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rezendiIn Londonium, jet-lagged.
Yes, again.
Just spent an hour in Gatwick's immigration line chatting with a friend of Gary Shteyngart's. (author of Absurdistan, a book I'm planning to buy and read RSN.) It may not be a small world, but it sure is one full of weird coincidences.
I find myself entertaining strange and heretical thoughts, such as: aimless travel is not as thrilling as it used to be, and perhaps there is considerably more to life than wandering about and writing crime novels. But that's probably just the jet-lag talking.
Wednesday I fly to Stockholm, Thursday to St. Petersburg. The next flight is Oct 24, Shanghai-LAX.
Did I leave the iron in? I think I left the iron on.
filler Trains I have ridden:
Australia: one of the many great things about Sydney is that you can take its commuter rail out to the splendiferously beautiful Blue Mountains, just a ninety-minute ride away.
Burkina Faso-Cote d'Ivoire: Ouagadougou-Ferkessedougo, to be precise. A great ride across the Sahel, dining on foods thrust up to us, bargained and paid for through the train windows during our brief stops. Lazy beers-and-chitchat border crossing, which is probably very different since civil war hit Cd'I, alas.
Canada: various tentacles of the VIA rail system within the endpoints of London, Gravenhurst, Ottawa and Quebec City. Civilized in a dull way.
China: Yangshuo-Guiyang, Guiyang-Chongqing, Wuhan-Beijing, Beijing-Shanghai. Pretty good trains, shabby but comfortable, albeit built for smaller people than I. Samovars and blankets. Buying a ticket was always an adventure (this was in 1997) and I was never quite sure I was on the right train until we arrived.
Egypt: Aswan-Alexandria, in stages. Nice trains run by an exceedingly difficult bureaucracy.
France:the TGV from Paris to Nice and back, spectacularly modern; also, along the Riviera to Monaco and Ventimiglia in Italy, spectacular scenery.
Ghana: Takoradi-Kumasi, Kumasi-Accra. The first was no problem at all; the second was insanely, frustratingly slow, man was I glad to finally get to Accra. The snake-oil salesman who passed through the train was interesting though; an evangelistic sales pitch, vending various lotions, potions and powders in the name of Jesus.
Great Britain: various locations. Endpoints: Eastbourne, Edinburgh, Falmouth, Manchester, and some little town just inside the Wales border. Commuted by Thameslink to Blackfriars Station for months. Also, the Chunnel, maybe half a dozen times now.
Greece: Athens-Thessaloniki-Athens. Also, Thessaloniki-Macedonian border and back, because I was bounced for not having a Macedonian visa. Thankfully the train coming the other way took me back to Saloniki for free.
India:Delhi-Agra, Agra-Varanasi, Calcutta-Delhi, Delhi-Rishikesh-Delhi, Mumbai-Goa, Bangalore-Cochi, Cochi-Trivandrum. Various classes ranging from first (very comfortable, good food, but freezing AC) to hard seat (very fascinating, but very not comfortable.) I think I might have hopped on the Toy Train to Darjeeling too at some point; anyway I walked along its track on my way back from Tiger Hill.
Japan: various lines in and around Tokyo and Yokohama, esp. the great Yamanote loop, and the shinkansen down to Kyoto and Hiroshima. Superb, as you'd expect.
Mali: Kayes-Bamako. My God it was hot. Second hottest place in the world, after the Horn of Africa, and they were going through the worst heat wave in thirty years. It was an overnight train, but of course it was massively delayed, and once the sun rose the iron train began to heat like an oven. Beat driving, though; the truck took five days to catch up with us, with heaps of blowouts and breakdowns on the non-road wilderness in between. Our seats were just down from a severed donkey's head in a metal bowl, which was weird.
Mauritania: I didn't actually ride it, but it's worth mentioning that we did see the longest train in the world, which carries iron from Mauritania's inland mine to Nouadhibou. We were waiting in the no-man's-land between Morocco and Mauritania, playing soccer. It was, indeed, a very long train.
Morocco: Agadir-Casablanca-Agadir, if memory serves. And at least one other ride, but I forget where. Full of women carrying immense amounts of goods stuffed under their clothes, so that they all looked size 48, in order to avoid some sort of customs duty I guess. Orange trees at a train station, an oil derrick venting flame in the distance, black bulls and doves and olive trees en route. It's a gorgeous country. Great beaches too. Casablanca kinda sucked though.
