Not quite the Orient Express, but it'll do us fine!

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This is the Eggs, coming to you from somewhere on a train track, vaguely near Shanghai.........

Typhoon Chanchu didn’t really affect us after all and we were able to check out of our hotel yesterday as planned, and take ourselves down to Kowloon’s ‘Hung Hom’ station in Hong Kong to catch the 15:00 hrs K100 train to Shanghai. We were particularly pleased that the arrangements hadn’t changed because this route is only serviced once every two days and it would have been a bit of a palaver to hang around in the peeing rain & driving wind in Honkers for another 48 hours (but not that much of a palaver if we are completely honest). The taxi from our hotel to the station was supposed to be 32 HK dollars however the driver fleeced us for another 7 dollars apparently because we had luggage. Did you ever?! Cheeky bugger. We paid it though as we couldn’t be arsed arguing with him and it was raining cats and dogs by this time so we were getting soaked standing outside the cab. We placated ourselves by justifying that it was a 50p tip. Fair do’s an all that.

So anyway, we are now on the train, enjoying the relative luxury of our upper class ‘Deluxe Soft Sleeper’ cabin. The cost for this trip was 1039 HK dollars, and that translates into UK money as 69 pounds. The best thing about the cabin is the privacy. There is only the two of us, and compared to the rest of the train, which is packed out incidentally, it is fairly tranquil, clean and - the absolute best bit- SMOKE FREE! It seems everyone here in China smokes. And it also seems that because everyone smokes, there’s a helluva lot of retching, hawking, coughing and spitting going on all the time. Nice.

Anyway, we want to tell you about our journey a bit, so that if you ever visit and want to take this train, then you’ll know what to expect.

HUNG HOM STATION
Situated near Victoria Harbour, this train station is pretty good in terms of facilities. There is a Macdonalds, a Starbucks, and various other Chinese style restaurants & cafes with plenty of seating , plus some general food shops and newsagents located in the entry area. When you are ready to go through to the International Departure area for your train, you leave behind all these facilities and are faced at the other side with only a Duty Free shop and a snack stall with some dodgy looking sarnies, pies & greasy cakes. Bit like Coatbridge really in that respect. The drill is that you first have to show your ticket to a woman at the International Departure Gates, then she punches a wee hole in them and ushers you through to the Immigration dept for China. It’s a bit strange as the immigration dept is located in Hong Kong, but Customs is at the other end in Shanghai. In between times, you are not allowed off the train. You don’t need to fill in one of the Departure cards before going to the immigration dude as you will already have a portion of your arrival card left for this purpose, which you’ll have filled in before arriving in Honkers. All very organized.

THE TRAIN
There are a variety of ticket types you can buy for these trains.
1) Hard seat: This is the cheapest (and it is REALLY cheap - 2 quid or something ridiculous like that) which is a bit like a regular train between Glasgow and it’s local regions with added tables in between. Not too comfy for a long journeys such as this, but at that price, hey!!!!!.
2) Soft seat: Second cheapest, this is just like the regular seats you get between London and Edinburgh, which sounds like it might be OK but these compartments are HEAVING. Mega full, cramped because of everyone having millions of luggage, and its exacerbated by the fact that you have people cooking up noodles and other sorts of crap like that, plus the chat is fairly incessant. Again, this is quite cheapo cheap.
3) Hard sleeper: Seats that turn into beds by night, separated into bunks of four, dormitory style with curtains in between. Bit lacking in privacy for us.
4) Soft Sleeper: Second best class this - and it’s about half the price of a Deluxe Soft Sleeper which we have, the difference being that you have to share the cabin with other people, again making up a dorm style bunk of four.
5) Ours. 2 big long beds with nice backrests and a full sized window to ourselves. Your fresh white bed linen is provided with 2 full comfy pillows, and you can change it into a bed any time you like. We can stretch out, have a kip, watch the world go by outside the windows, footer on our laptop, listen to our tunes out loud, stay up all night - whatever we want, anytime we want. It’s actually great, and we’ve really enjoyed it. Definitely worth the extra cash. We figured that we haven’t stayed in any dormitories in hostels up until this point, so why do so now just coz it’s a train. We made the right choice.

Toilets: Hmmm. This is the big let down on this particular journey. The toilets are dead basic - I mean there are toilet pans with wooden seats an all, however the floors are wet with heavens knows what, and the toilet roll ran out about 2 hours into the journey last night. They don’t look overly clean and have 4 air fresheners hanging up on the walls - there is obviously a reason for that. Mind you, I can’t recall a single ocassion that I’ve been on a train in the UK where I’ve been in a nice loo. They’re always a bit Dodge City.

FACILITIES
1) You get a nice pair of slippers each to wear. We’ve had ours on the whole journey, just so we can get our ‘money’s worth’. They are also dead handy for going to the loo in the event that you don’t want to subject your precious trainers to the manky floors in the bog.
2) Restaurant Car: Located near to our cabin, the restaurant car is (of course) smoky and has about 16 seats which each fit 4 small people around each table. The food is fairly basic Chinese style, and the menu includes Spicy diced chicken, beef in oyster sauce, fried mushrooms with greens, shredded pork Sichuan style, and rice. There are a few other things of this nature, but don’t get your hopes us as it’s not like the food you would get at home from the Chinese. It’s much more basic, eg the Spicy diced chicken comes with carrots and peanuts in the sauce and that’s it. The portions are quite small too, but hey, as far as we’re concerned that’s no bad thing, as (and sorry to harp back about the bogs here) but you wouldn’t want to be making too many visits y’know?! Each dish is about 25 Renmimbe (1 pound 60p) which we think is reasonable.
3) Trolley man: There’s a wee man who comes round with a trolley selling beers, juices, tea and snacks. We bought two Tiger beers @ 10 Renmimbe each - that’s about 65p and some peanuts which were 3 Renmimbe, 20p.

