My trip to Sichuan province was far too action packed for just one entry so I have broken it up starting first with my train trip to Chengdu from Hunan. As I wrote before, being a Chinese state employee I got a week off for the Chinese National day. Me and a couple friends had planned to go to Sichuan province in southwest China, a beautiful and myriad place that never fails to excite and delight its visitors. As it turned out the three of us were not the only American teachers in Hunan going there for vacation and once I got to Chengdu (Sichuan’s capital) I met up with a full 11 of my friends. Besides us foreigners there were millions of Chinese traveling. For Beijing the ‘golden week’ was the biggest National holiday ever in terms of the number of Chinese traveling. The Sichuan newspapers reported the same thing and pointed out that the spring earthquake in Wenchuan did not affect the boom in tourism. It was crowded.
Getting to Chengdu was not as easy I had hoped. Train tickets in China go on sale 5 days before departure, so 5 days before I wanted to leave I went to Huaihua’s large and imposing train station to purchase my ticket. I waited in line for about 45 minutes as it seemed the whole city wanted to leave just like me. When I got to the ticket seller the news was not good. Not only were some of the trains to Chengdu completely sold out but my only other option was to take a hard seat to Chengdu – a 14 hour journey from Huaihua. Hard seat. Just the name sounds bad and on long distance train rides sitting in a hard seat car will surely make you spend every minute cursing the very existence of such cruel torture.
The seats are hard and your butt quickly becomes painfully sore while your lower back cries out against the straight no-nonsense seat back you must try and rest against. Add in the fact that there is no leg room at all, the windows are locked, everyone and their entire family is eating obnoxious vacuum sealed duck legs and the like, the passengers all bring as much luggage as they can possibly carry themselves, men smoke cigarettes all night, the bathrooms smell terrible and the sinks have no water, babies are crying and screaming every minute, etc etc – then you may have some inkling of how horrendous it is to travel hard seat during a Chinese state holiday. The thing that really got me was the standing room only passengers. I had a seat that I had bought for $17.50 US, thank God. But the Chinese train company doesn’t stop selling tickets after the seats are sold out, no that would cut profits too much. These standing room only passengers (who numbered almost equal to the seated passengers) were everywhere. They filled the aisle with their slouched half-asleep bodies, the space between cars, people even sat on the bathroom sink. This is all normal in China and no one complained.
My ride started at 6:30 pm and as the night progressed the situation got steadily worse until around 2:30 am when the train car I was in reached a point of fullness that was staggering. I literally felt claustrophobic, something that has never happened to me before. With the outside world just a dark blur of countryside and the car lights left permanently on my eyes had nowhere to look but in, in at the manic sleep deprived masses of Chinese. I took this video of the situation at around 2:00 when the car was packed, but had yet to reach the high tide of insanity.
At around 3:00 am the car was becoming very hot and at one end the passengers were getting very agitated because they wanted to open a window yet the attendant was no where to be found, no doubt in more comfortable settings. Seeing these people yelling at each other and standing on seats trying to force open the window was deeply depressing – I felt like we were prisoners. And, as is often the case, no one around me on my side of the car cared. We resigned ourselves to this treatment.At 8:30 am I arrived at Chengdu and happily got off the train.Once outside the train station I realized, with much sadness and foreboding, that I still had to buy a train ticket back home. You can’t buy round trip tickets in China (at least not in Huaihua), only one way. So I entered the massive room where you buy train tickets in Chengdu. The place was a zoo, yet everything was slightly organized. I waited in line for approximately one hour, one slow boring hour. My mind was obsessed with the thought that I may have to buy another hard seat ticket back to Huaihua. This I decided would be too much and I resolved to not buy a hard seat ticket under any circumstance. I took a video of the Chengdu ticket office, I even added some commentary. In the end I got a wonderfully comfortable hard sleeper ticket for my ride back home.
Then I got a taxi to my hostel, showered, had a quick breakfast at Starbucks (!), and slept like a baby in a smelly room filled with the dirty laundry of a half-dozen Belgians, Americans, and French backpackers.
