Archives October 2008

Traveling to Hong Kong when working for a Chinese company can prove to be a rather tiresome task. However, I have heard of several western businesses traveling in this manner. The manner in which I am asked to travel is sometimes completely beyond my understanding but it always is becomes a very interesting experience full of excitement, complications, and stressful situations. My company is constantly trying to “cut corners,” so to speak, and in the end spend much more money through these attempts.

Hong Kong

Usually I am asked not to fly directly to Hong Kong because it is extremely expensive. The reasons as to why flights from Shanghai to Hong Kong are considered international flights are money, the SAR (Special Authority Region) status that Hong Kong has maintained even after the 1997 turnover to China, and that China has signed a non-interference agreement with Britain / Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is politically part of China, but like other SAR and AR (Autonomous Regions) in China such as Xinjiang, Xizang (Tibet), and Inner Mongolia – which have existed independently for thousands of years, or in this case, 99 years under a treaty with Great Britain, the dissimilarities that exists between the mainland and these areas are immense. Even 11 years after the turnover, the Chinese authorities have surprisingly not intervened in Hong Kong. Besides the wide circulation and acceptance of only Hong Kong Dollars (HKD) and not Chinese RMB in most establishments, the fact that one crosses a “border” when entering and exiting Hong Kong, and that mobile phone networks from the mainland do not work or are charged international roaming fees, are solid examples of their semi-solidarity. I also believe that many Hong Kong citizens have a disenchanted or skeptical view towards the mainland. When asked about my employment with a Chinese company, many Hong Kong locals have responded, usually in perfect English, “you must be very angry and annoyed frequently while working for a Chinese company.” I will leave my response up to the interpretation of the reader.

Flying into Shenzhen is considerably less expensive than direct flights into Hong Kong. However, the land border crossing and shuttle bus back and forth can be extremely time-consuming. A shuttle bus from the Shenzhen airport arrives at the customs center near the international border crossing. All passengers have to carry all other luggage into the exit compound. After receiving some particularly annoying “foreign treatment,” you are ushered through the gate and board another bus outside the gate. This bus drives less than 10 minutes and arrives at the Hong Kong clearance compound. Once again, you have to take all of your bags off the bus and get clearance into Hong Kong. Then, you board a completely different bus and drive into Hong Kong. After almost two hours, you arrive at the destination you could have flown directly. Then, even though you have to go to a trade show near the Hong Kong airport, you have to stay in a hotel in Kowloon because it is also cheaper. After dealing with phone calls from your boss for not checking your email because the crappy hotel you stayed in doesn’t’ have internet services, you have a take the subway and walk to a bus center to take you back to the trade expo center one hour away every day.

In a poor attempt to save money, the company spent more on paying a salary while I was traveling and placing me in a hotel with no internet connection from which I could not perform my duties. This lack of foresight and logic is widespread throughout Chinese companies in my experiences. Although anecdotal, I have witnessed these events repeatedly and feel safe in generalizing, however many of these things are simply cultural. If you would like to save money by taking this route, I urge you to consider the time you are wasting while attempting to save money.

-Posted by Mike.

West Lake

We arrived in Hangzhou at 6:00am. The city is well known for its beauty, and along with Guilin is one of the most beautiful tourists spots in China. I had traveled here in 2005, my first time in China, and this city alone is what had eventually led me to return to China. The city is shrouded in everything one comes to love about China, and its history is startlingly ever present. We grabbed a cab to West Lake, the centerpiece of the city, and tightened the straps of our backpacks as we set of to circumnavigate the lake. Slightly remembering the features of the area, I set of pointing out aspects of my previous journey. We sat on the lake shore with a group of over twenty elderly Chinese and drank coffee and tea as we watched women in their nineties do tai chi while men did their morning exercises of military drills from years long passed. The elderly were surprisingly limber, and possibly in better shape than ourselves. They laughed and chatted amongst themselves while they exercised and drank their tea, and we aware that we were on the outside, looking in. I admired these old people, who were light years ahead of the American elderly who sat decaying in old folk’s homes, antisocial and full of self pity. Chinese elderly are the life of the country, they meet at night to dance in the parks with each other, and congregate every morning around the lakes to exercise and socialize. I hoped then and there that when I aged, I would age with dignity and grace like the Chinese in Hangzhou. We watched them for quite some time before the sun fully emerged, and then we set off along dragon bridges in the early morning light.

