The revenge of the sweetcorn ice-cream

18 April – 21 April 2014 – our journey from Hong Kong to Lhasa

Friday 18^th was the day of frenzied last minute packing after some tasty local Dim Sum – how did we manage to accumulate so much stuff? We just about made it to Hung Hom train station for our 6.45pm train to Guangzhou. Hot and sweaty but happy, we boarded and then we were off.  4.5years in Hong Kong and the last three months of planning and organizing reduced to that single moment when the train rattles and starts to roll out of the station. Whilst the last few days in the run up to this Friday had been quite emotional, on the day itself there wasn’t any time to get emotional in the rush to make sure everything was ready. And so we leave Hong Kong the same way we arrived – by train with our lives packed up in our travel bags. We travelled to Guangzhou for a night in a nice hotel near the high-speed train station from where we headed out in the morning to catch the 9am train to Xian. Ian likes trains so he was quite excited that travelling at speeds in excess of 300km/hr, we reached Xian in only 7 hours – nothing remarkable about the journey other than it had Mr. Bean on TV and there were tons of kids in our carriage and at least two sets of twins. Our hotel in Xian was right near the train-station and the city wall and even nicer than the one in Guangzhou – we are definitely flashpacking (flash backpacking) insofar as we have taken taxis everywhere and stayed in good value yet super nice places thanks to the joys of tripadvisor and booking.com. We headed out for tasty local noodles and for provisions for the train, and it was here that the revenge of the sweetcorn ice cream on a stick struck. Astrid pointed out the offending ice-cream in the icebox, missed her step and crashed knee first into the pavement – ouch! We hobbled slowly back to the hotel for an early night before getting up early to catch the 5.59 T223 sleeper train to Lhasa. Getting from the hotel to the station was painful enough, but getting through the decrepit station and up and down the station’s many stairs with a bruised knee was even more painful. Once again we boarded the train hot and sweaty and happy that we made it. The whole journey so far was a prelude to this moment – we were finally well and truly on our way to Lhasa (and a 2 day train journey with not much room to move around was exactly what was needed for the bruised knee). After a morning and an afternoon of rolling through nondescript Chinese cities with thousands of unfinished concrete tower blocks (one wonders if you were to put them all together how large a city one could build) in dreary grey and rainy weather we once again took some moments to appreciate the beautiful English and Austrian countryside we were privileged to grow up in. Towards the evening the journey became more exciting as snow appeared outside the window and after the guard informed us that during the night, at 2am, we would be crossing a pass at 5200m and that they would use some of the oxygen outlets to help us breathe at altitude. But we slept through all of that excitement and when we awoke up the next morning the sun was rising over beautiful Chinese/Tibetan highlands with frozen waterways. We whizzed past a lake reflecting the clouds as we sipped our morning coffee and as we progressed the scenery became progressively more rugged. Later in the day snow and glacier-capped mountains appeared in the distance and at 4.30pm we arrived in Lhasa, we had arrived at our first ‘destination’.