Take the train

A short description of my,sometimes weekly, journey from Honqiao, Shanghai to Hefei, Anhui
Around 290miles west.

Arrive 7a.m. Honqiao station

Travelling through the flat outskirts of shanghai on the D train to Hefei. The bullet train-which won't travel like one. Glimpses of ancient water towns now surrounded by industry, warehouses and roads. Stagnant water, breeding grounds for mosquitos no doubt, but still retaining a quiet beauty in the early morning sun. Before the grey smog descends. Barges carrying cargo on the wider canals, moving silently through. Workers tending to the trees on the sides of the track, using the wooden supports as an outdoor gym, stretching their legs skywards.

Powerstation plants and factories give way to fields,but not for long, construction is everywhere and hundreds of high rise apartments cover the landscape, for vast distances, often unfinished. 

Passing through Suzhou, the knowledge that there are many beautiful gardens here is reassuring as there is no visibility of them from the train. A noisy group get on here and make an incredible commotion over seats, can't imagine what the problem is, either they have reservations or they havent! It continues for a good ten minutes. 

Wuxi, a textile city, known for wool. An older station, not yet had the make over to the ubiquitous marble and steel, rolled out at many other stations. An old G train with rusting orange and red carriages sits at an adjacent platform.glimpses of travellers and bags of food and snacks behind the blue curtains. 

More coal yards, cooling towers interspersed with lost villages. Low level white buildings with sky blue corrugated blue tin rooves. Yellow jacketed, coolie hatted workers maintaining the tracks. More high rise and a gold topped pagoda at Changzhou station. The group become noisy again.

Past a storage yard of yellow fork lift trucks. Onward to Zhenjiang, pylons and overhead electric cables. A mist descends. Rows of regimented trees. Cement works. Wide canals with coal carrying barges. Half finished flyovers. Poly tunnels. A white egret flies across some lotus ponds. Brick factories. 

Through shiny new deserted stations. 

Older style stained cement apartments overshadowed by cranes and multiplying new builds.

A long stop as we wait for the fast train to pass, adding 20 minutes to the journey

The landscape becomes more rural, with small market gardens, willow trees Past a half deserted village painted unusually, in soft aqua. Had there been a job lot available? More greenery, more water and a few hills. some being carved away for gravel or stone, bit they quickly disappear into the haze.

Two hours out of Shanghai and we pick up speed up to nearly 250km an hour. Rapidly passing the plots of hundreds of mid rise estates. Small allotments run alongside the track, fronting the scaffolded, emerging buildings. 

Mile after endless mile of construction. 

The man next to me, covers himself in a shirt against the coolness of the air con and slumps, asleep. 

A wide river, more barges. Fishing nets make a bid for anything that may still be alive in the water as we arrive at Nanjing, the ancient capital of the south, adjacent to a new 6 lane highway and a flyover under way. All shiny and new and still being built. Three new rail lines,carve their way through the mud. 

Crowds get on and the group becomes animated. A very wide sand coloured river with docks, ships and cranes. Disappearing quickly into a similar coloured horizon.Plantations of trees, patchwork fields, watery pools pass by the window as the sky darkens A storm threatening, giving the paddy field green a deep luminous tone. The rain starts to fall, the heat outside not apparent in the cool carriage.

Sun shines, clearer air now, plains of rice fields bordered by distant smokey blue hills. Flocks of egrets billow from the watery fields.rural farmers and a few water buffalo.small white washed villages with black tiled rooves. Small groups of stone shrines pepper the landscape, looking like small pagoda bee hives.

Waiting again at Fei Dong, just outside of Hefei. Then after hree hours forty, we finally arrive. 

Then it's out into the bleak square, the harsh heat and the throngs.