We continued our tour around the lake, sometimes losing sight of the shore as we strolled through deep woods, always keeping the lake in the distance. Emerging back on the shores, we encountered hundreds of boaters and fishers, eager to offer us a ride (for a fee, of course). The mood around the lake had shifted as the sun climbed in the sky. Younger people emerged, and with them some of the charm of the lake disappeared. Loud tourists came out of nowhere by the bus load, and we were happy that we had been there early to sense the quiet energy of the elderly. Eventually we were overrun by tours with megaphones and camera shutters snapping in our faces and decided we had had enough of tourism! We were tired of calculated trips where a lady with a bullhorn would screech into the crowd, “look how beautiful and serene the lake is. hurry. hurry. look. okay, moving on….” There is hardly anything to appreciate when one is in a crowd as massive and noisy as a Chinese tour group. We waited for the groups to pass so we could make our escape, but they did not cease. Finally we fought our way through the crowd to the nearest exit and hailed a passing cab. Exhausted and tired, we directed him to the train station where twenty minutes later we found ourselves sitting on a fast train home to Shanghai.

Hangzhou

Though it had been an amazing week on the river, we were tired and eager to be back home. It was odd thinking of our tiny apartment in Shanghai as our home, but when we walked through the door to familiar smells and fabrics, we smiled and truly realized how fortunate we were to have such a nice place, with so much security and comfort. A week sailing through poverty had made it so nothing would be taken for granted for a very long time.

-posted by Lauren.

Yellow Crane Tower

Again we were awoken at 5:00am as we passed through the final of three gorges. This last gorge was vastly different than the previous two, and we were happy that we had decided to go topside. The cliff sides were covered in lush greenery like a scene from Jurassic Park, and we took out our binoculars to watch for monkeys. After an hour the sun began to rise, and we joined the Swiss in the dining hall for boiled eggs and waterlogged rice. We continued our previous discussion of religion in Switzerland, noting that the Swiss pay taxes to the Church via the government. I pondered how un neutral this was, but decided not to point this out. We talked about neutrality for a long time, and though I had always admired the Swiss for being internally focused, I found neutrality to be a double edged sword. It protected the people, but it also meant they turned their backs on the world when it sometimes needed it. A truly confusion conundrum. After a leisurely meal the Swiss got off the boat to see a monument, we stayed on board and played cribbage overlooking the hillsides. The stop was the final day trip before the end of the cruise, but we had heard roomers that the stop was largely bullshit, another tourist trap selling plastic Olympic goods. The Swiss returned and sat with us in the windy sunshine and laughed at what a joke the last sight had been. It was a fake dragon boat race that lasted less than two minutes, but they had been forced to march at top speeds up a large hillside to see the race from afar. After a few warm beers and more discussion with the Swiss, we packed up our room and got off the boat. It had been an interesting four days, but I don’t think I would ever recommend the ‘cruise’ to anyone. At least not anyone I liked.

We boarded a bus for Yicheng, a nearby city where we would be able to buy train or bus tickets to Wuhan, and then back to Shanghai. We found Yicheng a beautifully modern and clean city that resembled, in many ways, the US mid-west. Our bus passed through a housing district of large brick mansions facing the river, and we watched, mouths agape, as the luxury passed behind us. Apparently black gold had made this village prosperous, that coupled with a constant stream of disembarking tourists had elevated the city. We rumbled towards the bus stop where we bid farewell to the Germans and the Swiss, and boarded another, more crowded bus that smelled of vomit and was full of flies. This bus would take us 5 hours to Wuhan.

Arriving in Wuhan near 21:00 we began walking aimlessly down a large street near where our bus had abandoned us. Curiously, we spotted the German couple down the road and hurried to catch up with them. They had arrived an hour earlier and had checked into a hostel down the street. We followed them to the hostel, checked in and then set about devouring a round of beers with the Germans. We took a cab to look for western food, but ended up in a Chinese buffet hall when we realized it was too late for most restaurants to be open. Returning to the hostel after a tasty meal- our first in five days- we slept soundly and awoke refreshed at 10:00, the latest we had slept since leaving Shanghai.

