2nd December: Nanjing, China to Wuhan, China

We wandered around the corner to Nanjing South high-speed station. The weather was glorious once again and it was lovely to not have to get the metro. This is another extraordinary station. It’s not even the biggest we’ve been to, but the concourse is 1km across, and the station is set at the end of a grand axis. There are separate metro stations at each side. Elevated wide vehicle drop-off ramps for departures can be found at both the north and south, as if at an airport terminal. Corresponding underground slip-roads connect from the sunken highway to the below ground arrivals floor. Between it all, 28 platforms of high-speed rail transport passengers to destinations across the country. It’s as close as you’ll find to a modern cathedral to socialism.

Today’s train was a little different with a singular door in the centre of the carriage. It seemed a bit older but didn’t have any issue in quickly accelerating to 250 km/h. As we reached top speed out of Nanjing, we crossed one of a long succession of suspension bridges across the great Yangtze. The cargo traffic stretched upstream, the lifeblood of central China for generations. Hankou station is a glorious European-style station, although it is actually a modern construction. Hankou is one of the three towns which form modern Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, along with Wuchang and Hanyang.

In recent years, the city has become (perhaps unfairly?) known to the world for one reason. We arrived five years to the day since the person identified as patient zero first developed the symptoms of what became known as COVID-19. The site of the now closed Huanan Seafood Market – usually implicated as the location the outbreak began – is just 500 metres away Hankou station. Perhaps it was for this reason that I was particularly struggling today with the Chinese habit of coughing and sneezing liberally without covering their mouths. This is generally an older person thing, but not exclusively so. Most people do still wear masks when they’re actually ill.

We temporarily left the early December sunshine of Wuhan and sunk down into the metro network, our 15^th so far of the trip. Undoubtedly this is the one with the best staff outfits! A fuchsia daubed conductor watched on as people pushed on and off the train. The behaviour of queuing and waiting to the side, as noted previously on the Beijing metro, seems to have gradually vanished throughout our travels in China. Perhaps we’ve become weary too. Multiple times per day I find myself deliberately, but carefully, blocking the people pushing on whilst people are still getting off. Nobody moves. Nobody cares. If you don’t barge them first, you’ll get barged yourself. Again, it’s usually older people that don’t respect others.

Immediately, Wuhan feels like a very liveable city. We walked around a lake in golden sunshine on the way to our hotel. The light for the past few days has been spectacular. Our room itself is the best in weeks too, which made us both feel that bit better as well. I still can’t stand up under the shower, but you can’t win them all! We’re going to try to book slightly better places from now on, although it is a bit of a lottery in China as many places marketed as hotels turn out to just be poorly sound-proofed sub-flats in residential blocks. It’s pretty cheap here but hopefully the budget stretches a bit further in southeast Asia.

Down a backstreet, we found a second lovely park with a half moon bridge and skyline reflecting in the calm waters. We also found a gazillion mosquitoes too, which will surely soon become an ever-present feature of our journey. One corner of the park contained orange trees, from which most of the fruits had been recently picked. Across the road, we wandered yet another glorious park. Wuhan really seems to be the city of parks and lakes. This is Zhongshan Park, named after Sun Yat-sen (also known as Sun Zhongshan). Amongst other things, this park had an overhead children’s monorail circling it! A step up from a model railway. A young couple also came to say hello and we had a lovely long chat. She was a teacher and helped us understand the lack of older children out and about. Apparently, there is immense pressure to get grades at school and many have secondary tutoring on weekends. Those who don’t are likely just playing games or hiding to recover. I’m not sure that children should be under such pressure anywhere, and neither should most adults either for that matter.

Of course, we finished the day with a veggie buffet. The pear and jujube compote had extra ginger at this place and was deliciously warming. They also had various different ways of cooking potatoes but unfortunately none of them were quite as good as they looked.