Hard Sleeper, Part One Train No. 5 left the new West Beijing Station -- the largest train station in China -- at 11:23 PM, exactly on time, on a frigid night in January. It was our first train ride in China and I was excited and worried in equal measure. Old China hands love to tell horror stories about riding the trains here: dangerous overcrowding, toilets you never want to see in your worst nightmare, everybody smoking and spitting, guards locking car doors at stations to keep more passengers from coming abroad, and new passengers getting on anyway, flooding in through the windows. To make it worse, my wife and I were traveling during Spring Festival -- a Chinese holiday that is equivalent in importance to Thanksgiving and Christmas combined. Our first challenge was figuring out how to buy the tickets. Everyone we asked gave us conflicting information. Our travelers' Bible (the Lonely Planet Guide to China) suggested using the English-speaking travel agents in the large hotels, but every such agent we asked told us, in disdainful voices, that they only arranged international fares. Chinese friends informed us that train tickets could only be purchased at the station itself 5 days in advance, and indeed, this is how things were managed in the past. But this year the government is making a major effort to improve service and we heard rumors that you could now reserve tickets 15 days in advance -- some said 30. Others insisted the correct number was still 5. Finally a friend directed us to a small non-English speaking travel agency; 15 days in advance seemed possible, and for a small fee, they would send a runner to the station to stand in line for us and get our tickets. . . our tickets south, that is. Our plan was to go first to Guilin, then make our way gradually to Guangzhou, and return to Beijing in three weeks time. But we were told it was impossible to reserve our return tickets from Beijing. It was necessary to set off with the blind faith that we would somehow manage to find tickets home once we were in Guangzhou. "Don't count on it!" said a friend with a wise smile. "I was once marooned in Guangzhou for a week, trying to get a ticket back to Beijing!" Another friend told us a cautionary tale of how seven people had been trampled to death trying to board a train during the crowded time of Spring Festival two years ago. And as if this wasn't bad enough, virtually all our northern friends warned us to hide our money in our shoes and guard our luggage with our lives, for people in the south were notoriously dishonest. Would this be the vacation from hell? I was determined not to relax for an instant. On the night of our departure, my wife and I made our way to the train station clutching frantically to our bags. Our money and passports were hidden so deeply in intimate places that we would need to do a striptease to check into a hotel room. We found the cavernous waiting room for Train No. 5 and we had our first pleasant surprise: A young woman in uniform with a red sash draped off one shoulder studied our "Hard Sleeper" tickets and then gestured for us to come with her. Were our tickets no good, we wondered, for we had been warned about counterfeits. But she led us to the special Soft Sleeper waiting room where there were more comfortable seats and few people, clean bathrooms -- even a bar. "Not bad!" I admitted to my wife. We had come two hours early to be prepared for stampeding hordes trying to get onto the train. As it turned out, the loudspeaker summoned us in English and we pre-boarded in perfect comfort onto a sparkling clean train. In a few minutes, we were off, rolling through the dark back streets of Beijing, slowly at first, gathering speed . . . southward into the "real" China that we were so eager to see. Next week: Trains, North and South. From the Editor in Chief: If you have some travel or work experience in China to share with us, we will be very excited to hear from you! Send your feedback by e-mail or regular mail to ASM Overseas Corporation. Thank you! And if you liked this column, please check Expats In China (International Community in China) for more interesting and useful information on life in China as a foreigner, including calendar of events, entertainment, housing, employment, classifieds, personal, etc. |
