It's better to travel hopefully than to arrive

I have always loved trains. Growing up in a tiny village in the valleys of North Wales, trains offered the one thing I desired more than anything -- a way to leave.

So, when I found myself at Beijing Railway Station this month covering "Chunyun," the busy travel period around Spring Festival, surrounded by hundreds of people excited about the exact opposite -- going home, I must confess, I felt a little peculiar.

Since the opening up and reform era began in earnest some three decades ago, more and more people have left their homes and families to seek work and the promise of better lives in China's cities.

It's hard for any Westerner, I think, to truly understand the sacrifices of Chinese migrant workers. Families are split up, children don't see their parents for months at a time, grandparents juggle bringing up their grandchildren with eking out an existence from farm work. b Spring Festival is often compared to Christmas, but seems much more simple. Spring Festival is about getting the family together, eating, laughing, drinking. It is not bogged down by some out-of-date meta-narrative, it is not so much about some fictional character. Its just about being around the people that you love.

I spoke to people at Beijing Station who had upward of 18 hours on a train ahead of them, some of them will be standing that whole way. Yet, they were upbeat, positive, and more than anything excited. Excited to go home and tell stories from the past year, hold babies in their arms, kiss their grandmothers.

As the long, green train cars pull out of the station this morning, taking thousands of people of hundreds miles away, something dawned on me. I had been misreading my feelings about train journeys all this time. They weren't taking me away at all. They were just moving me to the next place; to new situations, people and experiences. Endtiem