Peru:from Agua Caliente, at the foot of Macchu Picchu, back to Cuzco. It was nice to ride instead of walk after four days on the Inca Trail.
USA: Amtrak Montreal-NYC. CalTrain. New Jersey Transit. I think that's it.
Serbia-Macedonia-Greece: Belgrade to Thessaloniki. Weird compartment where the beds folded out to cover the entire flat-space area. Slow and massively overcrowded; thankfully, I had a Walkman and Hybrid Theory. Passed through Macedonia this time (picked up a visa in Sarajevo) but did not stop.
Slovakia: from Bratislava to Vienna and back; the two cities are so close that the former makes a good alternative airport for the latter.
South Africa: Cape Town's suburban rail from downtown to Muizenberg et al. on the Indian Ocean side of the Cape. Basic, somewhat run-down developed-nation public transit; great scenery once you hit the ocean.
Sri Lanka: Colombo-Galle-Colombo, Colombo-Kandy-Colombo. Rusting hulks of metal that somehow made their way along the rails more or less on time. The times I got a seat, they were fine; the times I didn't, it was insanely crowded. The 2004 tsunami overturned a whole coastal train and killed hundreds of those on board.
Tanzania-Zambia: 44 hours from Dar es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi. Actually pretty organized and efficient, by African standards. Got slightly sick, but was still fun hanging out in the bar car and watching the savannah roll by.
Thailand: Bangkok-Ko Samui (or the nearest mainland town anyways). Overnight sleeper berth. Quite reasonable if a little down-at-heel.
Zimbabwe: In 1998, linens, pillows, delivered meals, polished wood, loads of tourists spending money, great fun, on time. In 2005, stuck windows, crumbling linoleun, filthy fixtures, wires sprouting from holes where lights used to be, inexplicable delays, no other tourists, bitter resignation from fellow-passengers, the general sense that the system was only a couple of months from total collapse.
Yes, again.
Just spent an hour in Gatwick's immigration line chatting with a friend of Gary Shteyngart's. (author of Absurdistan, a book I'm planning to buy and read RSN.) It may not be a small world, but it sure is one full of weird coincidences.
I find myself entertaining strange and heretical thoughts, such as: aimless travel is not as thrilling as it used to be, and perhaps there is considerably more to life than wandering about and writing crime novels. But that's probably just the jet-lag talking.
Wednesday I fly to Stockholm, Thursday to St. Petersburg. The next flight is Oct 24, Shanghai-LAX.
Did I leave the iron in? I think I left the iron on.
Australia: one of the many great things about Sydney is that you can take its commuter rail out to the splendiferously beautiful Blue Mountains, just a ninety-minute ride away.
Burkina Faso-Cote d'Ivoire: Ouagadougou-Ferkessedougo, to be precise. A great ride across the Sahel, dining on foods thrust up to us, bargained and paid for through the train windows during our brief stops. Lazy beers-and-chitchat border crossing, which is probably very different since civil war hit Cd'I, alas.
Canada: various tentacles of the VIA rail system within the endpoints of London, Gravenhurst, Ottawa and Quebec City. Civilized in a dull way.
China: Yangshuo-Guiyang, Guiyang-Chongqing, Wuhan-Beijing, Beijing-Shanghai. Pretty good trains, shabby but comfortable, albeit built for smaller people than I. Samovars and blankets. Buying a ticket was always an adventure (this was in 1997) and I was never quite sure I was on the right train until we arrived.
Egypt: Aswan-Alexandria, in stages. Nice trains run by an exceedingly difficult bureaucracy.
France:the TGV from Paris to Nice and back, spectacularly modern; also, along the Riviera to Monaco and Ventimiglia in Italy, spectacular scenery.
Ghana: Takoradi-Kumasi, Kumasi-Accra. The first was no problem at all; the second was insanely, frustratingly slow, man was I glad to finally get to Accra. The snake-oil salesman who passed through the train was interesting though; an evangelistic sales pitch, vending various lotions, potions and powders in the name of Jesus.
Great Britain: various locations. Endpoints: Eastbourne, Edinburgh, Falmouth, Manchester, and some little town just inside the Wales border. Commuted by Thameslink to Blackfriars Station for months. Also, the Chunnel, maybe half a dozen times now.
Greece: Athens-Thessaloniki-Athens. Also, Thessaloniki-Macedonian border and back, because I was bounced for not having a Macedonian visa. Thankfully the train coming the other way took me back to Saloniki for free.
