8000 km by train, a trip from China to Holland (part 1)

Today I am going to take you all on a trip I made a while back from the time when I when I was still living in Europe. I made a trip by train 8000 kilometers over land from Beijing, China to Eindhoven, Holland. I can already hear you thinking: "why on earth would you want to do that?", but for me it was very rewarding. This is because I was afraid of flying for a long time, and when I mean afraid, I mean afraid. So say in the previous 7 years before, I hardly did any flying at all. This because the experience for being on an airport and being in the plane, was so much overshadowing my trip itself, it decided to leave it. But I also was feeling I was missing out of lots of cools trips, so I decided to do something about it. I read a lot of books, I talked to a specialized guy in irrational fears, I went plane spotting. Yes all these kinds of things, to get my fear of flying out of the way. But I also felt I had to try afterwards to fly somewhere, and reward myself for the work I put in to overcome this stupidness.

The plan

So what my idea was, is to book a one-way flight, and travel back over land by train or car. Well, this idea got out of hand a bit, and all of a sudden I had booked a ticket to Beijing. Ow crap, and now what! So my idea was to travel by train all the way back home from there. But, all these countries I was going to travel through required visas. I decided to leave this visa-drama to a specialized company, because it was a hassle, a big hassle. It turned out to be a good thing, because this travel agency has experience with these kinds of train trips, so they also booked all my train tickets. These means I was stuck to dates, on the other hand this gave some good guidelines on how long I was going to be travelling. 6 weeks in total, from China, to Mongolia, to Russia, and through Belarus, Poland and Germany towards home, the Netherlands. What a trip...

Holy crap, just look how long this Chinese wall is!!! You cant even imagine its around the whole country

Beijing

The start of my trip was there, fully prepared with a backpack and a small bag, a passport full with visas, a fresh e-reader and lots of fear towards my long flight to Beijing. I admit, I took some pills to calm down, and asked the flight attendant to check on me a bit, but Beijing was there before I knew it. I don't remember anything from the touchdown there, because the pills make you forget stuff. Not cool, but hey, being scared on a plane is also not cool! I would stay in Beijing more than a week, and this city has so many sides, I could have stayed way longer without being bored. I loved Beijing!! I took subways (even though in a different language, these systems are still easy to understand), I walked a lot, and tried everything I ran into. This means I ate cow tong, chicken kidneys, fried grasshoppers and all kinds of other stuff. My favorite meal? Traditional hotpot. This means dipping your raw foods in a boiling stock, and in a sauce afterwards. It was fantastic. Food and China and Karin--> YES!!!

More Chinese wall, you can stare at it forever!

Of course I did a lot of touristy attractions as well. I have to say I was luckily that there was not a lot of smog at the moment I was there, skies were clear, and the scenery was beautiful. I visited the Chinese wall on a calm day, Tiananmensquare of course, the summer palace, and the traditional old town hutongs. Well, I can tell you, when a white, blonde girl (I was blond at the time) goes for a pee in a traditional hutong area, she can not do that without having at least 10 Chinese ladies checking to see what she is doing. A whole new experience!! I visited the theatre for an acrobat show and was almost and run over by silent electrical scooters about a million times during all of this. I saw temples, people doing tai chi in the parks in the morning, honking cars and gigantic buildings.

From a boat at the summer palace, so much green also to find in the concrete jungle!

After staying in Beijing for more than a week and because it is so big and so divers, to be honest in my conclusion: It was too short! If you want the full Beijing experience, stay a month.

Datong

It was time to leave Beijing and travel to my next destination, Datong. Datong is a medium/large city just northwest of China with a population of 'only' 3 million residents. The train ride from Beijing to Datong was just a couple hours and through a very cool scenery of hills and tunnels. The train station in Beijing where I stepped in the train, was by far the biggest train station I have ever set foot in in my whole life! And crazy busy, crazy busy. I thought I was going to be fine with my train number on my ticket, but all destinations turned out to be in Chinese symbols and not in numbers, and asking somebody was also not too easy. But with a good mouth, and pointing at tickets will in the end always help. I was on the right train towards Datong. So during the pleasant trainride, I was fortunate to have good talk in my coupe. The man who was also in my coupe was a cardiac surgeon in training from Thailand, and he was travelling the world before finishing his residency. The cool thing he was doing, was that he was not using any airplanes, only boats and trains. He was travelling for months already. Well, since I was also working in cardiac surgery at that moment we had a lot to talk about and the 4 hour trip had passed before I had even finished the conversation.

Arriving in Datong was strange. Naively I had thought that because Datong is a 'small' city, it would really be small. But with that amount of residents it was still gigantic, and skyscrapers were everywhere. I walked over the old city wall, which was beautiful only to find out later that thousands of families were forced to move because of the construction of that wall. Hmmmm, also a part of China.

On top of the Datong city wall

Anyway, sightseeing time the days after my arrival! Datong is known for its hanging monistary in the hills, and its Yungang caves which I both visited. I have to say, even though both of the sites actually beautiful and something I had never seen before, the amount of tourists there was quite ridiculous and most of them were very impolite. It was not super pleasant to walk around and bumping in to everyone, just because they want to pass fast. It took a bit of the magic, to be honest

The hanging monistary from below

In the evenings, again the daily pleasure of food came lurking around the corner! Datong city is not touristy at all, so none of all menus had English on it, nor pictures. I choose my foods by walking around with the owners of restaurants (again it helped to be blond and tall), and just pointing out the dishes that I wanted from other peoples tables. Fantastic meals I had there, for such soft prices. I really enjoyed Datong for that.

Back on the train!

It was time to hit the road again, and continue my journey towards Ulan Baator in Mongolia. This would be a 24 hour trip, and I was looking forward a lot visiting this next gigantic country! Mongolia is so different compared to China AND to the rest of the world, so I was mentally preparing for this! I will tell you about it next time in my blog!