THE DAWN was shortly to break through the light mist. Wearing only a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops, with neither money nor passport, I trudged along the tracks of the railway, taking two sleepers at a time and doing my best to stay calm. It was four o’clock in the morning and I was alone in the middle of the Gobi Desert. The Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator, was four hundred miles to the north-west, and Beijing was the same distance to the south-east. I had known many frightening, isolated situations in my life, but I had never felt such disquiet as I did now. It was only my second time in China, but I was painfully aware that it had become a ruthless, unsentimental place during the Cultural Revolution, where life was cheap. Anything could happen to me, and nobody would care that I was just a hapless traveller with a potentially fatal sense of curiosity. I cursed the folly that had got me into this predicament.

Up ahead, I heard a light ting-ting-ting sound. It was a sign of life, and it sounded unthreatening, so I hastened towards it. As the sound grew louder, I saw a figure bending over the rails. It was a rail-tapper, dressed in standard-issue Chairman Mao suit and cap, tap-tap-tapping the track to test for cracks in the metal.

I emerged out of the mist and said good morning to him in the best Mandarin I could muster. To my consternation, instead of greeting me back, he screamed in terror, dropped his hammer and ran off as fast his legs would carry him.

Now I had really blown it. I could just imagine him calling the police and bringing out all the local villagers to search for me. Since I had no papers on me, I could see myself being
thrown into a bamboo cage and paraded through the town, while the villagers threw rotten vegetables at me. But I had missed my train and there wouldn’t be another one for a week. What the hell was I going to do?

The only other time I had visited China was in 1964, on a fleeting call at Shanghai on a freighter. Now, following the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, my wife and I had
managed to get a two-week transit visa through this magnificent country on the Trans-Siberian Railway. That meant starting the journey in Mongolia, where we stayed with the British ambassador in Ulan Bator. We then embarked on the train ride across four hundred miles of undulating grassland steppes to the Chinese border.

It was around 3am by the time we reached the border, where Outer Mongolia became Inner Mongolia and we were formally in China. We stopped at a small station before the next main station of Erenhot/Erlian. Being of a curious disposition, as well as wanting to stretch my legs, I got off for a wander around the station to see if I could find anyone to talk to. Marie-Thérèse called after me to keep an eye on the train to make sure I did not miss it, because this was only a weekly service. I told her not to worry. There was bound to be a whistle to call any passengers back on board. There was no sign life on the platform but I walked around the back of the station building and found a fellow writing at a desk in an office. He nearly fell off his chair when he saw me, because a white face must have been such a rarity in those parts, but he knew I was a passenger from the train, so he was not too alarmed. We started exchanging Chinese ideograms by way of rudimentary communication. He asked who I was, and I wrote the word for England. We became fairly engrossed in our little conversation, so I completely lost track of the time, and it was with a sudden shock that I remembered my train. I had not heard any whistle, but I had been distracted, and in any case I was now completely out of sight and earshot of the platform. Giving him a cursory bow and wave, I hastened back to the platform. My heart sank as my worst fears were confirmed: the train was no longer there.

I looked frantically around for someone who might be able to help me but as I did so the lights started going out one by one. Trying not to panic, I headed back to the office where I had been talking to this fellow a few minutes earlier, but now that door was locked. The situation was turning rapidly into a nightmare.

There seemed to me no alternative but to start walking along the railway tracks in the direction of Beijing. There was a road at the front of the station, but I was mindful of the paranoid atmosphere in China: anyone seeing me wandering the highways might assume I had been dropped in by the CIA, and there was no knowing what might happen to me. Sticking to the track seemed the safest policy.

My encounter with the rail-tapper confirmed all my worst fears about the situation where foreigners were concerned. As this poor chap ran off into the dawn, I decided in my jittery state that the best thing was to return to the station, which might have opened again by now. But when I got there, it was still locked. I decided then to set off the other way along the tracks, the way we had come. Four hundred miles was an impossibly long distance on foot, but moving back in the direction of Ulan Bator felt better than staying where I was.

***

For as long as I could remember, I had woken up every morning and wondered what adventure the day would hold. The taste for it is in my blood. An ancestor on my father’s side, despite being a wealthy landowner in Barbados, decided to become a pirate and was subsequently known as the Gentleman Pirate. He became an associate of the infamous Blackbeard and ended his life on the hangman’s scaffold in Charles Town, South Carolina. My father, the son of a British army officer, was born in Tianjin, China, and my Anglo-Irish mother’s family distinguished themselves in London, Ireland, the Americas and India. I myself was born in a farmhouse with no electricity, in the isolated British colony of Southern Rhodesia – now known as Zimbabwe. From my mother, a free-thinking quasi-mystic, who cut a striking figure in our remote colonial outpost, I had learned not to fear being an outsider, and to take risks at an early age. Had I now taken one risk too many?

Nearly twenty years earlier, I had abandoned the country of my birth and set off to be a medical student at Trinity College, Dublin, with which my mother’s family had been involved since it was founded in 1592. After a year of studies, I decided that I was both not patient enough to deal with sick people for the rest of my life, and far too curious about the rest of the world to be restricted to this profession. So I left and began a six-year odyssey around the world. It took me from a cultural college in Germany to a Vancouver logging camp, from a stevedore’s job in San Francisco to a mountaintop Buddhist monastery in Japan, from a jail cell in rural Oregon to an opium den in Laos, to crossing the Atlantic in a seven-metre sloop with no GPS to some serious climbing in the Canadian Rockies – and my accommodation ranged from one of the finest stately homes in England to the freezing floor of a Canadian public lavatory.

At every turn, I was driven by intense curiosity and had learned not to be daunted by physically difficult or emotionally isolating challenges. I had built up five businesses in Tokyo and then lost everything when the CIA threatened my life. Having been ordained as a lay Buddhist monk, I had learned to control my emotions by trying to minimise the demands of my ego, and I had never fallen prey to panic or despair.

But my current situation was as testing as any I had ever known. Where was my wife? Would we ever see each other again? If we did not, it would be entirely my fault.

***

After I had stumbled on for about three miles, I saw a large railway shed ahead of me with tracks going into it. The interior was brightly lit and full of noise, and my heart lifted, because now at least I might find some people to whom I could explain my predicament.

As I walked in, I saw an astonishing sight. On the train track in front of me sat a row of bogies – effectively the chassis and wheels of a train and nothing else – from which the carriage itself seemed to have been stripped away. I walked further into the shed and saw that the train itself was suspended ten feet off the ground, carriage by carriage, on a row of cranes. And there, at one of the windows, to my amazement and huge relief, was Marie-Thérèse, looking down at me, equally flabbergasted and delighted to see me.

The shed, it turned out, was a rail gauge-changing station: the Chinese use the standard international gauge but the Mongolians use the Russian one, which is about three and a
half inches wider. That means that all carriages much be lifted off their bogies in a procedure that can take several hours. Because it was so laborious, it was no wonder that they ran so few trains on that line, but as my wife and I were joyously united, and I prepared my speech of abject apology for not heeding her warning, I thanked my lucky stars that it all took so long. If the train really had gone off to Beijing without me, I am not at all confident I would have survived to tell the tale.