The Train Ride from Hell

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 in: News

A cab proved harder to hail than we had anticipated, as drivers in Xi’an tend not to use their meters we kept waving our arms at cabs who already had fares. We finally managed to get one and hit the ground running at the station. We were close to missing the boarding time for our train, let alone find out which train car had the upgrade office and try to get sleeper tickets. We got onto the train, dripping in fresh sweat, to find that no upgrades were available. We were going to be stuck in hard seats for the next 14 hours (only 10 for Dan, he was going back to Xingtai). This was the city’s last way to stick it to us before we could leave its walls, and it got us good.

Goodbye Xi’an, and fuck you very much.

Our seats were on different cars, so we split up, saying we’d touch bases later. Walking to my seat at the very end of the train was a chore with my overstuffed backpack, especially since there were tons of Chinese people who had only a standing ticket, which meant they had strewn themselves about the car in an attempt to find a comfortable position in which to spend the next half day. I saw some British kids and briefly introduced myself in the spirit of fellow-laowai comradery before moving back to find my seat, swarming with peasants. The end of the train was particularly crowded, and I realized that I probably had one of the worst seats in the train, but it was probably just as crowded near the bathrooms on every car. Dan had observed on our other train ride the look the peasants with standing tickets get when they’re squatting in someone’s seat; every time someone walks by, it could be their last moment with a seat, which can only be a harrowing experience. But you get what you pay for, and this peasant is in my seat. I point to the ticket and he slowly rises to step aside. Now I feel a bit like a jerk, because this guy doesn’t just disappear, now he’s got to hover nearby, because he has nowhere to go for the next 10 hours. To make matters worse, there’s a young mother holding a two or three year old on the floor. In of itself, this is not strange or unusual, but her positioning, out of necessity caused by the unusually thick crowd at the end of the car, was jammed so far into my personal space she was practically under the table. Since there was only enough room for one leg in front of my chair, I found myself straddling this woman, and then she leaned back, her head in my inner thigh.

This, I thought, will not do.

I came up with a plan. Well, it wasn’t so much a plan as escaping from this armpit of humanity and managing to look like a halfway decent guy. I tapped on the woman between my legs and asked her where she was going. She seemed a little perturbed at being reminded that she was inches away from accidentally committing adultery, and said some place I’d never heard of. I mustered my best Chinese skills and said “look, I’m going to Beijing, but I’m gonna go talk to my friends for a while. While I’m gone you and your son can have my seat, OK?” She nodded hesitantly and I slowly extricated myself from the chair and stumbled over the rest of the nongmin who had made themselves at home in the aisle. I then realized the big advantage of a “soft seat” versus a “hard seat:” standing tickets weren’t allowed in soft seat cars.

I made my way up to where the British kids were sitting and reintroduced myself, pointing out the situation down the hall. They had already realized that they would get minimal sleep on this train ride, and we began the traveler’s equivalent of sniffing each others’ ass. Where you from, what do you do, where’ve you been and how long you been there? They were 19 year-old “gap year brats,” on the tail end of a 6-month trip through SE Asia, getting ready to fly home from Beijing. there were 6 or 7 of them, quite a large crowd to be sure. We talked about all sorts of shit to keep ourselves occupied, to pass the time more quickly. Dan came back and joined the conversation for a while, and we gave them a bunch of pointers about Beijing. I’d give you my phone number, but some dickhead in Xi’an has it now. That’s ok, they said, they already had a laundry list of phones, cameras, ipods and other valuables that had been sacrificed on the altar of travel. It’s all relative, after all, you just have to keep going when something goes wrong. Setbacks can’t defeat you!

Dan retreated to his hard seat to get some sleep, and I eventually did the same. I managed to kill about 8 or 9 hours with the British kids, which was a considerable chunk of transit time. They were good kids, and I’m sure they were a heck of lot better conversationalists than my fellow passengers at the end of the train. The mother was gone so I kicked some other guy out of my seat again and dove back into my book. I managed to sit quietly and not sleep, thinking that no matter how shitty and long this train ride was, the bus ride the day before was even shittier.

I’ll leave you with one of the parables the British kids presented to me. If you had just finished defecating in a 2nd or 3rd world country, and realized you had no toilet paper, and you had a choice between A) some writing paper, B) some well-circulated paper money of some worthless denomination, or C) the bathroom’s toilet brush, which would you use to wipe your ass? Apparently, they asked this because they had all been in the situation before, and they all chose different things. That’s right, one of them used an old toilet brush to wipe his ass.

Twice.

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