The Slow Train from Guilin

Truth Be Told...

Though the majority of travel reviews are designed to inform their readers of interesting, fascinating and attractive places to visit and are full of compliments and artfully-styled descriptions, there comes a time in every travel writer’s life when they must warn fellow readers and travellers away from something or some place.

And my time has come to do just that

My plan was to leave Guilin to travel to Shanghai for a conference. I went to buy a train ticket to Shanghai the night my friend Jane left Guilin and, since her ticket cost around 400-something RMB to get to Beijing in a sleeper car and the ride took approximately 23 hours, when the man handed me over a ticket to Shanghai for 223 RMB I thought, yep, sounds about right: half the distance, half the price. I didn’t spend any time to ask about alternative schedules and ticket prices because there were so many elbows and hands pushing to get to the front of the ticket queue from behind me that I just felt happy to have a ticket and escaped from the counter as quickly as I could. Little did I know that I had just purchased myself a 30-hour train ride in the hard-seat compartment of the slowest train in China.

Exceptions and Options

Now, normally, Chinese trains are just fine and dandy modes of travel. But there’s an exception to every rule and the exception for this rule is as follows: Chinese trains are just fine and dandy modes of travel except when it’s overnight in the hard-seat compartment and except during post-holiday times when all the migrant workers are returning to the cities for work from their holiday visits home. Now, the hard-seat compartment is extra-special because you don't just have the thrill of sitting upright for 30 hours straight, but the Chinese have this fantastic system whereby they sell people tickets but they don't give them seats. Therefore, these people are allowed to board on roughly 3 or so cars of the train (only the hard-seat compartments), and then these non-seat ticket-holders plunk down all their stuff in the aisles and squeeze onto any available inch of space. About 100 people tried (and succeeded) to situate themselves and their humongous bags within a space where only 10 should be, despite the clearly labeled sign within the car that reads: Occupancy 150.

With the Cluster System underway, I thought I was going to die of 1) asphyxiation from lack of potable oxygen for all these people to breathe; 2) nitrogen poisoning from breathing in everyone's exhalations undilutedly; 3) someone will start a fire during their cigarette smoking in the car and we'll all have to evacuate in 2.6 seconds and I'll get crushed in the stampede; 4) someone will smuggle a chicken on board and we'll all contract Avian Flu in a feverish 10 minutes and then die in a wave-like domino effect; 5) or the combined temperature of everyone's body heat will approach the approximate temperature of the core of the earth and we'll spontaneously combust in a mushroom cloud similar to a nuclear blast and bits of our flesh and smoking twisted steel from the train will become fertilizer and re-usable machinery parts for the farmers in the surrounding countryside. At the time, I was certain one of those fates awaited me. But, as I am writing to you now, you can see that I survived (barely).

Co-Existence

Now, you may be asking why not just quickly leap to my feet and contact the local train-manager and see if an upgrade to a sleeper car is available? Or, better yet, get off the train in the next big city and start over again with a mode of travel that doesn't mimic a 30-hour fire-drill in a kindergarten? Well...you see I fancy myself as strong of spirit and not above others. I told myself at the beginning that if all these people can handle travelling like this then by george, I can do it too. That attitude lasted until about 3 in the morning, 17 sleepless hours into the journey, and then I decided I might try and look into an upgrade. I arose from my seat and ten minutes later managed to get just over the threshold between our car and the next. When I saw that the next two cars were in a similar state as mine and if I were to accomplish this task it would take 17 hours to traverse over the thousands of bodies, I thought: by that time we'd be in Shanghai, and then I would have spent the money for no reason.

So I went back to my seat.

It wasn't just the crowded environment that was difficult to endure: it was the people themselves. I hate to say this, but when the Chinese get onto a hard-seat train car, they behave like toddlers who have just learned to sit in high-chairs and feed themselves. For one, they've brought with them in their gigantic bags a supermarket full of food and they proceed to eat throughout the entire journey. When the train stops, the food they have isn't enough and so they all clamour to the one barely-cracked open window in the center of the car and have a kiosk-man send things to them through the window. All this eating results in one thing: trash. Do they dispose of trash properly? Well, sometimes, but seeing as how the trash can is about as big as a thimble and there are 10 million people on the train, it doesn't take long before people just start dropping their rubbish on the floor at their feet. After 30 hours and trudging from seat to bathroom and back again, this rubbish turns into slippery, slimy piles of goo and nastiness 'neath your feet. And then their feet end up in all sorts of undesirable places: on the seats, on their bags, on other people...which are then touched by their hands...which then go to their playing cards...which then go...well, you get the idea. They also like to treat the bathroom as if it's a zone for paint-ball practice. And let me tell you, they would be terrible paint-ball players. Perhaps 1/1000 of the items aimed at the hole in the center of the bathroom (and it isn't just what normally goes down a toilet hole...) actually makes it through the hole; the rest happily rests on or around it, which is a joy to encounter (dripping sarcasm) and makes for exciting speculation about all the diseases you're likely to have contracted during the train journey.

