself to the move across town to the new hotel the Travel Company
is using. In a bid to save money, they have abandoned our usual poor
quality hotel in the centre of town for another poor quality hotel now
located in the outskirts of the city. Essentially this means that any
time a group member wants to do some sight-seeing, go shopping, have a
meal or see a show etc they need to catch a taxi across the entire
city. As you can well imagine, this can become an expensive exercise
when teemed with Beijing’s heavy traffic. It took 40 minutes for the
taxi to transport me to the outskirts of the city and I was decidedly
unenthusiastic upon my arrival to the Tiantian Jiari hotel. This was
for a couple of reasons – not only was I due to meet the group in a
few hours but I knew I was going to be sharing with a group member, so
effectively for the next 31 days I have absolutely no privacy and no
“down” time to relax away from the group.

The issue of my Kazakhstan visa still had not been
resolved – the last email I got from the Travel Company told me I would have
to stay behind in Beijing while the group left for Xian, and after I
collected the passport I would catch the train to try and catch up
with the group before they left Xian. As the Travel Company would have to pay
for one of the local guides to go with the group to Xian, it seemed a
bit pointless for me for me to stay behind when they could pay the
same amount and have someone else collect my passport and bring it to
Xian for me – I’m not actually required to collect it in person, the
Kazakhstan embassy is more than happy to hand it over to anyone. I
suggested this to the Travel Company and will wait to hear from them.

After checking into the hotel and heading up to my room,
it was partly with despair and partly with resignation that I realised
the room had a clear glass wall separating the bathroom from the
bedroom – meaning that anyone using the bathroom was easily seen from
the room. Nice. No wonder I hate sharing! The group member I was to
share with had apparently not arrived yet, and I didn’t dare pop into
the shower when she should be arriving any second. To find me in the
shower when she walks into the room - that’s not the kind of first
impression I was hoping to make!! So I went without the shower and
instead got ready for the pre-departure meeting. At 5pm I met the
group for the first time, and what an eclectic group they are!! I
have 3 Australians, who consist of a woman, her younger brother and
her friend (all in their 60’s). The woman I am sharing with is a
Canadian engineer who is a little younger than me, and then I have 2
lesbian couples who are all friends in their 50’s and 60’s from the
UK... among them they number a head mistress and an OBE recipient!
They all seem really nice, and I am marginally amused that I am
setting off for one of the strictest Islamic countries in the world
for the first time in a group that consists of 8 women and 1 man. If
we make it through this alive, it will be a bloody miracle.

Our time in Beijing was fairly straightforward, with the
main entertainment coming unexpectedly from one Australian woman who
was hesitant to try the local food. Due to our more remote location in
the city, there was no one around who spoke English, and no tourist
restaurants with English menus. This meant that on the few occasions
when we tried to eat around the local area, we had an uphill battle to
choose food that wasn’t of the exotic variety. We usually resorted to
charades describing various animals like chickens or cows, and figured
that at least that would prevent weird things like eel and offal
coming out. But alas, our idea of the edible parts of animals differs
from the Chinese, and on more than one occasion this poor Australian
woman ended up with chicken heads – intact – on her plate. Needless
to say, this was not received enthusiastically. It became somewhat of
a group joke about the magnetic attraction of chicken heads to this
woman, and she was not allowed to order at restaurants for the rest of
our time in Beijing.

From Beijing we caught the train to Xian, and this was when
it became apparent my number was up – literally! With 8 group members
and myself, and compartments on the train being 4-berth, I came to the
sudden realisation that I was going to be spending the next month
travelling east to west across the largest continent on Earth on
trains where I would be in a confined space with 3 strangers where I
didn’t speak the languages. My joy knew no bounds.

When I got on the Xian train, I felt a momentary hope
when I saw a Caucasian woman about my age in the cabin already. Turns
out she was an American who had married a Chinese man, and they were
heading to Xian to visit his family. Sounded all very nice until she
revealed that also travelling with her & her husband was a
sister-in-law and her two small children, and that they would all be
in the 4-berth cabin with me!! My first train trip of the season,
isolated from my group and now with 6 people in 4 beds in a space
roughly 2 metres wide. And two of them were highly excitable and
restless children. There wasn’t a lot of peace on that journey, let
me tell you.

It was with a touch of relief that I got off in Xian, and
we were collected by our local guide and taken to the hotel. Unlike
the Beijing hotel, this one was centrally located and meant that we
could walk to a lot of the attractions around Xian. Other than a
scheduled trip to the Terracotta Warriors, the group had almost 2 full
days free on their own to sight-see in Xian, and rather than try and
follow them as they scattered to different parts of the city I decided
to pretty much leave them all to their own devices. I did take them
for a walk through the Muslim Quarter of town to orient them to the
street layout and show them some of my favourite street vendors
selling local Muslim food. The four women from the UK are very
adventurous when it comes to trying street food but the Australians
are not, so more often than not we’d buy something to try and share it
5 or 6 ways, with the Aussies opting out. It’s a bit of a shame for
them as they miss out on some fantastic stuff but I can understand
that they don’t want to get sick.

After our time finished in Xian it was back to the train
station to head towards Turpan in the far north west of China. From
this point onwards I was completely in the dark as to things to see or
do and what to expect, as I have not been to western China before. My
three companions on this train were Chinese women, 2 of them quite
elderly who seemed to have a penchant for turning the radio up to
eardrum shattering decibel level and leaving it that way all day.
Rather than music though, it played a woman talking for minutes at a
time, interspersed with a riff or two of Chinese music. I rather
suspect that it was religious radio but regardless of what the woman
was saying, all I know was that being on the top bunk meant that my
ear was alarmingly close to the speaker in the roof. It was one of
the more irritating things I have experienced recently, and when my
subtle turning down of the radio whenever they left the room failed to
give them the hint that possibly not everyone in the cabin was
enjoying the racket, I was forced to resort to outright treachery.

I discovered that by stretching my arm between the wall and
the top of my bed, I could just reach the radio controls. When they
lay down to nap, I would turn the radio off, but usually just as I was
subsequently settling down for a nap of my own they would wake up and
turn it back on. Enough was enough, I was becoming homicidal. I
waited until they were both out of the room and using my steak knife,
pried the knob off the radio after turning it off. I then hid the
knob in my luggage so they couldn’t find it again. Normally I don’t
condone destruction of public property but if it came to using my
steak knife on them or the knob, I figured they were still getting the
best of the deal. They quickly realised what I had done, and did a
bit of yelling at me in Chinese but I just shrugged and looked at them
blankly. So they went to the conductor and complained, dragging him
into the room to show him the disappearance of the radio controls and
he asked me something but I did my best innocent look with wide open
eyes and told him politely that I only speak English. He put the
whole thing in the “too hard” basket and left, much to the frustration
of the two elderly women. For the rest of the journey I was subjected
to glares from the women but as it was accompanied by the blissful
sound of silence I could afford to smile back ever so sweetly. When
the train arrived in Turpan I allowed them to exit first and carefully
placed the knob back in place as I headed out. Mission successful.