Train of thoughts
Monisha Rajesh’s global adventure is irreverent yet evocative, writes
Having travelled 25,000 miles around
India in 80 trains
(and written a book about it in 2012), Monisha Rajesh, a 30-something British journalist, had sworn never to take on anything so ambitious again. But, back to her humdrum life in London, she realises that the romance of long-distance railway travel has her hooked. So, three years later, she embarks on a seven-month, 45,000-mile journey through Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Canada and the United States, accompanied by her fiancé Jeremy, later to become her husband. The result is Around the World in 80 Trains, which offers vivid snapshots of the people, politics and culture of the countries she traipses through.
As a child of two Indian doctors whose jobs required them to move all over England, Rajesh lived in eight cities (never staying anywhere longer than three years) and attended six schools — a peripatetic lifestyle that gave her an ability to make friends, embrace change and relish travel. As one train ride follows another, Rajesh discovers the joy of communal dining in restaurant cars, where passengers play cards, smoke and make friends over cups of tea, without the need for a phone or a book.
Rajesh has a keen eye for social and political realities. In Beijing she discovers the
hutongs, a network of medieval residential alleyways housing the informal-sector businesses of migrants, being demolished as the Chinese government repositions the city as a “hyper-modern” centre for finance and technology. As a result, she writes, “Beijing’s history, grit and charm lay in ruins.” She has a sense of history, too, making time to visit the Hellfire Pass Museum at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, where she finds remnants of the “death railway” from erstwhile Burma to Thailand that the Japanese army forced Allied prisoners of war to construct in 1943.
On the train from Shanghai to Xining, from where she is to board the train to Lhasa, Rajesh meets an English-speaking retired Chinese teacher whose family suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He is all praise for Deng Xiaoping, tells Rajesh a thing or two about the brutal realities of life under an authoritarian regime, books a hotel room for them in Xining and even pre-pays the bill for it.
In Tibet, her Indian origin wins Rajesh many handshakes, especially from Buddhist monks, but she finds Lhasa an “Orwellian nightmare of CCTV, road blockades and popup police stations”. There are signs of superficial prosperity (Lhasa should be renamed “Lhasa Vegas”, suggests her photographer friend Marc), but Tibetans have hardly benefitted; it is the Han Chinese migrants who run most of the shops, cafés and hotels. She learns through a whispered conversation with a young woman in an obscure café that younger Tibetans’ sole source of information about the outside world is the Lonely Planet guides at Lhasa’s only good bookshop. The story is the same in Turfan in Xinjiang province, her next stop, where the Uighur Muslim minority is similarly oppressed.
Rajesh concludes sorrowfully that highspeed trains — in China, as in Japan — kill the romance of railway travel. Yet she finds that Japanese trains have a character and soul of their own. All exiting passengers deposit litter in a garbage bag held out by an official, the conductor removes his hat and bows as he enters the carriage (repeating the act as he leaves), and sanitation teams at Tokyo station take a mere seven minutes to clean the entire train before the next batch of passengers board.
Rajesh seeks people out and is amply rewarded. In Japan she chats up 81-year-old anti-nuclear campaigner and Hiroshima survivor Tetsushi Yonezawa, and, more remarkably, the 67-year-old daughter of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was the only double-bomb survivor in Japan. He fled Hiroshima a day after the bomb strike, arriving in his home town Nagasaki the day before the second bomb was dropped, and lived on until 2010.
In the United States Rajesh uses a 30-day Amtrak rail pass to swing from the eastern seaboard, through the Deep South to Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle, and back to Vancouver, Canada, where she had flown in from Japan. Drawn to New Orleans by “Creole cooking, jolly people and jazz”, she is told by a taxi driver that a lot of the black culture disappeared with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, because some 100,000 members of the community were resettled elsewhere. Yet, Rajesh finds it a friendly city — the first time she has wandered around an American city (other than New York) without worrying about her colour.
The intrepid Rajesh also travels around North Korea for 10 days in a 1970s-vintage chartered train, part of a motley group of 14 foreign tourists who, like her, wish to find out whether the country is changing. Statues and portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are everywhere and, predictably, when the train to China reaches the border, North Korean guards carefully delete all the photos in her phone.
The last leg of the journey home, on the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, is completed in relative luxury, their excitement mounting as they approach home. But the icing on the cake for Rajesh is that though she and Jeremy thought they knew everything there was to know about each other when they became engaged, they discover personality traits in each other over the previous seven months that could only have been made possible by their travels.
As Rajesh ends her witty, irreverent, insightful and evocative account, the thought occurred to me that she says little about the logistical demands of their trip, and nothing at all about the state of their finances during their travels, which must have cost them a
minor fortune.
RAJESH CONCLUDES SORROWFULLY THAT HIGH-SPEED TRAINS IN CHINA AND JAPAN KILL THE ROMANCE OF RAILWAY TRAVEL