Yellow Crane Hill

After a nice breakfast at the hostel we went to the Yellow Crane Pagoda where, for 50Rmb one can stroll along the gardens and climb the pagoda where Li Bai had been humbled by former masters and an amazing view of the river. We spent the afternoon talking about American politics and slowly walking through the shade of the bamboo. Resting often, we felt close to the Chinese of old who had had a lifestyle of learning and growing. After the pagoda, which is a beautiful spot in Wuhan I’d highly recommend, we returned to the hostel to spend the afternoon resting in the sunshine. Mike found an abandoned guitar and he strummed songs and sang all afternoon in a cove in the hostel. I read Empire of the Sun, a gift from a Shanghai friend I had recently received for my birthday, and we whiled away the hours sipping beers and relaxing. We ate a nice hostel meal that was the largest array of foods we had seen in ages, and dined until our bellies hurt. At 17:00 the Germans appeared and we decided to share a cab to the train station. Once we arrived the Germans bought another round of beers and we chugged them on the platform and shook hands and exchanged phone numbers and emails. Traveling in china always produced friends of necessity, but this trip had been very good to us, and we adored the Swiss and German couples we had met on the trip. We boarded the night train to Hangzhou, and were amazed at the modernity we were faced with. This was the cleanest and nicest train we had ever been on, and we stayed up playing cards and drinking cheap beer until the lights were turned off and we crawled up into our top bunks and slept.

-posted by Lauren.

River boat capitan

At 5:00am I was wide awake listening to an overweight and undereducated Chinese man yell at his wife in the hallway. They screamed as loudly as possible, yet no one asked them to be quiet. I wondered if this happened in America, if someone would ask them to take their fight somewhere more isolated, and decided that they would. Moments after their doors slammed shut, the sirens went off for our wake up call and everyone was moving and yelling in the halls at once. We ate cold rice porridge, boiled eggs with fecal matter caked to the shells and pickled beans with the Swiss couple before getting off the boat and into an overcrowded bus. The bus drove ten minutes up a hill, unloaded its cargo and the driver fell asleep against the wheel. We blinked back sleep and surveyed the area. We were outside the White Emperor City, a small island the Emperor had given to his younger brother to appease him. In a massive group, we walked along listening to the tour guide point out special attractions. Falling to the back, we strayed off course and looked around at the very modern, very new ‘ancient’ city. In a far corner we found a sign saying the city was built in 2005 after archeologists found a brick foundation they thought matched the description in a fictional work of literature about the king’s brother, the White King Emperor (so named because he saw white, dragon-like smoke pouring from a hole in the ground on an island, which he called the dragon’s cave). This may or may not have been that island, and that may or may not have been a factual story about a factual emperor. Dismayed at having been lugged out here for fake ‘history’ we spent the morning checking out the view of the gorges the island’s vantage points provided. We largely ignored the ‘ancient’ buildings and avoided the crowds all together. At the top of the hill stood a lone shack under construction, we went inside and saw a few Chinese gentlemen and their girlfriends from our boat. They were looking into glass display cases and laughing. One youth had his girlfriend take a picture of him making daemon faces in front of the case. We walked over to see that the case contained human remains. A sign nearby said that in ancient times a strange people had buried their dead in hanging coffins, high in the nearby gorges. These few coffins had been removed from their lofty resting places so tourists could pose in front of them. A hold in the glass case was drilled so tourists could fill the coffins with money for luck. We were aghast that the poor dead were being treated in such a way. The worst possible death I could imagine would comprise of being a part of a disrespectful, Chinese tourist trap in a fake city. I spent the day contemplating the way Chinese think of death and dying, a near theme for the trip so far considering the previous day’s outing and now the desecrated remains of an unfortunate man.

Back on the boat we sat on the deck counting the floating shoes we passed in the water. For some reason there was an excess of shoes (possibly because the rubber soles made them float). We wondered if for every floating shoe there was a pair of sunken pants and missing, sunken shirt as well. Mike wondered if we’d pass a body. Before the words were out of his mouth we saw something floating in the water 100 yard away from the boat. As we neared we saw four pale legs sticking out of the mucky river and saw that it was a bloated and green dead pig. Naturally, we stopped counting shoes, worried we would spot something equally or more disturbing than the dead pig. We mentally made a note not to eat anymore river fish.

