As the nation's, and the world's, attention was focused on Beijing a little over one month before the Olympic Games kick off, I made a relaxing week-long trip south.

I'd like to share here some of my thoughts and photos from the journey, just to take a break from our obsession with the good, bad and ugly of Beijing and to give a taste of the country's vastness and diversity.

The 18-hour train trip, which started at the Beijing West Railway Station at 8:36 p.m., was only along a thin stretch of east China, but it still passed through places with distinctive landscapes, cuisines and dialects - vastly different from the capital and each other.

By breakfast time, we had already travelled over 1,000 km and were approaching the Yangtze, China's longest river. The sometimes dull plain of north China had given way to green hills and abundant waterways, rice paddies replacing fields of wheat.

The express train,  bound for the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, had crossed the Yellow River - second only to the Yangtze in length -- in Shandong at around 2 a.m.and then grazed a corner of Henan. Both provinces were cradles of Chinese civilisation.

While the parallel Beijing-Guangzhou railway to the west runs through major provincial capitals, the Beijing-Kowloon (Hong Kong) line wanders through underdeveloped and previously isolated areas.

Those who joined our crowded hard-seat coach, the cheapest class of travel on the train, were mostly migrant peasant workers heading for the prosperous Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province to make a living.  In Chinese, they are called "sheng dou xiao min", roughly meaning "humble beings who survive on the calculated use of scant food".  

People around me were laid-back and chit-chatting about jobs, old friends and the varied products of their hometowns. The Olympics were almost never mentioned.

I quite liked the man in his late 20s sitting opposite me, who would deftly open beer bottles with a plastic cigarette lighter. His obedient wife, or girlfriend, would then faithfully fill a glass they had carefully wrapped and placed in a red bucket under the seats.

"Ah Hong said he wanted to come over to our factory. He hadn't received his salary for two months," the man said to his partner contentedly after taking a sip. "Ah Xiao, his tendons will wither if he continues working there. That's for sure. He can't do that anymore."

There was an air of coolness about him as the train sped through the seemingly endless tunnels and over the many bridges in the scenic mountains of Jiangxi. It's hard not to be sentimental with wistful Taiwan pop songs - tributes to bygone love stories and wasted youth  -- coming out of the loudspeakers overhead.

At 2:30 p.m., the train pulled into my destination Ganzhou, a small city on the southern tip of Jiangxi. The folks I bid farewell to would remain in the coach for another six hours to complete their journey to Shenzhen. I had a four-hour bus trip to my home county ahead of me.

We witnessed a serene and beautiful sunset as we made our way along the country road. As I watched bluish smoke twisting its way up into the sky from the dark tiles of white rural houses dotting the bamboo woods, it was hard to believe that I had really lived in Beijing for the past four months.

All those shiny futuristic buildings and frenzied spats over lofty values -- and the Olympics which caused them - suddenly seemed very distant and surreal.

Pictures from top left: (1) Thanks to better incomes and the government's campaign to build a "new countryside", old wood-and-clay houses are left to rot and collapse as villagers move into new homes.(2)The entrance of a traditional Hakka housing compound in my home town. (3) New concrete-and-brick structures are made possible largely by remittances from Guangdong  (4) The remaining residents of the villages are mostly the elderly and children, as men and women aged roughly from 16-50 swarm to Guangdong to staff the "factory of the world". (5) Heading into to highway tunnel on the Jiangxi-Guangdong border. (6) Buses carrying Jiangxi peasant workers stop for lunch in northern Guangdong. (7) A shopping mall in downtown Shenzhen. "Be a party hottie", reads the ad. (8) A shop in the mall. 

    It's a month to go! So, we sent our reporters out onto the street to speak to ordinary Beijingers to find out how they and the city are coping.

    "I didn't have much interest in the Olympics before the Tibet riots. After that I became to think: All right. If you guys are so keen to make us look bad, we'll have to get things done even better. After the earthquake, I felt really sad and at one point even thought that it might be good not to hold the Games any more. But the reality is the country has poured in so much manpower, materials and money to prepare for the Games. As the Chinese saying goes, 'there can be no turning back once the arrow is on the bowstring'." - Zhao Qian, 26, a public relations officer for a European company

    "The Olympic Games is a national glory. I really look forward to it. Beijing has changed a lot in the past few years. The roads have become wider and the city cleaner. Terrorist attacks? I am not worried about that. Our country is strong enough and those who operate in the dark for bad things will be scared." - Zhang Quanyi, 45, taxi driver

    "I am not going to watch the Games in the stadiums and I am not able to. What can I do with the 700 yuan ($102) I make every month? I also have to pay for my daughter's education." - A female street cleaner in her 40s on her morning shift to clean a street outside the Chaoyang Park in eastern Beijing, where Olympic beach volleyball matches will be held.