If we were doing this journey again, we’d get more snacks to bring with us instead of going to the restaurant car. This time we brought a bottle of red wine and some wonderful Swiss Chocolate biscuits which were totally munched by 10pm last night, but it would be a good idea to bring some pot noodles or pot rices and some crisps and juice too. Definitely definitely DEFINITELY bring loo roll.

We had a brilliant sleep - Alan said that he felt like he was back in his buggy aged 2, being rocked to sleep. We dimmed the lights in the cabin at about 10pm and woke this morning at 9:30am, refreshed and ready for a nice day of sightseeing along the tracks!.

Unfortunately we haven’t been able to work out the route we have been following between Hong Kong and Shanghai, because all the stations we have passed have been fairly small so they haven’t appeared on our Lonely Planet maps. We do know however that we definately went north inland immediately after leaving the Hong Kong province as we passed through Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, shortly after we left.

The rain hasn’t really stopped since we left HK, and we’ve seen quite a lot of flooding in paddy fields and on roads. A number of the buildings we have seen along the way have been pretty grim. Lots & lots of stark grey blocks of flats all built to face in the same direction with about 3 metres between them, stacked up along the tracks with lines and lines and more lines of washing hanging up to dry outside. The owners of this washing will unfortunately have had no joy with their clothes drying efforts though, as last night was so very very wet. Most of these dwelling places are built near to other larger structures with towers, smoke and trucks outside which we can only presume are the factories and industrial units where the people work. The route has been mostly like this all the way, with intermittent mountainous parts, washed with muddy brown overflowing rivers. Oh, and we’ve seen lots of people working in paddy fields with those conical wicker hats. Very traditional.

We are now about one hour away from Shanghai and the landscape is becoming even more built up. Unfortunately the power is about to run out on our laptop, so we’ll have to leave this update here and pick up with you again in Shankers. We hope the rain goes off soon - we’re desperate to achieve that elusive suntan which has so far over the last 9 months evaded us. It’s not going to happen, is it?

Shaz & Al. xxx

POST TRAIN JOURNEY UPDATE:
We arrived at Shanghai train station and passed thru customs fairly quickly even though we were shoved about a fair bit by all the Chinese folks - but we started shoving back so they behaved themselves after a fashion. Then we had a mental taxi trip to our hotel (Hotel Metropole) near the famous BUND stretch of road on the river. The 20 minute drive was hairy to say the least but we got here in one piece, and the cost was 23 Renmimbe ( about 1.60 or something). Thankfully the driver didn't try and con us out of any money cos we only had 60 Renmimbe on us from change we got for Honkers dollars on the train. Our hotel is very nice in the lobby - very glam (chandeliers and all that), they sell Cranberry Bacardi Breezers in the bar (had one already) and we have a computer in our room with FREE internet. Yippee! Although Hotmail is unfortunately banned in China, we found a way of accessing our accounts via a mobile phone link. Well done Shaz - some of Alan's techno skills must be rubbing off on you after all these years! Unfortunately though, our room is slightly grimbofied - Lawrence Llewellin Bowen could work wonders in here that's a certainty. Although it is spotlessley clean - its just a bit old fashioned, nothing too horrendous. Anyway - we are just away to watch the Arsenal / Barcelona game on the telly (there are around 60 channels) so must bid you farewell.............. We'll write again soon though - it's dead interesting here and there is lots to keep you updated on. S&Axxx

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Photos

If this was the first picture we showed you, you would think we were in a really posh hotel!
This is the wine and Swiss chocolates we bought in Duty free at the train station. We didn't have a corkscrew (I know - I can hardly believe it meself!) but the helpful conductor chappie sorted us out after Alan went and made some POP noises at him while making a sign to indicate a big corkage from the top of the bottle. Amazing how you can get by with sign language if you are desperate enough!

Train toilets.
For a change, the photo does do it justice.

Ah, now this is great.
We bought peanuts, and they had eating instructions on the back of the bag which made us laugh a lot. Enlarge and read for a giggle.

Hot water flasks.
You can get these delivered to your cabin if you have a posh ticket like us. We had no need though as we didn't bring any pot noodles or tea. Also, slightly disconcerting that the flasks are lined up on the floor of the washroom - see next photo.

Chinese flats or maybe a hotel?
Again, this is not far over the border on the Chinese side.

Just over the border on the China side.
Not quite sure what this is meant to be, but looks like Statue of Liberty with a microphone in her hand. Could it be....karaoke?????????????

A better photo of flooded paddy fields.
It's terrible how they call them that. Very rascist against Irish people.

Powerhungry Jobsworth
We stopped at a station for about 15 mins yesterday, and this lady conductor person in the hat was directing people left right and centre with this megaphone. If you look closely at the picture you can see that she's actually talking to the woman next to her through the Megaphone. No need.

Train official stands to attention.
There are so many train officials, honestly. There were about 20 guards on our train alone. And they all have immaculate uniforms with nice shiny buttons, and big hats.