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.