Traveling in China - Day 1 - Off to Guangxi 广西

Here in China school doesn't get out around Christmas time. Fortunately for me, this past Christmas was on a Sunday, so I had the day off, but I still had to teach English classes for a week afterward.

What IS nice however is that the Chinese new year is a <understatement>pretty big deal</understatement>. This means that from the beginning of January until the middle of February has no school! Woot!

I was able to endure a week of nothing in my apartment before I realized that doing nothing is only slightly more fun than actually going to work. That called for a plan. A plan to do SOMETHING! When most people go to China, the go with the intent to travel. Sounded like a good plan to me, so that is what I decided to do. I talked to a couple other teachers here who wanted to travel as well and we decided to go to southern China near the border of Vietnam. From Zhengzhou (Henan province) to Nanning (Guangxi province) is just over 1000 miles (see map below). It is about the same distance as driving a car from Provo, UT to Kansas city MO. (Incidentally, I just found out from Wikipedia that Nanning is sisters cities to Provo. How cool is that?!)




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The plan was to go to southern China and stay at the home of a student at our university to graciously offered her home and her services as a tour guide. First step; getting the train tickets. Easy right? All you have to do is walk a block down the street and go to the train station ticket depot and buy some tickets.

Turns out that for the month of January when everyone in China is traveling (there are a lot of people in China), buying a ticket is not that easy. We were hoping to go the week before the Chinese new year so that things would not be so crazy on our trip. We went down to get our tickets and ended up waiting in line for over an hour to get our tickets. When we finally got up to make our purchases, they informed us that the day we wanted to leave was all sold out. We asked about the day after that. All sold out. After that? Sold out. Every day was sold out for the sleeper train (of course, we could have gotten standing tickets on a train, but standing for 26 hours on a train did not sound all that appealing).

We admitted defeat and decided to go home and reevaluate our plans. Rather than leaving a week before the big holiday, we decided we would leave during the middle of it. We went back a few days later, waited in line again. This time we were told that we had to purchase the tickets 10 days in advance at the earliest. We went back 10 day prior to our trip. We were told we had to wait until 3:00 to make the purchase. We went back at 3:00. We got our tickets! The tickets cost 350 RMB ($55 USD) and would take 26 hours (the trip would be much shorter than that in a car but the train we found out makes stops at every; single; small; town).

Note* So I will probably be making many references to money and expenses in these next few blog posts because this sort of things is fun to me in a nerdy way (and maybe even useful to people who ever want to travel in China). From here on out I will use ¥ to denote Chinese money (RMB) and $ to denote US money (USD)

Our ticket was for the actually first day of the Chinese new year. We chose this day because we knew that most Chinese people would not want to be traveling on the biggest holiday of the year. We took the bus to get to the train station (¥1 $.15). Fortunately, we decided to neglect the fact that the bus went past the train station and was going in the opposite direction. Eventually we decided that this was important enough for us to get off the bus and get on the correct one that actually DID go to the train station. <sarcasm>Lucky for me, I don't stress out too much when I am running behind or late for things </sarcasm>. Because it was the holiday, there were not long lines and we were able to make it to our train on time.

I must admit to being a bit excited for such a long train ride. I have typically (minus my first train experience in China) have always loved trains and thought that taking a cross country train ride would be a lot of fun. We got the "hard seat" sleeper train. Each compartment has six beds. Me and Jerry were in the middle and Loida was on one of the top bunks. The bottom bunks are the most expensive and the top the cheapest (they are so high up you can't really look out the window... except to see the ground).

Here you see a great shot of Jerry's head and an even greater shot of my back. I tried to capture the awesomeness of the compartments and bunks. Not a lot of room... turns out that keeping your backpack on the bed with you is a bad idea, unless you don't mind not moving for 26 hours.

There was nothing to special about the train. Small bunks. Clean enough. I decided to not eat food or drink water the day before so I could (hopefully) avoid going to the bathroom. I have been in China long enough to know that if it is not my bathroom, I really don't want to use it unless I absolutely have to (even then... I still don't actually want to use it. Yikes. I will try to refrain from talking too much about bathrooms here). 

Because it was the holiday, those that were traveling tried to take the holiday with them. A lot of people busting out chickens and other such things to eat (and subsequently place on the ground). In our compartment we had another Chinese man across from Loida, but no one underneath me and Jerry. We assumed we would be picking up a couple additional travelers on the way, but in the mean time, that space was occupied by various kids and adults who thought it would make a great place to watch movies, play game, sit down, take a nap etc.

Here you can see some more of the train. They are cutting up a chicken. Yum. 

 Most of the trip from this point consisted of putting in my ear plugs to try napping, playing Scrabble with Jerry and Loida, reading a book, or just looking out the window.

Whenever I see towers like these, I always assume they are nuclear power plant towers (not sure what else they would be). I have seen them all over in China.

After taking a nap, I woke up to see landscapes like this. It reminds me of villages you might see in a Chinese movie. Mountains too. Starting to make Zhengzhou less and less beautiful the more we traveled.

My camera window shots don't capture the scenes all that well, but it turns out that there actually ARE some pretty areas in China.

Our train left at about 11:30 just before noon, so when it was the evening we were already pretty bored with traveling. We played a game of Scrabble then went to bed with the false hopes that we would actually sleep.

We were able to get to bed well enough, but me and Jerry were awakened by flashlights in our faces with official looking people wanting something from us. They wanted Jerry's card because he was one bunk over; he switched so we could all be in the same place. It isn't that bad to be woken up with a flashlight shining in your face, but once we were up, we realized that the lone Chinese man in the compartment with us was snoring. Rather loudly. Loida had it the worst since she was right next to him. Needless to say, we were all getting pretty anxious for day 2 of our adventure.