37 Hour Train Ride!

A prolonged mental war was waged in my brain over the decision to travel to Sanya by train or by plane. Ultimately price won me over, and I opted for the train. Sadly, the train ticket turned out to be considerably pricier than what I had looked up on the internet, but I bought it anyway. Had I continued my research instead of buying the ticket I would have found that it’s actually slightly cheaper to fly. As it was, I had an overpriced train ticket in hand and was, I thought, mentally prepped for the journey.

I’d been on long train rides before, but nothing close to 37 hours. Somehow I’d worked out in my mind that it would be ok. 37 hours later, I can tell you it most definitely was not ok. There’s so much I hate about riding trains I’m not even sure where to begin. One of the most annoying things is that they like to blast loud, obnoxious music all day long. It at least helps drown out some of the ridiculously loud talking and eating, but it’s not much of a trade off. While smoking isn’t allowed in the passenger cars, you can smoke in-between them. Unfortunately it doesn’t keep it as contained as I would hope, and the whole train smelled like cigarette smoke the entire time. Combine that with the smell of the ever worsening bathroom and I constantly felt like I was on the verge of puking. It doesn’t help that many of the Chinese men think if they hold their cigarettes really low and behind their backs that nobody will notice or care that they smoke in the passenger cars. At about 10:00 the lights and music went off without warning; apparently it was time for bed, which would have been great if I didn’t have a loud snoring guy next door. Every train comes equipped with at least one, and my snoring guy sounded like a large drill with low batteries slowly and sporadically grinding its way through a thick Styrofoam board. What little sleep I did get was rough because I kept dreaming about being on a ship with a thief problem. We even came up with a cute alias for him, but I can’t remember what it was so we’ll just call him the Bedtime Bandit. The frustrating thing was that the bandit only stole stuff from me, and it was stupid stuff like one spoon or a sheet of blank paper. Sure I didn’t really need the spoon, but why didn’t he take anything from my bunkmate!? Even more annoying was that he kept flashing a light in my face just before he left that would wake me up every time. What’s really, REALLY annoying is that that last part wasn’t a dream at all. One of the train… guys… kept walking down the hall shining a light in the rooms that woke me up every time. I finally smashed another pillow in my face and solved the problem of Mr. Snores and flash light man. Until 6:20 when that damn music started up again!

Towards the end of the train ride I was literally rocking back and forth muttering to myself like some escaped mental patient. It got worse when I was informed by my hostel that they didn’t have a room for me after all, and it got really bad when the train was almost an hour late! I should have known things would go downhill rather quickly when, right from the beginning, some Chinese guy tried to steal my bed.

When I bought my train ticket I neglected to specify which bed I wanted (top, middle, or bottom), and since the ticket is written in Chinese I had to ask another passenger which one was mine. He looked at my ticket and pointed to the middle bunk; the cheapest, most inconvenient one. I wasn’t too pleased, but whatever, I’d make it work. The guy helped me hoist my stuff up to the luggage rack, and soon the train was on its way. Nobody had taken the bottom bunk yet, so I decided to sit there until someone kicked me out. As soon as I sat down the guy that helped me started yelling at me and pointing to the middle bunk. I thought it was a little odd that he would care, but I moved back out in the hall anyway. A few minutes later the ticket lady came to switch my ticket for a card. I couldn’t help but notice that she drew my card from the bottom of her portfolio. It just didn’t make sense, why would she put the card for the middle bunk in the bottom? It wasn’t sitting well with me, so I asked a Chinese friend to send me the characters for top and bottom. Lo and behold, my card said bottom. I immediately went over to the guy that “helped” me and showed him the card, pointed at the bed, and proceeded to ream him for lying to me. His friends had a good laugh about it, so I’m sure his plan was to move into my bed later (he had a middle bunk in the next room). They kept laughing and saying “ting bu dong!” so I finally yelled at them “I know you don’t understand, but you can tell that I’m mad and that’s all that matters!”

The good news is I survived. I made it through a 37 hour train ride mostly intact, and I’ll never, ever do it again. I’ve already booked my flight back to Shanghai so take that, stupid train. One cool thing about the train was that at one point the whole thing was loaded on a ferry to take us out to Hainan. Woo, that totally made it worth it. (No it didn’t.)