The next night I found myself headed South for Beijing in another sleeper train. Being the night before Spring Festival, it was almost empty. I enjoyed the luxuries of the space, sitting at a thin side table with a beer and sesame seed nuts, writing and contemplating my regained freedom. Five months before I'd left a repetitive job with computers to come to China with no specific objectives save to explore and learn Chinese, now I found myself once again moving to see what I could find. This holiday was to last a month, taking in a few cities before returning to Shenyang, arranging appropriate visas, and then taking a second holiday in the South of China to see a close friend from New Zealand teaching in Hunan.

My pillow backed onto a window again, so I checked the scenery whenever sufficiently awake; the environs seemed grubbier than they had up north on the Harbin line, thick woods, urban areas, farming settlements. I had the definite sense of moving inwards as I approached the centre of the culture, China's capital for centuries, once thought to be the centre of the entire universe. After sunrise the loudspeakers were turned on with pleasant music and a 'be awoken, friends' - hardly the rude awakenings of ten years beforehand. The music, however, annoyingly continued throughout the morning; a phenomenon which has remained consistent.

My mood was exceptional as the train entered the official outskirts of Beijing. The train lines began thickening into a twisting vena cava, snow laden paddocks gave way to roadways, squat brick houses accumulating height and proximity as they surrendered to unbroken lines of tall apartment blocks. The city was under grey cloud, the central station at Beijing misty and cold.

The nature of travel has recently changed much for several reasons. Firstly, business has awoken to the fact that people like to go to different places more than it had noticed previously; tourism has become a game of working out where is interesting and transforming it so that travellers are obliged to make use of the expensive creature comforts prepared for them. Many tourists make no bones about this - if a travelator was fixed on to the Great Wall to eliminate the effort of walking along the more scenic areas of its length, I'm sure it would receive many millions more visitors than it does already. Beijing is a prime example of a city that has had its international face refigured within the past ten years, once a thick maze of raw culture, now it is host to grand shopping malls and cafés, fashion stores, the KFC in the historic park. Foreign faces are everywhere, self-important businessmen and loaded holidaymakers in the main, their hotels and restaurants of choice staffed by underpaid English-speaking attendants.

Secondly, the Information Revolution has meant that nowhere is far away anymore as long as it's online in some respect. I had three friends in Beijing whom I intended to visit, mostly accumulated from the time spent in online chat rooms during periods between calls when working for Xtra Internet last year. As a consequence, I had some idea of what to expect from the capital, and had arranged an excursion to a nearby small town with one friend who was studying in Beijing; she had invited me to spend the Spring Festival with her family in a remote and primitive town called Zhang Jia Kou.

Zhang Na met me at the station and assisted me in finding the apartment where I was to stay, in the Hua Jia Di apartment complex in Beijing's North East. I was to stay near the ground floor of an enormous block, crowned with a gigantic Chinese character, kai, meaning 'open'. With the character on the neighbouring block, their meaning was 'explore'.
 
 

We were short of time, an expensive taxi ride across town to the South station left no opportunity for orientation in Beijing before I had to leave. We arrived with seconds to spare, forcing ourselves into little seats for the three hour's journey deep into Northern Hebei province. I amused myself by speaking with my fellow passengers as Zhang Na slept, one a PLA (People's Liberation Army) officer who was delighted to meet a foreigner who could speak some Chinese, a chubby bespectacled girl who had studied English and spoke with me about her tastes in music. Outside, we were passing through a mountainous terrain broken with small rocky villages; I spotted caves, possibly still host to some of China's troglodyte population, even still not having made it to houses in this the 21st Century AD. The soil was poor and sparsely vegetated in winter, a feeble river made several understated appearances on its casually majestic stage.

We finally arrived, it was a cold, filthy afternoon and Zhang Jia Kou squatted unpromisingly on a rare flatland amidst the mountain ranges. The city is an industrial pit for its hardened population of some 12,000 inhabitants at the centre; the city spans several distinct locations around the plain, however, and the total population of these and their satellites numbers close to a million. Centuries before, the region was an important caravan stop for trade routes headed North into Mongolia and Russia, being relatively close to the Great Wall. It has changed hands between the Chinese and Mongols a couple of times owing to its strategic location; the Japanese took it in 1937 and attempted to strengthen their own ties with Mongolia, discouraging Chinese colonisation with a few indiscriminate slaughters. The communists took it back in a friendlier fashion before their victory over the Kuo Ming Tang in Beijing. Known to the outside world as the inglorious city of Kalgan, meaning 'gate' in Mongolian, its Chinese name preserves this meaning in the word 'kou' which also means 'gate' or 'mouth'; the 'Zhang Jia' part means 'Zhang family', and it is likely that Zhang Na is a direct descendant of the pioneers that gave the town its more recent name in Chinese. Her grandfather, who met us with 12 other family members at their stationside home, was too young when his parents died to remember them, but he is certain his grandparents were also born in this area. Their family history spans a long, important period of modern development in a town that is still far behind the times; outhouses are a recent invention and a long drop proudly awaited us on the opposite side of the train tracks for our regular evening visits in the cold.

The family lived in a concrete bunker, the fifteen of us were to share three broad table beds. Zhang Na's parents were there, visiting from their home in Tang Shan to the East of Beijing; several uncles, aunts and cousins huddled around a table of party dishes. The tradition is to stay up all night; eat until midnight, celebrate with a further meal of dumplings, one of which contains a lucky coin; play until morning when a warm breakfast gives the family to a late morning sleep. All of this is punctuated by constant fireworks and crackers - we all wandered outside onto the tracks at midnight to see the town count in the Chinese New Year of the Snake. It was snowing lightly, all around the apartment blocks were afire in a display of coloured lights, bright explosions, glowing red globe lanterns; for miles around sky lotuses flamed in sporadic intervals. In a remote town, the reaches of a national culture touched on short bare villas of stone, Grandparents huddled around the old furnace, unshowered brothers drinking spirits and their children watching Hongkongese pop stars sing in the new spring on CCTV1. A century still behind Beijing, it was a warm company of faces not seen by most visitors, it was a privilege to be a foreign witness and to be accepted immediately as kin.