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Published: February 14th 2011
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I was initially concerned about domestic travel during the Spring Festival season, so much so that I was considering going to Taiwan or sticking closer to Wuhan. I saw some terrifying photos in news articles and read stories about people getting stranded for days. However, I went myself to the train ticket office early in the morning nine days before the train I wanted and all options (hard/soft sleeper, hard seat) were available. A hard sleeper is good for an overnight trip where you want to feel well-rested upon arrival. However, the ride to Kunming is 27 hours so I selected a hard seat for the cheaper price and also the 24-7 free on-board entertainment.
The Wuchang train station was a bit busier than normal, but the train was not nearly as crowded as the train I took back from Beijing a couple of weekends ago. As we were boarding the train, there was a big commotion and it looked like there was some sort of fight in the aisle. The other passengers were looking on in amusement and saying "touzi, touzi/thief, thief." They didn't kick the thief off of the tarin. Rather, they handcuffed him and kept him under
the close supervision of a tough-looking staff member. Also 5 minutes after we boarded, a guy next to me peed in a bag and was wielding it around on his way to dispose of it. Also also an older woman across the aisle vomitted into a series of plastic bags approximately once an hour. I suppose that if you have a golden seat ticket during this tough season, not even food poisoning will prevent you from making the journey home!
Once settled into my seat, I remembered the shooting pain that began to develop in my legs after standing for about 4 hours into my 12 hour journey from Beijing, so I scooted over and allowed the fellow next to me 1/4 of my seat. This turned out to be a poor decision, as seeing this opportunity, he took every chance to claim more and more territory. I figured we would eventually settle into a mutually comfortable position where he would stop moving and we could sleep. However, when he had taken half of my seat, was stretched across my lap with his head resting on the table in front of me and was STILL trying to get more
of my seat by shoving me into the passenger next to me, I shifted to a strict policy of Sharp Elbow Containment. I explained to him that he was not only making me uncomfortable, he was troubling the woman to my left (who frowned at him and "aiyooo'd" in agreement). I said I was willing to give him a portion of my seat, but it was not okay for him to keep taking more and more. He muttered an angry "不够!/not enough!" Anyway I managed to get him off of me, but it was a rather sleepless night of shoving him off of me. The other travelers with standing tickets had brought their own seats and were much more politely sitting in the aisles and leaning against the seat backs. I'm not sure why this dude kept needing to nuzzle his unwashed hair against my shoulder.
The next morning and afternoon was fun as passengers were less grumpy and I made friends with a man sitting next to me named Tianwei. He works in a factory about an hour outside of Wuhan and he, his wife, his younger brother, and his younger brother's girlfriend were all heading home to
Guiyang. His younger brother was actually the victim of the attempted robbery the previous evening! I had brought "Walden" by Thoreau for some good dense entertainment that I would not burn through too quickly. He was like, "Oh, that looks like English! Do people speak English in America?" Tianwei bought me iced tea and invited me to go visit his factory when I return to Wuhan. It would be very interesting to see where all these Made In China products come from. My Chinese was not sucking that day and his Mandarin was not super accented so we managed to chat about a variety of topics including how the retirement age in China is ~55 and in America it is ~65. We figured that makes sense because the average life expectancy in the U.S. is ~10 years more than that of China. He asked me why, I asked if he knew the answer, and he replied, "You're a scientist so I thought you would know."
The train ride between Changsha, Hunan and Guiyang, Guizhou had some of the most spectacular scenery I have scene. So much Karst topography! It looked just like pictures I have seen of Guilin and Yangshuo, with big oddly-shaped precipitous lumps poking out all over the landscape and also magnificent rice terraces carved in every place possible, sometimes hundreds of layers on a single hill. The rice terraces were like contour plots that helped us see the shapes of the hills. I am not sure how they decided the shapes of the whimsically-shaped agricultural plots. The mountains grew quite tall and we began traveling through a series of tunnels that went straight through them. When we exited the tunnels I was struck by the steep dropoffs on either side of the train tracks.
At Guiyang, approximately half of the passengers got off, leaving us with a comfortable amount of room and even some extra seats. Hard seats are in fact just as spacious and comfortable as Amtrak in the U.S.. It's the standing tickets that can make the experience so crazy! As we approached Kunming, more and more passengers got off and I eventually nabbed an empty row of 3 seats for a luxurious 1.5 hours of interrupted sleep. I woke up in Kunming at 5 am to my neighbor nudging me awake, hours before the sun rises out west.
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