China Day 1

In February 2025 I decided that I needed to leave my job and by July I had left. I desperately wanted to see some of the world and without action it just wasn’t going to happen. On the 23rd of February I sent a message to my friend Will Frank if he fancied a trip to western China. A week later were on a video call and the planning begins.

I had initially met Will in 2018 whilst working at CERN, the particle physics laboratory on the border of Switzerland. He had been there on a 3 month project and I had finally found a friend at the lab. I distinctively remember saying to myself “I have found a new best friend”. Well, he was only there for two more weeks and I wouldn’t be seeing him again for quite sometime. A year later I am at the introductory CERN accelerator school in Romania and am pleasantly surprised to see his face again! Two weeks of intense and often confusing lectures on physics later and we have become pretty good pals! Three years later I find myself working in Oxford at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory where Will was also working at the time. Somewhere during those years Will mentioned his trip to through Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in china and was keen to go back! Four years later we’re going to China!

Day 1 - 14th September 2025

I meet Will at Euston station, London, he has left science and retrained as a horticulturist, though he would say gardener and is now living in the lakes up north. Again, It’s been a long time since we have seen each other, he’s now married, has a daughter, and has grown his hair out long! Big hugs and we’re on our way to Heathrow airport terminal four!

I have managed to sleep on the plane and awake to incredible views out of the window. We are getting close to Chengdu and are travelling over incredible mountains.

As we are arriving I get my first views of the farming culture of China. Each field is very small and varied. I don’t see any giant monoculture fields close to the city at all.

We land and pass through a series of checks. After a barrage of questions about my plans and another round of biometrics, we’re finally in China! As you walk through the airport you begin to notice the intense security. Cameras watching you and following your every move, and even to get on to the metro you are funnelled through a metal detector scanner.

On the train Will and I sat on opposing seats and people watch. I thought phone addiction was bad in Europe but what was going on around us was outrageous. Phones held inches from the face, videos scrolled past before they’ve even filled the screen and walking on and off the train without breaking eye contact with the phone. it was wild! Later a young boy sits next to me and stares at me for a good while before saying ‘hello’. I say hello back and he tells me where he lives in Chengdu, it’s near a lake. We miss our stop by one and say bye to the kid. He replies ‘bye bye’ which apparently everyone seems to say.

We exit the metro at Renmin North Road and take our first steps, breathes, and smells of Chengdu. There’s definitely a smell unlike anywhere I have been before but it’s not pollution, the city is silent, every single vehicle is electric. Every single one! It’s incredible, you just can’t imagine this at home. I don’t know when this will happen in the UK but I’m pretty sure it won’t be for at least another thirty years or more. We’ve travelled half way across the globe and have arrived in the future.

We walk along the river and find out hostal, drop our bags and head to the Wenshu Monastry area for dinner. After finding a place we spend forty minutes deciphering the menu and then spend a further fifteen minutes trying to figure out how we order food. I’m finally going to eat Chinese food for breakfast lunch and dinner and I cannot wait. I wanted to eat sweet and sour and the closest I could get away from meat was fish. I had said to myself I was going to eat everything in China but as Will is a vegetarian I decided not to stray too far. Still, i order the fish and then make a joke that its definitely going to be the whole fish and not chunks of fish. I was right, I got a whole deep fried fish in sweet and sour sauce and it was delicious. Will on the other hand had ordered a cold noodle mushroom salad and a soup.