We were really excited about our twenty-three hour trip from Urumqi to Kashgar. We had planned to travel by train for the opportunity to see the surrounding countryside. Like our other train travel, we had booked first class soft sleeper. The rail trip however turned out to be more than disappointing.

On boarding our train we made our way upstairs to our sleeper cabin which was numbered according to our tickets. It was small but attractively set up with a lace clothed table and two smallish beds. We were delighted that we would be on our own in what looked like a very pleasant compartment. Our delight however was short lived. No sooner had we put down our bags, when our steely faced female guard berated us severely, making it quite obvious that we had to move to a lower cabin. And infuriatingly, this was despite there being a full suite of empty soft sleepers in the upstairs level.

As we sadly learnt, there was no point whatsoever in arguing with rail staff, more so that we had no idea of the language. And so we had to resign ourselves to a hard sleeper compartment so low on the train that it was impossible to see out above the rail tracks. Not that the window would have helped. It was double sealed with a heavy plastic material that was so dust ridden that it was impossible to see out of anyway. We shared our hard sleeper with a Chinese business man who seemed as happy to see us as we were to be put in the compartment with him. Within minutes he pulled down the shutters, making it very clear that he intended to sleep for the afternoon.

Bloody wonderful - this was midday - our travel agent had booked and we had paid for a first class soft sleeper and here we were trapped in our miserable dungeon in the dark and unable to do a thing about it - for twenty three hours. Being disappointed was a gross understatement and it certainly gave us a different perspective about travelling on trains in China. We began to question again why we had paid for a travel agent. But then again, it was really not our agent's fault that we were landed with a guard whose only apparent motive in preventing us from staying in our booked soft sleeper cabin was to make work easier for her in that she did not need to climb up and down the stairway. In hindsight, perhaps we should have just insisted and stayed where we were. Who knows?

In our gloom we decided that the only solution was to move to the dining carriage for the afternoon. If there was a bright side, at least the dining car was a bit easier to see out of and it meant that we could sit up in the daylight. We felt too miserable to eat so to keep our seats, we bought some beer and more beer and then sat watching in total fascination a strange but beautifully eerie vista of huge mountain passes, arid deserts and a mausoleum of abandoned villages, some almost covered with the travelling and unforgiving desert sands.

Late in the afternoon the train lurched up and up, snaking in immense arcs over huge passes and through a wonderful sunset lit bright pink and orange desert scenery, interspersed with vivid green oasis fed meadows. Wild camels and donkeys could be seen from the train line, but apart from these animals there were very few signs of life, just a few forlorn mud walled villages and very little farming in this desolate desert region. We were intrigued with the abandoned villages. From the material we have read, a lot of towns in this part of Xinjiang have over time endured sad deaths because of receding rivers and encroaching sands caused by huge sand storms. Climate change is not a new phenomenon in far western China. .

As for a lot of our journey through arid China, we were more than interested that the railway passed through enormous desert areas that had been planted with literally millions of trees, mostly willows and poplars. We were told by locals that this mind bogglingly large China tree regeneration had been highly successful in counteracting the fierce sand storms that used to blast their way uncontrollably through arid China. We commented that in our Australian press, the Chinese authorities are - and with justification - fiercely attacked for their pollution record but sadly are given very little recognition for any environmental achievements such as these massive regeneration projects. Before our travels, we certainly were unaware of the massive scope of these projects

We arrived in Kashgar mid morning, extremely tired as we had not slept very well on the train. It did not help that we were wakened at 3.00 am when our Chinese train compartment companion was woken by the rail guard for his arrival at the city of Aksu. We guess he had reason to want to sleep for the afternoon but it did not help our black moods.