Train diary

12.30pm, Tuesday 17 November: Due to my obsessive punctuality we're at Guangzhou Railway Station ridiculously early for our 2pm, 19-hour train journey to Shanghai. Convincing the taxi driver to bring us here with a challenge; he was set on taking us to Guangzhou East Railway Station, which I'm sure is a very nice station but it's not the one our train was leaving from.

12.43pm: This is a poorly sign-posted station. We've found the lounge for our train but we've also seen vague hints of a deluxe lounge for soft berth passengers (that's us - soft sleepers for soft Westerners). "The passenger waits in the teahouse," says one cryptic sign on a locked door.

12.48pm: Sometimes following the herd works out. On a hunch, we trailed a group through a set of heavy wooden doors and discovered the promised land of the soft berth lounge. I just hope it's the correct lounge for our train.

1.11pm: Barack Obama's joint press conference with Hu Jintao is playing on the TV in here but it's drowned out by the pan flute muzak.

1.21pm: I have an unenlightening encounter with the woman at the counter. I point at the train number on my ticket. She shakes her head. I point at the waiting room. She nods. What is the meaning of this?

1.23pm: A boy in a Spiderman outfit won't stop crying.

1.45pm: Having lugged our heavy suitcases down three flights of stairs then up three flights we're now on the train. This is my bed:

We're sharing a four-berth compartment with two middle-aged men, both of whom are sitting on pull-out chairs in the corridor using their cellphones.

We paid extra for the bottom bunks (tickets were 658RMB or NZ$130 each) and I'm glad.

There's a fake rose and a thermos on the tray table and slippers are provided.

1.57pm: A woman comes by and swaps our tickets for plastic passes. Not sure why.

2pm: Bang on time, we're leaving.

2.05pm: The piped music is traditional Chinese, which makes a nice change from the soft jazz and pan flutes that are ubiquitous in this country.

2.08pm: First offer of food: a lady comes by selling fruit from a cart.

2.14pm: The other guys have come in and stretched out on their top bunks. It smells like feet in here.

2.18pm: There's a squat toilet down one end of the carriage and a Western-style toilet down the other end. Both pretty clean.

The outskirts of Guangzhou are rolling by outside: square concrete apartment blocks, power pylons, piles of rubbish, highways, and a surprising amount of greenery.

3.07pm: The train is pretty quiet, aside from the noise from the TV set that just came on above my head and the cries from the tea and snack ladies marching down the corridors every 15 minutes.

Time for a nap.

4.01pm: Rejuvenated, I go in search of the dining car, which turns out to be the next carriage along. It's full up with train staff and miscellaneous guys in uniform smoking, drinking and eating sunflower seeds. At one end a chef is asleep, white hat askew, mouth drooping open.

4.05pm: The Western-style toilet appears to vent directly on to the tracks.

4.17pm: Our first stop: ShaoGuan. There's a five-storey crimson pagoda on the hill.

4.44pm: I'm glad we're not in hard sleeper beds. Six to a compartment, no door:

5.57pm: We're pulling in to Chenzhou. Quite a few people are disembarking, including one of our roommates. Maybe we'll pick up a new roomie.

It appears when it's your turn to leave they bring back your ticket in exchange for the plastic card.

Four hours in, I have to say I'm enjoying this. It's much more relaxing than flying.

6.02pm: We've got a new roomie, a youngish guy wearing a silver sports jacket and carrying a big suitcase. Too big. He can't fit it beneath my bunk nor in the cupboard above his, so he has to store it on his bed.

6.43pm: A youthful Jackie Chan, dressed all in white, is boxing a Vanilla Ice lookalike on the TV.

6.55pm: There's an urn of boiling water down the corridor, so it's instant noodles for dinner. I believe mine are pork flavoured.

7.34pm: Bought a Coke off the drinks cart guy. A minor victory as I completed the transaction entirely in my very limited Mandarin.

9.15pm: Every so often I go for a stroll down the train. I get some odd looks, especially in the meal cart. They go from my face down to my feet. It appears I'm the only one wearing the free slippers.

11.20pm: After an uneventful few hours reading and watching Entourage episodes on my iPod I'm going to sleep.

12.43am: A baby is crying in the next compartment and a man is yelling on his cellphone.

1.20am: God, I wish I could sleep. The two guys in the top bunks are snoring in relay. One of them will snore up a storm then stir and choke himself to a halt, thereby passing the baton to the other guy to pick up his snoring effort.

