A two-day journey from hell!!
We left our hostel bright and early on Thursday the 5th to get to the station for our 9.03 train to Guangzhou (having experienced the buses in Xi'an the day before, we opted for a taxi to the train station!!). Everything went well: we found our waiting room with ease and boarded the massive train shortly after. Everthing had gone to plan, as we found our 'soft-seats' (soft by what standards, we don't know!) and settled in quite happily for what we thought would be a 15 hour train journey.The train was fairly cramped and we were sitting uncomfortably close to a Chinese family who were obviously quite excited by us. They looked through all of the tickets we had collected and watched us write our journals (we have grown quite used to been freaks by now - at the Big Goose Pagoda two separate groups of people approached us to have their picture taken with us). They were most interested, however, in my zip-off trousers!!
When we had bought our train tickets the booking lady (I wouldn't far as to call her a travel agent, as she as working at the back of a hotel convenience store) had told us that we would arrive just after 12 on the following day. This made sense, as we had seen on the internet and in the guide book that journey takes approximately 15 hours. However, after about 6 hours we pulled into Luoyang, which we knew from our map was about 300km east, and slightly north of Xi'an - this was quite a shock, seen as Guangzhou lies about 1500km south of Xi'an, and the total journey was supposed to be 2100km!!
Almost certainly in a state of denial, we decided that the East-West line we were on must have been especially slow, and that the meandering train must speed up once we reached Zhengzou and headed south. We reached Zhengzou about two hours later, but things did not improve - despite Emily's optimism, the train was not speeding up!! It then finally dawned on us what the ticket lady had meant, and that actually, this might be a 27 hour train journey. This was a low point and we regretted not paying extra for sleepers!!
Meanwhile, the train was getting hotter and busier, and the close quarters were getting more frustrating, particularly during meal times (the Chinese don't have the best eating manners) and after the meals, when they would throw their rubbish under their seats. Thankfully we had brought enough food with us so we didn't have to eat the gruel that they were selling on the train. More annoying still was the music that was being played through the speaker above our heads. At the start of the journey the music had been quite fun, mostly a combination of traditional oriental music and chinese adaptations of wild west music - this made the journey feel more like an adventure. However, by evening the music seemed to get louder had changed to Chinese pop music, which seems to be a combination of 80s trash and 90s boyband music. Worst still, 2 of the people next to us started singing (or rather wailing) along to it.
Fortunately the music finally stopped at about 11pm, but despite being really tired, I was struggling to sleep. This of course only makes things worse and I only managed about 3 hours in total. It did not help that one of the train guards felt the need to walk down the train every hour or so waking people up and shouting at them for being asleep. I did not understand quite why he was doing this (I presumed he was ex-army and loved the power), but it scared the hell out of me when he woke me up. For some reason, he didn't do it to Emily, and much to my annoyance she basically slept for 12 hours. I still found the decency in me to shut her mouth every now and again. She looked something like this:
By morning we really just wanted to get off the train. We did get treated to some wonderful scenery, although by this time it was mostly wasted on me.
The train eventually pulled into Guangzhou just after 12 (MIDDAY!), ending our 27 hour train journey. Armed with our backpacks and our Lonely Planet Guide, we found a bus to Hong Kong in record-breaking time (for us anyway). In one hour we managed to check out two bus stations, before getting a taxi to a five star hotel, which we had discovered ran a shuttle bus to HK; I am not sure they were too pleased when I walked into their extravagant reception dirty, smelly, unshaven and sporting a vest!! Nevertheless we sorted out our coach tickets and we were away!
Excited and relieved, the journey to the Chinese-HK border flew by. However, once at the border then it all got rather confusing. We got off our coach, and got ushered through to customs, where we were given a 'Departing China' form and our passports were checked carefully and stamped. On the other side we wandered around with our bags and bus tickets until we were ushered onto a second bus. This then took us to the Hong Kong entry point, where we once again had to fill in a form and have another passport check. This bit was so confusing that I managed to leave our China guide somewhere in between China and HK - fortunately I was able to pop back in between and get it. Finally we were sent to bus platform 12 and boarded the bus, not quite sure where it was going. A metro ride, and a taxi later, we finally arrived at Cape Mansions, Hong Kong Island, at 6pm. Our journey had taken 46 hours, we were just so relieved to get here!!
Chris
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