India:Delhi-Agra, Agra-Varanasi, Calcutta-Delhi, Delhi-Rishikesh-Delhi, Mumbai-Goa, Bangalore-Cochi, Cochi-Trivandrum. Various classes ranging from first (very comfortable, good food, but freezing AC) to hard seat (very fascinating, but very not comfortable.) I think I might have hopped on the Toy Train to Darjeeling too at some point; anyway I walked along its track on my way back from Tiger Hill.
Japan: various lines in and around Tokyo and Yokohama, esp. the great Yamanote loop, and the shinkansen down to Kyoto and Hiroshima. Superb, as you'd expect.
Mali: Kayes-Bamako. My God it was hot. Second hottest place in the world, after the Horn of Africa, and they were going through the worst heat wave in thirty years. It was an overnight train, but of course it was massively delayed, and once the sun rose the iron train began to heat like an oven. Beat driving, though; the truck took five days to catch up with us, with heaps of blowouts and breakdowns on the non-road wilderness in between. Our seats were just down from a severed donkey's head in a metal bowl, which was weird.
Mauritania: I didn't actually ride it, but it's worth mentioning that we did see the longest train in the world, which carries iron from Mauritania's inland mine to Nouadhibou. We were waiting in the no-man's-land between Morocco and Mauritania, playing soccer. It was, indeed, a very long train.
Morocco: Agadir-Casablanca-Agadir, if memory serves. And at least one other ride, but I forget where. Full of women carrying immense amounts of goods stuffed under their clothes, so that they all looked size 48, in order to avoid some sort of customs duty I guess. Orange trees at a train station, an oil derrick venting flame in the distance, black bulls and doves and olive trees en route. It's a gorgeous country. Great beaches too. Casablanca kinda sucked though.
Peru:from Agua Caliente, at the foot of Macchu Picchu, back to Cuzco. It was nice to ride instead of walk after four days on the Inca Trail.
USA: Amtrak Montreal-NYC. CalTrain. New Jersey Transit. I think that's it.
Serbia-Macedonia-Greece: Belgrade to Thessaloniki. Weird compartment where the beds folded out to cover the entire flat-space area. Slow and massively overcrowded; thankfully, I had a Walkman and Hybrid Theory. Passed through Macedonia this time (picked up a visa in Sarajevo) but did not stop.
Slovakia: from Bratislava to Vienna and back; the two cities are so close that the former makes a good alternative airport for the latter.
South Africa: Cape Town's suburban rail from downtown to Muizenberg et al. on the Indian Ocean side of the Cape. Basic, somewhat run-down developed-nation public transit; great scenery once you hit the ocean.
Sri Lanka: Colombo-Galle-Colombo, Colombo-Kandy-Colombo. Rusting hulks of metal that somehow made their way along the rails more or less on time. The times I got a seat, they were fine; the times I didn't, it was insanely crowded. The 2004 tsunami overturned a whole coastal train and killed hundreds of those on board.
Tanzania-Zambia: 44 hours from Dar es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi. Actually pretty organized and efficient, by African standards. Got slightly sick, but was still fun hanging out in the bar car and watching the savannah roll by.
Thailand: Bangkok-Ko Samui (or the nearest mainland town anyways). Overnight sleeper berth. Quite reasonable if a little down-at-heel.
Zimbabwe: In 1998, linens, pillows, delivered meals, polished wood, loads of tourists spending money, great fun, on time. In 2005, stuck windows, crumbling linoleun, filthy fixtures, wires sprouting from holes where lights used to be, inexplicable delays, no other tourists, bitter resignation from fellow-passengers, the general sense that the system was only a couple of months from total collapse.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 11:01 am (UTC)I vividly remember the trains we took from Gibraltar (after the ferry from Algiers). Fourth-class immigrant train which stopped at every single crossing, bump, and cow. I and our luggage shared the top bunk; I was hiding behind the luggage, exhausted, from the noise and loose chickens. There were at least five other people in the compartment besides my parents. The smells. The stuffy heat. All of which I was used to from Morocco, but never for so many hours on end. I believe it took five or six hours from the coast to Madrid.