At eleven we ate a hearty lunch on board with the Swiss couple and talked a great deal about politics, religion and the differences between Switzerland and the US (which are vast). Both of them had been in the US before, and had opinions on things that were very intense and new, and we enjoyed our chat immensely. By noon we had to get off the boat for a long day of touring. This was the highlight of the trip, and was especially touted as one of the last cruises humans would see of these cliff sides before the dam flooded the area. We boarded a smaller boat that held roughly 100 people, and the engine splashed up water as it took off down a mini gorge. We passed through several beautiful gorges before coming to the site of the hanging coffins. Up nearly 100 yards a small wooden coffin sat nestled in a square, man made cave along a steep and sheer cliff side. We wondered how the ancient peoples had put them up there in the first place, let alone how the Chinese tourism industry had gotten several coffins down for the White Emperor City. Further down we saw a monkey playing with a twig over the water, his long furry arms surprised us as we had never seen a monkey in the wild before. He vanished before we knew we had really seen him. After several hours of intense viewing, we halted and boarded even smaller boats of 20 which we took into an even smaller gorge. This tiny gorge was full of thin waterfalls spewing white spit. The water was clearer and our boat guide sang old fishing songs as he paddled us through the gorge. After a time we returned to the larger boat and again took off through larger gorges.

The boat stopped at a complete joke of a town that had at one point been an ‘ancient relic of China town,’ meaning, an old village. Because the water level would rise for the dam they had destroyed the old village and built a new one ‘exactly like the old one’ further up the hill for tourists to see how thoughtful the government could be. We looked around at the cinder blocks and 2x4s and left in disgust. Back in the original ancient village a poor old man was probably sifting through bricks for his possessions. Back on board we sped under several bridges under construction, as older, lower bridges would soon be wiped out, and finally arrived back in town where our ship was docked.

Protesting

Instead of boarding the boat we were directed to a bus. Apparently a local troupe had a show prepared for us. We ate a quick meal with the Swiss couple before grabbing a row of seats in a tiny stadium. Twenty scantly clad Chinese dancers frolicked on stage while the men, dressed in loin clothes, bounced around in the background holding twigs. Meanwhile, a smoke machine filled the room and flashing neon lights bounced off the walls in what can only be described as the corniest thing I’ve ever seen. In a rare show of defiance, however, one song and dance routine among the pack of otherwise pointless and flashy dances, showed an old man, wife and child with her baby being forced from their tiny home by government officials. The officials pranced around the stage singing as the poor villagers gathered their belongings and cried. It was a silent, smokeless theater when the last note was sung and we all looked at each other in shock. This was the only scent of protest we had ever seen from the Chinese about the dam, and it was not in the least bit subtle. We swelled with pride for the troupe and clapped loudly at their courage for doing a show with so much criticism in it. In the final act the policeman lifted the elderly woman onto his back and forced her off stage while the man was dragged by another young man in uniform. It was chilling. We were very happy to see that there was, at least, someone else who felt the whole project was hurting more than it was helping.

Boarding the boat we fell asleep the instant our heads hit the dirty pillows. We stayed on the dock all night, listening to the water lap at the shore.

-posted by Lauren.