    "It might be inconvenient during the Games as I cannot drive my car everyday, but I am happy and excited about the approaching Olympics."- Zhou Wenjin, 46, a government worker

     "Bags must be checked when you take a subway, batteries cannot be sent by express mail. We are excited and extremely happy for the holding of Olympics Games, but it dwindles day by day." - Jiang Yueming, 28, a graduate student in Renmin University

    "I don't feel the environment is becoming that much better. I'm not sure whether those security checks are efficient, but I'm sure I will cut some of the family's unnecessary travels during the Games." - Li Guang, 35, barber

   "Security checks and traffic restrictions at that time will certainly affect my commuting, but I understand the government. Safety is after all the most important thing. If there have to be more troubles, then let there be more troubles. My father-in-law's father-in-law really really wants to watch the matches, so we bought some tickets, mainly to fulfil our filial obligations. Personally I'd rather watch the matches on TV at home." - Wang Nan, 26, a white-collar worker who already spends nearly three hours commuting every day.

(Additional reporting by Laura Liu and Ella Li.)

Photos (from top): A woman takes a photo of the National Stadium, also known as the 'Bird's Nest', on a hazy day in Beijing July 8, 2008. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside. Visitors pose for a picture amid haze and smog at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause. Visitors walks past martial arts poster inside the Beijing Olympics Main Press Centre (MPC) during its opening in Beijing July 8, 2008. With 62,000 square meters of working space, the MPC in Beijing is the biggest press centre in Olympic history. It will be the central work place for the 5,600 accredited journalists and photographers covering the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV

It was a truly eye-opening experience for children in a mountainous -- and for that reason isolated and poor -- part of south China. It's the first time I had ever heard of the word Olympics and had got to know the existence of time difference. With the medal count being updated daily, the idea of national identity had also been imparted into our previously blank minds.

The broadcast presented us a curious world full of things urban, modern and foreign (I was struck most by Barcelona’s outdoor diving pool, with the backdrop of the city), but after breakfast we were preoccupied with helping adults harvest the rice, graze buffalo and guard watermelon fields against thirsty kids from outside the clan.

It is hard to believe that nine years later I would be on a college campus in surburban Beijing celebrating the city's winning bid for the 2008 Games. We didn't join the ecstatic crowds on the streets, but we were genuinely happy. The festive mood was appropriately punctuated by residents in nearby neighbourhoods setting off firecrackers late into the night.

Fast back to 1992, pre-industrial and tranquil way of life had been preserved in my hometown despite all the great revolutions of the 20th century. Villagers toiled the land in much the same way as their ancestors and even the ancient rule of men bathing at the walled hot spring after sunset and women during the daytime remained intact.

All this has changed profoundly after 16 years of dramatic economic and social reform across the country.

Most of the dozen cousins I played with on those starry summer nights travelled to the Pearl River Delta in neighbouring Guangdong province, dubbed the factory of the world, after middle school. They have worked since in plants that make anything from shoes and clothes to toys and household appliances for monthly wages of about $100, meagre by Western standards but which have meant much higher living standards back home.

May, one of my uncle's daughters and my one-time classmate, also found a job in Guangdong after studying traditional Chinese medicine and English in college. She now spends more than six months of a year in Cambodia and African countries, selling (and also donating) her company's special malaria cure based on a Chinese herb. During a cell phone conversation last week, my uncle told me she was currently in the Comoro Islands.

My parents have worked in a South Korean restaurant in Guangdong for the past seven years, with a couple from Busan overseeing two dozen employees including Chinese Korean chefs from the northeastern provinces bordering North Korea.

So the extended family, once insulated from the outside world, has been intertwined with the great globalisation one way or another. It’s a story shared by tens of millions of hard-working Chinese families over recent decades.

I look forward to taking my parents to Olympic events in Beijing in August. I wonder if they will have some reflections on life in the state-of-the-art Bird's Nest National Stadium. From the starvation and dire poverty of a backward, agrarian era distrastrously compounded by revolutionary excesses, they have come a long way to become part of the wild capitalism of Guangdong, a "lively and dynamic mud pit" as some people call it.

And they are not yet 50.

Guo Shipeng has been a researcher with the political and general news team of the Reuters Beijing bureau since April 2005.