August 19, 2011

• The Silk Road (Sort Of) Overland
  Wednesday 17 August 2011
  
  I’ve spent the entire 24 hours of today on the train to Xi’an. A university student who calls himself Harry – after Harry Potter – has offered to help me in many ways. For example, he’s several times asked on my behalf about the possibility of getting an unclaimed bed if available, and by 6.00 PM today he was successful, and I was able to lie down for a few hours after having sat on the same seat in the restaurant car for over 20 hours. It was bliss!

  This is the second time a young Chinese student has offered to help me on a train – not just cursory, but REALLY help. Maybe university students feel more obliged to help because they are the only ones there able to speak English, and therefore help a poor non-Chinese speaking foreigner like me? Or maybe these guys are angels sent to help me? An angel called Harry.

  The system of paying a minimum charge at the restaurant car in order to stay there is a good idea. I’m paying USD 5.00 or thereabouts every few hours (each time I get a bag of snacks I don’t eat) and can therefore sit at my restaurant table for as long as I like. The price has been set at a level so not too many people are using this option (maybe twenty out of forty restaurant seats are taken up by “permanents”), and no restaurant visitors seem to be turned away because we are taking up the space.

  The “rules” are OK as well. You are allowed to sleep with your head on the table (or any other way you can make yourself comfortable) between midnight and 6.00AM, as they lock the doors to the restaurant car over that time and it’s closed. You can also sleep with your head on the table between lunch and dinner, when there are no customers.

  The alternatives – for a stand-only train passenger – are these. First of all, the aisle is available to you in the sense that you can sit on the floor, perhaps using one of those mini-collapsable low seats, or you can stand/lie in the aisle, all until someone wants to walk past you – which is all the time. So, to travel like this for 23 hours would make most people go potty. A second alternative is to stand/sit in the area next to the exit doors, where’re all the smokers are. The advantage is that, if you’ve got an hour to the next station and you’ve managed to get the spot directly by the door, you don’t have to move for an hour. A third alternative is to befriend someone who is sitting where there are three seats in a row: here it is possible to squeeze in a fourth person without it being too uncomfortable – but you have to be invited. The fourth way of dealing with this to pretend this is all a great party and just stand around in the aisle, chatting to people, joking, laughing and having fun. This is the option most people seem to go for, to avoid going absolutely potty I presume. In my estimate, they seem to sell up to twenty stand-only tickets for each carriage in the train, so with nineteen carriages, it’s quite a party.

  But, as I said, I utilised the restaurant car option. I like parties, but I’m not a party animal, and 23 hours of chatting in the aisle of a train is a tad too much for me. And thanks to my new Chinese friend Harry, I got nearly six hours of sleep, lying in a top bunk bed in a “hard sleeper” carriage – not meaning it’s hard, but that the car is like an open dormitory. The bed was fine, and I had clean sheets and a lovely duvet.

  This is a nice respite – tomorrow is the only full day I’ve got in Xi’an so I better be awake and perky then.

  • 10:01 pm
  • 1 Comment