toot toot
by Rach
Nanning to Guilin, China
I’m not sure what the first class seats are like, because we bought “hard seats”. They were nice. Soft, even. And the train hardly appeared to move, it was so smooth – although the scenery did keep changing outside our window and Mr GPS indicated we were approaching 100km/hr. There was no clickety-clacking, no straining, no horn honking, no noise at all, no dirt (in fact, rubbish was twice collected, and toilets cleaned too (something that didn’t happen even once on our two day journey in Vietnam!) In under two hours we covered a distance that took us ALL DAY in a bus in Laos (no trains in that country). Good thing too, because there is a lot of track to cover in China. Five hours took us 2 centimetres on the map and we still have a 30cm ruler to zoom over before we are out of the country.
Apart from being fast, efficient, punctual, clean and comfortable, catching a Chinese train is a bit different to the other countries we’ve been in so far.
Tickets are presented and all baggage is x-rayed before you enter the waiting room, where queues of people elbow their way to the gates. Tickets are checked a second time and the crowd continues its constant surge forwards. Ours did a left turn and up a flight of concrete stairs, across a bridge over the tracks and descended to the platform.
Carriages are numbered, seats allocated and people hustle to get on board. Little wonder – there’s no mucking about – the train leaves at the advertised time. We scrambled on and held up the instantly impatient queue as Rob tried to find our seats – upstairs or downstairs? Yes, the train was two-storeyed! Voices grew more anxious as fellow passengers were unable to pass our back-packed bodies. We had barely arranged our belongings in, on, under and around ourselves when the train pulled out of the station. Perfect timing!
from Jboy13’s journal:
The people on the train are very friendly. They all smile and say “Nee how”. They took Tgirl4 over to their seats and got her to sit on their knee and say her name, which she doesn’t really like, but ER2 went fine coz they were eating pumpkin seeds and she likes them.
Tags: children, postcard: China, quote, transport
rayres
I don’t normally comment on blogs but your post was a real help. Thank you for a great topic, I will be sure to bookmark your site and check it out again. Cheers, Amy xXx.