At 4:30 a siren sounded and I was sure the boat was sinking. I mentally ran through all the logical escape routes, noting in my mind where the life vests were stored. There had been no emergency drills, and we noticed that as dirty as the water was, if we fell in we’d probably be poisoned to death in minutes. I had not slept hardly a wink all night as we lulled back and forth in the Yangzi’s current. Not a hearty swimmer, I was worried about the possibility of making it to the closest shore before being snatched by the cold or exhaustion or fear of what I could get tangled in in the dirty water. We did not sink, and another siren went off at 5:00am indicating we should, perhaps, prepare to disembark. We were arriving at the ancient Ghost Town, the only Daoist ghost village in China. For 80Rmb a person you could freely roam the two hillsides full of abandoned buildings full of relics of an abandoned religion. The town was a tribute to death and hell. The idea was that if would could pass through the scary underworld and survive, he had been a good person in this life and thus would survive the torment of hell. We marched past neon pools of drainage and waste into a serene valley of abandoned buildings. At the top of one hill there was an empty doorway shaped like a giant dragon’s open mouth. We walked inside alone and down dark stairs where a motion sensor triggered an insane and surreal giant puppet show of flashing lights and life-sized displays of torture and hell. We quickly walked through the haunted house of Daoist hell, but after twenty minutes of giant puppets sawing each other in half, we had not found an exit. Another ten minutes of crazy lights and giant horrors and we finally passed into another hall of Chinese history stories acted out in moving statues. We were too shocked at what we had just walked through to really express any thoughts other then blank stares. Walking out into the bright sunlight we wondered if we had really just marched through hell. After walking around the town a bit more, we headed back to the boat early and beat the crowd. I took a cold shower (no hot water on the boat) and by the time I came out of the disgusting bathroom I felt dirtier than when I went in. Our room mates sat on their bunk, nearly nude, chain smoking and avoiding eye contact. I went topside where I read in the fumes of exhaust and wrote in my journal, all the while snapping pictures of the gorges and hillsides as we passed slowly by. We spent the rest of the day on board playing cards, drinking warm beer, chatting with the Swiss couple, and watching the scenery.

walking through hell

At 21:00 we stopped at a Buddhist temple for a quick trip, but decided to walk around the outside of the temple rather than go inside. This was a depressing revelation. All along the temple there were knocked down homes and piles of rubble with people sifting through debris looking for belongings or scavenging. Little children pestered us to buy rocks and oranges from them while the elderly simply sat and looked at the piles of bricks. The whole town was in piles around the temple, and the people stayed only to try to sell what little they could produce to the tourists who would overpay and then board their boat. The three gorges dam has aroused controversy across China and the world for its massive displacement of people. Reading about the project one could see the large numbers of people who would be moved, but watching them poke at piles of bricks that used to be their homes was heart wrenching. We bought oranges, and then left them on the shore for the children to find and resell, and then we boarded the boat in a sober and depressed mood. Back on board, however, we met a German couple, we thought there was only us and the Swiss on board for foreigners, but the Germans had been hiding in their room until this evening. We chatted lightly and he bought us a round of beers while he talked about his pipe factory in Canton. We ate boiled cabbage and rice with the Germans in the canteen before bed. Returning to the room we found the nearly nudes mid argument. They abruptly silenced themselves and huffed into their beds. We all slept heavily that night as we rolled further away from the depressing shores of devastation.

-posted by Lauren.

skinned frogs

We arrived in Chongqing at 19:49, twenty minutes off schedule. I was handsomely impressed with their time management skills. On a 31 hour journey the train managed to cross the majority of the nation and arrive nearly on schedule. On train trips in the US I planned to arrive over four hours late, per leg. When we stepped of the train we were greeted by a throng of locals screaming “hotel” in Chinese. We bypassed them, knowing they are regular scam artists, and stepped into a small shopping booth where a young woman charged us an unheard of 7RMB for a two minute phone call (normal price: 50 mao (12 cents). We stood in line for a cab for nearly ten minutes before noticing the line stretched around the block, and cabs were arriving only rarely for the line of over 100 tired passengers. We went around the train station and found exactly what we were looking for. Illegal cab drivers who charge double the fare to take you half the distance. After negotiating for over half an hour we agreed on a 40Rmb fare. 25 for the driver, and 15 for the bridge toll. Needless to say there was no bridge toll and the greedy driver pocketed the money with a smile as he said “all foreigners have money. no problem.”

A bit irate, we walked around the river where the crook had dropped us of. Our hostel was nowhere in sight. After another overpriced phone call we spotted our contact, John, a Chongqing local who runs a friendly home hostel. He took us up to his three bedroom apartment (converted into a hostel) and showed us our tiny room. The spartan and deserted, it was a decent place to stay. We left after dropping off our bags and washing our faces, and found a local stall to eat dinner. The outdoor dinning consisted of plastic pink chairs and a piece of plywood over a bucket for a table. A worker in the ‘cafe’ plucked a large fish out of a tank in the front of the store, and lifted it high above her head. Smiling shyly at me, she slammed the poor fish against the cement, splattering foul water, blood and scales across our table. I shrieked in horror as she laughed and picked it up and again smashed the squirming beast into the cement. She did this several times as I staggered away from the stall and Mike paid our waiter (a drunk man with one leg of his pants missing). The fish-torturer began scaling the fish, which began to flop hideously about in the sink. She lifted it and smashed it against the ground one last time, now covered in petrol, dirt and dog shit. She smiled, finished scaling the poor swimmer, and then began to heat a pan. A cop and his ugly girlfriend watched the whole scene, applauding how fresh the fish at this stall was.

