Hard Sleeper in China
This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006. It is taken from my travel journal for October, 1988.
How happy I was to see him hurrying over to the taxi dragging his worn-out small, hand-cart luggage carrier. He indicated he wanted to take my bags to the train. He was middle-aged, rather scruffy-looking, and by his smell at 7 a.m., also a drunk. He struggled to put all my bags on this tiny, very tired two-wheel carrier. Failing to get them all on, I took a couple of lighter bags.
My joy at seeing him was not only because I had no desire to lug all my bags alone, but because I also hoped he would help me find the right train and “hard sleeper.” He did, and led me on in fine style, installing my luggage on the racks. I knew I was overpaying, but I gratefully handed him 10 FEC (a special foreigner’s currency once used in China and worth about $2.50 U.S.). He looked at it in surprised awe, and hurried out.
Chinese trains divide into hard seat, hard sleeper, soft seat, and soft sleeper. Buying a hard seat ticket had seemed to me to be entering the hardship of Chinese life too precipitously, especially for a 28-hour or more train ride. Soft seat, while less crowded and more comfortable, seemed less of a local Chinese experience. So, I had decided upon the middle approach for my first long train trip in China. Hard sleeper, I had been told, was usually the choice of hardy, individualist backpackers.
A hard sleeper isn’t as hard as it sounds, being covered by a wafer thin pad. There are six to a cubbyhole — bottom, middle, and top, each with its own particular advantages and disadvantages. The bottom is convenient, but since there are only two small seats adjoining each window, the other people must either lie on their sleepers, or sit on the bottom sleepers together. The top sleepers, while providing some privacy, give a feeling of being wedged in, offer no view out the windows, and receive very little air since the windows don’t open up that high. Middle, which I had been given, seemed the most convenient and comfortable since no one else sits on it, and it does afford a view that could be appreciated while prone.
Even before the train departed, people immediately made preparations for the long voyage. These included wetting towels for washing hands and face and hanging them carefully over the rungs of the luggage racks (which maintenance train personnel periodically come around to re-fold so that they do not hang below the upper window level), filling jars with hot water in which tea leaves float and seep their flavor, and arranging various food they have brought.
These tasks done, people sort of eyed one another to check out who would accompany them for the next 28 hours or more. Some Chinese carefully locked their luggage to the luggage racks to insure its safety. Apparently cash is often carried in this basically check-less, credit card-less economy. Theft is going up on trains.
I checked out my neighbors — a young married couple, the wife of which looked ill and who immediately lay down, and the husband who was a pleasant looking fellow, but a chain smoker. There was another woman traveling alone who smiled at me shyly, and a distinguished-looking older gentleman who somewhat timidly began to talk to me in fairly good English. He had a brother in Seattle, Washington, and he and his wife were going there to live in one month. He wasn’t with us much because his wife was traveling in the more expensive and more comfortable soft sleeper section. So, he spent his awake hours there with here.
The other occupant of our cubicle was a young man who must have come from another part of China because he spoke a different dialect. Not that I could distinguish a difference, but eventually he and the other young man spent hours over a notebook on what seemed to be language lessons. He was a more occasional smoker, but I eyed him also as a problem to contend with. This young man said only one sentence to me, “Do you know what time the train will arrive?” but this sentence was said surprisingly clearly. I casually looked around at the rest of the car’s occupants in other cubicles, and they stared at me. I was, as I later learned, one of only three foreigners out of all the train’s travelers.
To be continued…
Tags: Train travel in China; train culture in China; hard sle, Travel