Insult to Injury

Also--and this really got to me round about 5 am--people kept talking about me. I know I'm a bit of a novelty and what the heck is a lao wai ("foreigner") doing in this rail car and gosh doesn’t she look funny and does she understand Chinese et cetera et cetera...but seriously. It gets very tiresome to be talked about over and over again as if you’re a wax-model in a museum. I'd wake up from a 10 minute slumber and my bangs (fringe) would be a little out of whack and they'd point and laugh and tell their friends. I heard Lao Wai this and Lao Wai that and got more stares than I think I have in my entire time in China. It's all right for a while, but I started to feel really awful about the whole business and it was then difficult for me to warm to my 100 nearest companions (and believe me, they were near) for the rest of the journey.

To add insult to injury: the train was also incredibly slow. It stopped at every possible place that it could from Guilin to Shanghai and then, for hours at a time, would just happily crawl at a speed of 5 miles per hour. I could have run to Shanghai in shorter time.

Believing in Something

Now, don't let this give you the wrong idea. Not all hard-seat compartment experiences are like this and definitely not all trains in China are like this. In fact, during the very time I was sludging across China, my friend Tom's parents were swiftly traversing the country from Tianjin to Hong Kong. The kicker is that his parents had a cabin to themselves, with the buffet cart next door, their own SHOWERS, their own private luggage area, a Western toilet, AND their journey was shorter than mine by several hours....and covered twice the distance! Just goes to show you what money will buy.

Add to this the news program I watched the week before about the goals for the Chinese economy: they want to have standard health coverage for every citizen, raise the standard of living and minimum salary to over 700 US dollars a month, provide good education and __________ (fill in the blank) by the year 2020. This seemed a little far fetched, but seemed even more so after that train journey. At first, I thought "how nice of the Chinese rail system to make train travel affordable for everyone...even if they aren't able to have seats" but later I was thinking "what a crap deal that the Chinese rail system compromises the safety of hundreds of human beings just so they can make an extra buck and sell tickets without seats". If they can't even maintain a standard for the lower classes on their trains, how can they provide health, education, and a good wage margin for them...within 14 years?

About 3 hours outside of Shanghai I had a near breakdown. My rear-end was numb, I was afraid to get out of my seat in case anyone would sit there and not give it back (you become scarily protective of things you think are yours when there’s so many people who think they’re also entitled to what you’ve got…even if it’s just 1 foot of seat-space), I had to go to the bathroom but didn’t because it was too troublesome to spend so much time crawling over human bodies, my ankles were swollen and my feet ached from the blood pooling in them after sitting in one position for so long. My eyes were bloodshot and I was exhausted and I thought the three remaining hours of the trip would never end.

When we arrived at Hangzhou it was getting late in the afternoon. I thought I might just get off the train and sleep in Hangzhou for the night. I’d do anything for a shower and the chance to walk in a straight line freely. We pulled into Hangzhou and I stared out the window, at open space, at freedom. It was just there. I started to grab my things and stand up. But then, counter to its behavior the past 28 hours, the train quickly pulled in and left Hangzhou. I sat back down, and told myself to suck it up and wait.

What Money Will Buy

In the end I made it to Shanghai in one piece. Luckily, the synapses in my brain were still firing with somewhat normal regularity, and after I had made it to a hostel and had a shower I was feeling almost myself again. Later that evening my South African dorm-roommate invited me to join him and two Germans to a club to hear some live music. Live music?! Sleeping aside, nothing sounded like more fun. So I spent the evening with one South African, two Germans, one Australian, one Frenchman, one Canadian, one Swiss, and one American listening to live acoustic guitar music and having good conversation. It was the perfect kind of random encounter with cool people and a fun environment that I needed to cancel out the agony of that awful train journey. The next afternoon I went to a very Western cafe called Wagas for lunch. I had a Turkey Sandwich (Turkey!) on soft thick whole grain bread (whole grain!) with spinach (spinach!) and Brie (oh my god! Brie!) and pinenuts and cranberry sauce (pine nuts! cranberry!). I was in gastronomic heaven, in a swank shopping district in Shanghai and there was wealth and affluence all around me and I couldn't have been in a more starkly different environment than I was 24 hours previous.

And it’s all within one country.

China has a little bit—and sometimes a lot—of everything.