In the morning John promised to help us book tickets on a cruise ship up the Yangzi for 580Rmb. We were thrilled, having investigated and found the average booking agent was charging over 1000Rmb. We fell asleep optimistic, but awoke to the thunderous sounds of horn honking at 5:00am, to which mike mumbled through tired eyes, “did you know honking is illegal in Chongqing” (and indeed, it was outlawed in 1997. Obviously no longer enforced). We stumbled out of the room, dizzy from the overkill John had done on month balls in our tiny room, and hungover from breathing poor air for the whole night listening to illegal honking. Sitting on the living room couch, John made a proposition to Mike. He proposed they go into business together ripping of western tourists. The key was that foreigners had money and did not mind spending it. John and Mike could split the profit they earned by overcharging unknowing tourists. Sick at the thought of ripping of friends and fellow travelers, we politely declines. John then began talking about how much money he was making in Tibet on foreigners who would agree to pay any ridiculous price he demanded to see China’s Tibet. At this point we were sure ready to flee the hostel, and Chongqing for that matter for all the unpleasant people we had so far encountered. On the excuse of hunger we left John sitting on the couch talking about his pyramid scheme. Walking around a local street market, we gnawed on lamb skewers and dined in a local street stall with a cold beer before strolling arm in arm down the stepped alleys.

The bathroom

We were set to meet John at 17:00. He was massively late and the cruise, we were told, would leave at 18:00. Finally he burst nonchalantly through the door, took our money and told us to follow a random woman to the cruise. We followed her after several rounds of negotiations and swears, and she led us to a dock several hundred yards away from the primary port. The main port held beautiful white ships with lavish decks and gold dining halls. We were led to an underground passage to a hidden terminal. Trying to cheer ourselves, we opened a few beers and snacks and watched a movie on Mike’s laptop in the waiting room (after being informed our boat left at 21:00). A friendly man riding his bike across China joined us. He spoke little English, so we talked in Chinese about his trip, and got to know him as best we could with limited language skills. He shared a few beers and before we knew it we were smiling and boarding the gangplank to the boat.

The ‘cruise ship’ was probably condemned, it leered to one side and stunk of diesel and fish. Fake plastic grass covered parts of the deck, and the exhaust pipe for the engine (itself a relic from earlier times) sprouted black smoke and coughed up flakes of engine onto the passengers on top deck. Our shoulders slumped as we were ushered to our room by a rude and almost unbearable man. Angered and nearly in tears, I collapsed against the door of our room, waiting for the floor attendant to unlock our door (no passengers were allowed to keep keys and had to track her down each time to enter the room). When the door was finally opened, we saw two bunk beds, a soiled chair and a tiny yellow stained bathroom. The bathroom deserves more description: It was a plastic square with a drain, a toilet and a sink. A large shower head was fixed to the ceiling. If one showered, the water would fill the room (nearly a quarter of a foot)before slowly draining. The water was a strange brownish gold color. We put our bags down and slowly sank to the beds as we talked about our options. We could chase John down and demand our money back, or we could make the best of it. We decided on the later.

After deciding not to jump overboard we went on to the top deck where a young attendant demanded 60Rmb to sit on the deck. Another fee, and no surprise. We felt we existed in China only to provide money to everyone we met. We sat under the billowing diesel exhaust coughing and silently watching other passengers look around in dismay. We were the only ‘foreigners’ on board. Once the whistle blew we snuggled into the corner breathing through our clothes. After some time, and I do not remember how or why, we both started laughing. Out of the black cloud of smoke emerged to pale faces that belonged to a Swiss couple on a whirl wind tour of the world. We talked well into the night. When we returned to our rooms, full of laughter and smiles, we had black streaks coming out of our noses. Our ‘roommates’ were in the room when we got back (four bunk beds). The wife was a pretty and thin woman, she was wearing nothing but neon red lingerie with matching nail polish. She had her purse on her arm (neon pink) when we walked in for some reason. Her husband was in a black button down dress shirt and nothing else. He sat on the bottom bunk eating oranges and staring at Mike. We fell asleep in silence, me on the top bunk reaching down, and Mike on the bottom bunk reaching up holding my hand.