I've tried cursing passive-aggressively in English but for some reason that hasn't done anything. I try it again, louder.

This time T wakes up and offers me ear plugs, which I forgot we had.

9.05am: Those ear plugs worked a treat. Nearly eight hours of sleep. I'm surprised I slept this long because I'd expected to be woken by all the morning noise.

Actually, we should have arrived by now. I wonder where we are.

9.14am: We're at Jia Xing, according to the sign on the platform.

9.15am: Ticket lady has just returned to swap our plastic cards for tickets. We must be next then.

9.40am: Through the condensation on the windows I can see factories and smoke stacks, dilapidated apartment blocks with bamboo washing poles poking out the windows and mountains of trash in the back yard, and muddy brown streams and rivers.

10.02am: And we're here. Shanghai South Railway Station.

Aside from the late arrival (bumping this up to a 20-hour journey) and the riotous snoring (a hazard of any communal sleeping arrangement), I have only positive things to say about this rail experience.

A few travel agents in New Zealand cautioned us against rail travel in China, saying it would be difficult and uncomfortable. I'm happy to say they were wrong.

Patrick's trip to China is supported by the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

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train   #1   09:53 pm Nov 18 2009

good to see you didn't listen to the travel agents. sweet train, it has a TV!

Andrew   #2   10:04 pm Nov 18 2009

I took a couple of train journey's in China a few years ago as part of a "Holyhead to Hong Kong" train trip to come home from working in Ireland. Apart from the rules regarding getting tickets (we could book in advance, but the tickets had to be delivered to us once we were in China) both train trips (Beijing - Shanghai and Shanghai - Hong Kong) were very easy and pleasant, and we got to see the countryside which you don't see from 30,000 ft

rebecca   #3   09:57 am Nov 19 2009

i did hard sleeper from shanghai to beijing - it wasn't that bad, despite the lack of door. it was an all-female compartment and i had good chats with a couple of interesting women. good job getting soft sleeper - it looks more luxurious than i expected.

Troy   #4   10:46 am Nov 19 2009

Hah, I have very fond memories of the overnight trains. The hard sleepers arent so bad, it's all a pretty great experience. Was in one of the soft sleepers for one trip which was interesting, with the door closed and strangers in there i can see how some people (my girlfriend) would feel a little uncomfortable, as opposed to the open plan hard sleepers, but we were lucky enough to be berthed with a chinese couple where the husband spoke really good english, and had a PSP, so we totally nerded it up and synched our PSPs and played games, pretty choice.

I know what you mean with the suprising ammount of sleep, on the top bunks its pretty hard at first but after a while the gentle rocking of going round corners swayed me to sleep. Was looking out the curtains for a good hour or two first, I kid you not, middle of the night saw this massive forest fire, was pretty amazing to see, blackness and then this massive area aglow in orange.

You got a western toilet, lucky, while I have nothing against squat toilets, squatting on a high-speed train is deffinatly an adventure. Thank god for handle bars. I'd advise against going toilet in the last hour or so before disembarking tho, somebody tried to shove a news paper down there and the buildup.. oh gosh.

I love it though, theres something serene about the overnight trains. Good job making your own way arround, I suspect your travel agent would have only advised the train if it were part of one of their comission gaining tours.

James   #5   01:25 pm Nov 19 2009

A few years ago I did the Shanghai-Beijing overnight train on a hard seat - not recommended! We'd missed out on sleeper seats, unfortunately. It was a box-seat configuration, with my friend and I next to each other, interlocking our knees with the two older Chinese chaps for 13 hours. There weren't any snack ladies to buy from - the aisle was completely full of travelers without seat reservations! Standing or sitting on the floor can't have been much fun for that amount of time! Whenever someone would get up for the loo, the closest aisle-sitter would take a quick chance for some vaguely cushioned comfort. At one point a young guy near us asked if he could budge up with us for a while. He spoke quite good English and told us that the train was so full because students were going home for the holidays (not sure which holiday - this was the start of October). It wasn't something I'd like to do again, but it's an interesting experience to talk about. I went to China again last year and took a train from Shanghai to Suzhou, which is slightly inland. There are bullet trains on this line now - we went there on a Japanese shinkansen and came back on a German ICE style train. I think things will be quite comfortable if they extend these lines between the main coastal centers.

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