pop: 670,000
Buy ticket for Chengdu (really cheap, wow, great, China has really cheap travel), eat some dumplings, noodles and soybean milk tea by the station and catch our train.
December 16
We grab our bags and head onto our train. It must be a local train because it makes all the stops. ALL THE STOPS.
For some reason I have it in my head that the trip will only last 19 hours. The carriage is packed with all walks of life. I soon realize why the tickets were so cheap. We are on the locals train. They are spitting on the floors and chewing seeds and spitting those shells into a big bag except it's missing the bag and hitting the floor. Shells everywhere. Once an hour one of the workers comes through with a mop and swishes around the dirt. We are seated at a small 2 foot by 1 foot table which we soon find out is our bed. The train is cold and doesn't have any heat. The smoke from the smoking section drifts back into our drafty compartment. The washroom floor is constantly wet for some unknown reason. And now there are people coming on with no place to sit.
Now this is the real China and I couldn't be more excited, finally a chance to mingle with the locals.
So after a fitful sleep of table / shoulder / heads on arms / arms falling asleep and waking every couple of hours to re-position ourselves we finally see the cracking of the dawn. And then it thins out miraculously as some people leave. And we manage to score our own individual seats. Things are looking up. Then we reach the 19 hour mark and then another 30 minutes and then an hour. And then it turns out that my co-pilot understood that this might indeed be a 26 hour ride. Hey what's another 7 hours on a hard seat. We've made it this far.
Luckily we bring snacks along, vital for any train trip and pull into Chengdu at roughly 1700. It's windy and cold, time to look for a place to sleep.
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