And then a train to China... again...

And Friday it was, and we did some bits and pieces in the morning and then packed a couple of bags and headed to the big station... which as per usual was bustling and hectic. The Hong Kong - China trains are mostly full of mainland Chinese, as most of China wants to get into Hong Kong but not so much the other way around... As I have probably already mentioned, despite the handover of HK back to China, the majority of HKer's still consider themselves an entirely different country and opinions of their billion or so neighbours to the north are not always the most complimentary.

Once we got down to the platform we had to fight our way through the scurrying masses and were first directed to the wrong carriage (which happens a lot)... Nick got on a few people ahead of me and went off to find our bunks (on some of the trains it is first-in-gets-the-best-bunk, so train boarding sometimes resembles the running of the bulls)... the train steward lady then looked at my ticket and told me I had the wrong carriage. With various gestures and noises I indicated she had just let my friend on who had the same ticket, but she was quite adamant... I ended up having to walk down the outside til I saw Nick through a window, looking somewhat perplexed at the six Chinese people already in our "luxury" cabin. In a touching scene that could have been from a 1940's movie, or possibly an Asian remake of Schindler's List, we both pressed our tickets up against opposite sides of the glass and exchanged gestures and yelled things which neither of us heard. Nick turned and looked down the narrow train corridor, now flooded with people, and started trying to make his way back out to the door. Since Chinese people seem to have no concept of things such as... well, manners, and getting the hell out of the way, and the fact that people twice their size generally win in pushing matches, this also involved more than a little yelling, and at one point, Nickos dragging his wheelie suitcase up and over the luggage going in the other direction.

Down the train a bit we found our carriage, and curses upon Nick's friend who had booked our tickets turned into rejoicing as we discovered we did in fact have a luxury two-bunk cabin (just as well for the price we paid for it...), complete with our own toilet, mini tv's (which only played Chinese shows of course) and a little armchair in one corner...

We quickly set ourselves up with the bag of beer we had bought at the station and once underway, sat back to watch the world go by.

HK/China border

The trip was obviously a long one, around 22 hours... the train itself was great and we were well entertained with our supply of beers, rum and vodka brought from home, and spent many hours in the dining car with a couple of young guys we met at the station, one an Aussie/Canadian who had grown up in China and one a Swedish exchange student, both of whom lived in Shanghai.

While I say the train was great, this unfortunately does not include the staff, who were, putting it nicely, utter @ssholes to whom passengers were just an inconvenience. I could tell many a long story about our dramas... we asked for cans of coke (for our rum, not that we told them that at first), but there was no coke... or any softdrink... or any juice... or, in fact, any bottled water... on a 22 hour train ride... neither were there any snacks... You have to understand that this was in fact a very fancy train (by Chinese, or any Asian, standards), and we were in fact paying a lot of money for it... then we got into arguments about smoking, because when we entered the dining car initially about 20 crew members were sitting there smoking and lounging around, and we clearly disturbed them as most of them begrudgingly got up an wandered off... and shortly afterwards they tried to tell us it was a non-smoking carriage... Our Aussie/Canadian friend spoke fluent Mandarin, though he preferred not to let anyone in on this secret, and he ended up in several long and heated debates.

In the end we settled for mixing our spirits with beer and entertained ourselves by making up a comedy/drama based on the lives and loves of the staff aboard a Chinese long-haul passenger train, giving all the porters and attendants and cooks and other staff who wandered by names that seemed to fit, narrating all their conversations in English, and generally further pissing them all off by watching everything they did and occasionally breaking down into hysterical laughter for no apparent reason. The night wore on and Nick and I eventually headed back to the cabin to watch the vast countryside go by in the moonlight and polish off the last of our beer reserves.

The next morning we awoke to more vast countryside, the sun bright and the whole place looking kind of parched and washed-out, as much of China seems to.

Nuclear power(?) station, one of several en route

ENDLESS apartment complexes. Not many as nice as these.

We passed through various towns and cities, again mostly looking straight out of the 1950's, and one thing that struck us repeatedly was the lack of signs of life... the big highways were there, but there were no cars, just the odd truck and bus... the streets in towns that passed by seemed mostly empty... there were blocks and blocks of huge apartments in various stages of completion, all unoccupied. We never really did fathom this, unsure if mother China is in fact so efficient that they are building huge facilities even before the people need them, or perhaps that they are just building wonderful modern things that the people can't afford to actually use. Or, alternatively, that they have many great projects that never actually get finished. It's hard to know. Regardless, we pulled into Shanghai around 11am, cleared Chinese Immigration, and walked out into the clear chilly morning.