At Madrid, my parents had had enough of the nightmare, and we got off that accursed train. Madrid had recently had some sort of bombing, so there were no lockers; we bribed a bellhop who had a place across the parking lot to watch our luggage. Mom, who'd been posted to Madrid some fifteen years previously, dusted off her rusty SPanish and began arguing firmly with the men in the ticket booths. I sat on the rest of our bags, exhausted, being eyed by the sort of men who hang around in Madrid train stations at midnight smoking ghastly cheap cigars. (I was, unbelievably, blonde, tan, svelte, and looked much older than my eleven years of age.) Dad glared at them and smoked his menthols right back. I coughed and dozed.
But Mom's rusty Spanish and grim determination had gotten us on a first-class carriage to Paris in a few hours. Or maybe it was only second-class.
It was like another planet. Everything was clean and bright and maintained. There were only four bunks where there had been six, and twice as wide. The train rolled smoothly instead of a bone-shattering rattle. The lighting worked; the doors closed. There was a toilet, and it worked. There were hardly any other people, all of whom smelled nicer than we did. There were no animals. We had a compartment to ourselves - two, in fact; the conductor apologized but even married men could not share a compartment with women, it was against the rules. There was a dining car.
Despite our getting on this train in Madrid several hours after getting off the immigrant special, we arrived in Paris several hours before it did.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:02 am (UTC)And aha! That other Morocco ride was Tangiers-Rabat. Thanks for the reminder. (And I think I actually went Rabat-Casablanca-Rabat not Agadir-Casablanca-Agadir.)
The Darjeeling Toy Train is steam-powered, iirc, and remains a full mainline service, not a preservation train. (It's called the Toy Train 'cause it's very narrow-gauge, and slow.)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 02:48 pm (UTC)Thanks for reminding me to order "Absurdistan" via the awesomeness that is inter-library loan.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 05:17 pm (UTC)Rode Virgin Rail from London to Manchester in 1998 [or was it 97? The mind, it's the first thing to go...] during the worst flooding England had seen in a century; what was to be a 2-hour trip turned into a 20-hour ordeal because of flooded tunnels and tracks. By the second hour the train crew were out of water and snackies and the passengers started getting fretful...
no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 06:04 pm (UTC)Amtrak cross-country: Fremont, CA->Sacramento, Sacramento->Chicago, Chicago->D.C., December 2000. One of the most memorable experiences I've had. Sacto->Chi was very pleasant, with utterly gorgeous scenery in Colorado and Utah, and we crossed the Mississippi; the Chi->D.C. train was more crowded (again, using the word by First World standards), the staff were surly, and the bathroom was filthy, so, less fun. Still, I was convinced that the train, if the conditions are adequately commodious, is a wonderful way to travel. I would like to take the Coast Starlight between California/Oregon/Washington - supposed to be a lovely trip.
Fall 2001: Great Northeastern Railway, London->Edinburgh->Leuchars, Fife; Connex SouthCentral around various parts of East Sussex and Kent and to London. I went from Portsmouth to Leuchars (an hour outside Edinburgh) in one long, long day: oh, the frustration of having to get off the train system, take the Tube from one end of London to the other with a study-abroad semester's worth of luggage, then get on another train to Edinburgh. Businessmen apparently commuted from Portsmouth, on the south coast, to London, a couple hours' ride; the familiar routine of phoning in to tell the office they'd be late when the train was delayed. And I thought Bay Area residents were insane for how long a commute they would tolerate.
Lastly, a youth Eurail pass (August 2001) is a wonderful thing. Went all over central Europe that way. So much fun. Much love to the German ICE (never got to France and the TGV). In Holland I was introduced to the fact that a train sometimes *splits* at a particular station, and the two parts go different ways, so it's very important to make sure you are in the part that is going where you want to go, or you will end up in Groningen instead of Bremen.
As a postscript, I like major train stations themselves. Grand Central Station really reminds you of how important and symbolic the train system used to be in America; in Europe, it still is, and the stations (Victoria for example) are proportionately impressive.
I love train travel. I have never been to a Third World country. My opinion may change once I am as well-travelled as you are.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:06 am (UTC)I just got rabies and typhoid vaccinations from a nurse who commutes from Brighton, and as a result was half an hour late. (In theory it's a one-hour commute; but in practice, 90-120 minutes.)
Never did the Eurail pass, but Japan does the same kind of thing, and the JR Rail pass is fantastic.
The splitting trains would give me a splitting headache.
I'm very fond of Victoria Station too. It's sort of my central locus of London reality.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-11 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 10:07 am (UTC)I keep meaning to get into the Railway-Tycoon type games. I suspect I'd be addicted in short order.