China has two national holidays where we get a week off work as paid vacation. One during Chinese Lunar New Year in January and one during the Mid Autum Festival in October. Last year this holiday in October was news to me and I spent it wandering around Shanghai since I had only been in the country two weeks and made no plans to travel. This year, at least I knew it was coming, but it seemed that all my friends had previous plans. I really wanted to see Guilin with its peaks and rivers- so I decided to take my first solo vacation. Ever.
Traveling in Golden Week as it’s affectionatly called is chaos. Everyone travels. That’s over a billion people. So maybe not all of them travel, but it sure seems like it. The prices sky-rocket too. Airline tickets, if not booked months in advance, are 4x the normal rate. So while I was pricing flights and hotels and tours the idea came to me to take a slow train from Shanghai to Guilin. It was only 520 RMB, so about 90 USD one way. It’s a sleeper train, so for part of the 19 hr journey I would be attempting to sleep…. I took one before to and from Beijing before the high-speed train and before domestic air travel was popular 12 years ago.. it wasn’t so bad so I decided to try it again. So with the help of a friend who booked it on-line for me I had my ticket…which is a feat since you can’t buy a ticket more than 12 days in advance on-line and 10 days in person. I wasn’t able to book at return ticket, they were sold out on the day I wanted to return so I took a deep breath and got out my credit card and booked a flight home. Next came the hotel and tours. I opted for the Sheraton since it was centrally located and I was sure they would have a soft bed… and booked two drop in tours on-line.. one to the Longji terraced rice fields and one Li River cruise to see the karst mountains as seen on the back of the 20 RMB note.
When Monday finally rolled around I hailed a cab to the Shanhai South railway station and I was off on my adventure. The main railway station is about 10 mins from my house… that’s where some high-speed trains and some sleeper trains depart but the south station was all slow trains. When I arrived, 45 mins later, my train was already boarding… sweet! I found my car and had to ask where my bunk was. As I made my way down the aisle lo and behold there is another lao wai (foreigner) sitting in the little jump seat in the hallway right outside my cabin. Looks like I am not the only crazy person out there. My friends thought I was nuts for wanting to take the overnight train.. I was looking forward to it. 19 hrs with my iPad, books, TV shows, my journal and my thoughts. Sounded like the perfect start to my first solo vacation. Seeing the University of Michigan tag on some luggage I knew the other Westerner would be in my cabin. At least I would have someone to talk to.
As we started to get settled in, me on the top bunk, Michigan on the other top bunk and two Chinese guys on the bottom bunks I knew I had made the right choice. I had my own little nest and was looking forward to some deep thoughts- Jack Handy style. But given my outgoing nature, I spent the first 5 hrs chatting with the guy across from me, swapping stories of how we ended up in China, where we lived, how safe China was, where we like to party, etc. It was nice to have someone to chat with.
I decided I wanted to explore a little so I took a walk through the cars. Now on a slow train there are several ‘classes’ of seats/tickets. I was in soft sleeper.- 4 bunks to a room, and the room has a door. There is also first class soft sleeper, two bunks to a room, but then there is hard class sleeper- 6 bunks to a room and your room doesn’t have a door. I experienced that on the way home from Beijing 12 years ago and I won’t lie, I didn’t want to do it again. The bunks are pretty close as you can imagine they are stacked 3 high, you can barely sit up. And then there are seats. Yep. Seats. Kind of the like the seats in the dinning car, with a table. These are the cheapest seats and they are sold out during holiday travel times. I made my way through all the soft sleeper cars, hard sleeper cars and found the seat car. I decided not to wander in the seated area because it looked so crowded I didn’t think I could actually make it through, so I turned back around and made my way back to my car. As I walked I could feel the stares… I could even hear kids saying “Mom, look at the foreigner”. Yes, dear little one, some of us laowai don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for airfare to get to Guilin. And yes, some of us speak Chinese.
On the train next to the bathrooms are little ‘wash up rooms’. There are 3 sinks per room, where you can wash your face, brush your teeth, wash your dinner dishes… the bathrooms and wash up rooms are usually at the end of every other car, and in between cars is the ‘smoking’ area.. where guys would sit and puff away, scream on their cells phones and generally act Chinese. Ah, the joys of train travel.
I didn’t eat dinner in the dining car, when I walked through the fare looked kinda sad so I just decided to dine on the plethora of snacks that I had packed for the trip, washed down with some warm Sprite I procured in the dinning car. Warm PBR didn’t sound quite as yummy as warm Sprite. It wasn’t until after some dinner/snacks did I settle in to read some of my book and write in my journal. About an hour later I still wasn’t sleepy, so I broke down and watched the episode of Man Men I bought from iTunes and downloaded onto my iPad the day before… not very deep, I know, but I was attempting to get drowsy… and attempting to drown out the sounds of the bottom bunk dweller’s snores. I was happy I packed my earplugs and sleep mask for sure now.. but man. That guy on the bottom had some serious sleep apnea going on. They ban that stinky ass fruit durian on trains, can’t they ban dudes who snore so loud it can be heard three doors down? I could seriously hear him on the way back from the bathroom… It was going to be a loooong night. I was wishing I had popped my Tylenol PM. I finally fell asleep probably around 2 AM… and was woken up by the bottom bunk dwellers relatives and they came over to visit. At 7 AM. After a futile attempt to fall back asleep I got up, rustled up my plastic mug and my instant coffee and went in search of the hot water. Once I had my steaming cup of Nescafe 2+1 I headed to the dining car.. knowing that I could find a seat and a table. Once there I was told I couldn’t sit down.. so I asked “you still selling breakfast?” So for 10 RMB I bought myself a seat that came with some warmish buns, some congee and a hard-boiled egg. As I ate my congee I watched the staff straggle in to eat their breakfast.
China tends to over staff just about everything. The train was no exception. They have a person to man each door when we stopped at the various stations and scream “Get on the train” for 10 minutes before we would chug out of the station.. the reason I know this is that they also lock the bathrooms at each stop, so I got to wait and witness this twice during the journey. The staff stay in the hard sleepers and they were all pretty young- I would say 18-20, so it gave off a college dorm vibe. Girls giggling and looking at the boys, the boys trying to ignore the girls and text on their cell phones.
After breakfast I had a few more hours to kill so I read some more… took some photos.. stared out the window at the countryside. When we finally pulled in, 2 hrs late, I bade goodbye to Michigan and made my way to the taxis… I’ll explain the taxi ride in the next blog update.
colleeninshanghai 