Vanity Fair UK – September 2019

rom deep within a

cocoon of blankets,

I could hear a steady

hiss. My head throb-

bing at every turn, I

nudged my nose out

and bristled: purified oxygen was sup-

posed to smell sweet but the tang of old

cigarettes soured the air.

On the ascent from Golmud station,

passengers on the Qinghai-Tibet rail-

way from Xining to Lhasa—the highest

railway in the world—are forbidden from

smoking as the compartments are pres-

surised to alleviate the symptoms of al-

titude sickness. Nonetheless, most of the

Chinese passengers had taken no notice

of the warnings, wandering around with

grubby butts between their fingertips,

smoke winding into the vents and curling

out through gold nozzles above the seats.

Fumbling in the darkness, I shuffled

to the foot of my berth and inched up the

blackout blind, hot white light slicing into

the compartment. Few sights can take

my breath away, but at almost 5,000 me-

tres above sea level, I was struggling to

fill my lungs. However, the scene outside

soothed my woes. Now awake, my com-

panions crawled towards the window

and the three of us sat in awed silence,

smiles playing on dry, blue lips.

The Qinghai-Tibet plateau resem-

bled a live Rothko painting: a slab of ca-

nary-yellow terrain rose to meet a slab

of electric-blue sky, not a wisp of cloud

in sight. Dreadlocked yaks speckled

the landscape, the odd cluster of no-

mad tents appearing in the foreground

strung with Tibetan prayer flags. Lakes

shimmered like shards of glass between

the dunes, turning turquoise beneath the

sun. In more than five months and 67

train journeys around the world, I had

never seen the earth stripped down to

such naked beauty.

Unlike a lot of train aficionados, I

didn’t grow up with a family who worked

on the railways, nor did I have fond child-

hood memories of chugging off to gran-

ny’s for the summer holidays clutching a

tin of boiled sweets and a copy of Beano.

At the age of 28, I was rather late to de-

velop my affinity for trains, discovering

them in their most concentrated form

when I spent four months travelling

the length and breadth of Indian Rail-

ways—a journey that became my first

book, Around India in 80 Trains. Even

then, I only chose to see the country by

train because of a crazily cheap rail pass

and the fact that the trains could burrow

into the nooks and crannies of the coun-

try that no plane or car could reach.

Once on board, I observed the modus

operandi of travelling in India and quick-

ly got the hang of how to intrude on oth-

er people’s lives. Perfecting this into an

art form, I began hovering in doorways

F

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