-posted by Lauren.

Mountains rose up from the land like rude interferences to local farming as hills were chipped away into terraces in a massive attempt to convert the fertile soils of the hillsides into useful space. We gazed out the windows of the slow train, watching the landscape change from the water-logged and soggy Shanghai flatness to the mountains of South-Western China. The train ambled slowly and comfortably along under 50mph, a speedy pace for the relaxed passengers on board.

Mike resting on the train

We watched small, gray and brown towns of under 20 houses pass by surrounded by fields of growing food and flooded rice fields. Suddenly, bright yellow and blue buildings with steeples on each rooftop rose out of the shrubbery to confuse us. The lavish colorful villages were mini Disney lands for the peasants on board used to stucco and mud buildings. We saw no people in these Disney-like towns, and no farmland surrounded the towered buildings. I wondered how they paid for their odd architecture, and where all the residents were, and how they had come to chose small church-like structures for their homes. Without a source for answers, we shrugged and resumed watching. The landscape quickly returned to the traditional gray and brown houses and fields, leaving us wondering if it had been an aberration.

Before leaving Shanghai, Mike and I both bought matching ridiculous pajamas. In the city, many people wander around at all times of day in full pajamas, we thought we would join this culture of relaxation, and donned the PJs before stepping onto the train. On board we purchased pomegranate, oranges, pistachios, grapes and noodles and, of course, a few bottles of beer. We sat playing cribbage on a small wooden peg board as we watched the scenery swoosh past. By 20:00 I had won three games to Mike’s zero, so he left the table to chat with a young Chinese man also traveling towards Chongqing. They dined on rabbit leg together as they chatted about women, jobs and China while I read in my bunk. Our six bed cabin was shared with a silent young woman in neon pink who said not a word for 31 hours, and a family of four (a couple, their 8 year old son, and a very limber 90 year old woman who bounded around the cabin grinning with her few remaining teeth). The small family shared three beds, and they spent their time entertaining the spoiled young boy, who spent his time irritating every breathing soul on board with screams, jeers and cries for candy.Throughout the train car, other children ran around quaintly playing with small paper toys while adults chatted with each other and socialized. It was a moving sewing circle, playground and men’s smoking card house all in one.

In the evening the lights were turned over at ten and we all climbed into our bunks for the night. Below Mike’s bunk a man snored louder than a chainsaw, and I worried for his health with such a strange and noisy condition. If he was asleep, then no one else in the cabin was. I lay awake all night, relaxed but tired, and listened to the helicopter-like noises of the fat man below Mike’s bunk. In the morning, noise and motion resumed at 6am when the lights promptly snapped on. The smell of instant noodles filled the cabin, as did the sounds of slurping and spitting. After trying to sleep for several more hours, we finally gave up and snacked on nuts and berries as we played a few more hand of cards. I won all but one game, leaving Mike quite dejected. Having tried train food the previous day, we were determined not to ever order it again, and listened to our stomachs growl as we traveled.

It was national day, Oct 1st, 2008. In 1949 on the same day the communists had officially come to power and announced the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong. To commemorate this occasion, all of China is given a week holiday each year in early October. For one week, all of China’s railways and highways are crowded with loud travelers eager to reach their families. It is known as the worst time to travel in China; an equivalent to Thanksgiving in the USA. We went anyways, eager to be a part of the hustle and noise. On the train, a more relaxed form of travel, we were surprised at how smoothly everything fell into place. We napped, gamed, read and blinked back the sun as we watched the scenery change. In all, it was a pleasant trip to Chongqing, and we arrived 31 hours later, a little tired and smelling of noodles, but quite relaxed and eager to start our tour of the city.

-posted by Lauren.