So who was murdered on the Orient Express?

July 23-24th 2011

It was bound to happen.  After all our travel successes, near misses and lucky strikes, we had to run into some problem, some little misery.  This great karmic travel balance came in the form of a train ride from Shanghai to Guilin.  I don’t particularly care to dwell on such hard times for fear of dampening our spirits or to discourage others travel plans to the far East or far anywhere, and we didn’t take many pictures for reasons that will be obvious so this will keep mostly writing.  As I have found most of life’s greatest stories told over drinks or else ways are the tales of woe that don’t really end in tragedy but help highlight the humor of folly.

Allyson and I had to span a lot of ground to get from Shanghai on the east coast and Guilin in the southern area of the country.  And let me tell you this is a big and splendid country.  Think of it as going from Boston to Miami, via Amtrak.  As a typical American, not from the Northeast, I have done little train travel and Allyson has only done little more in her travels.  However I was told from Allyson and my father, who travelled by train in Asia for business in the 70’s and 80’s, that I was in for some hard travelling.  They told me horror stories of shared chopstick bins (this one scared me enough to buy two pairs of stainless steel chop sticks for me the missus before the trip), railcars that separate in the middle of the night, and people stacked uncomfortably close.

This is not to say I did not believe them.  I did.  I also was thinking about how quintessential it is as a backpacker to try all forms of travel, whether by foot, bus, train or plane.  And in any case I had survived a more than 24 hour total flight time from Atlanta to Beijing, nay thrived thanks to my love of movies and no shortage of on demand cinematic masterpieces like Battle:LA and Hallpass.  It was because of this I agreed, and Allyson would say I convinced her, to a estimated 22-24 hour train ride. On a hard sleeper.

Now there is some terminology that you might already be aware of, but I was not so I will share but I have learned the hard way: A sleeper car is one in which has some semblance of a bed or rack in which one is theoretically supposed to rest or sleep.  A soft sleeper versus a hard sleeper classically refers to the quality of the bed provided.  There are also traditional seats (both hard and soft options as well) which refer, as you might expect, to glorified chairs.  I knew about this much going into the train ticket office in Shanghai.

But with the hour overlong walking trip to the office after getting lost in the sweltering heat, the small ticket booth in which no one speaks “much” English, and the “rude” (see Cultural Relativism) woman who decided her business was more important and literally tries to shove us aside after we had already engaged the ticket lady with our money bills and passports out all led to a little more than a troubled transaction.  Amidst all the distractions there was also no tickets available on the day we wanted, which meant a days delay already.  So when offered the next day with only a hard sleeper option, this comment was easily believed: “there no much difference in hard, soft sleeper.”  Call it lost in translation (interpretation to be more correct, thanks Bill Murray movie), call it flat out lie.  Either way…not true.  The devil is in the details, I guess.

The train station in Shanghai is deceiving.  It was modern, clean and spacious unlike the trains themselves.  We lugged our packs to the station in the evening as this was going to be an overnight train, which 24 hour rides often are eventually.  I think the exact moment I knew we were in trouble was the when I stepped on train car #17.  There was a sense of urgency as most of our fellow passengers, all of whom were native Chinese, we rushing to get on the train despite what we figured out was assigned seating.  This ended up being a dash to get their oversized bags in the bins opposite their beds.  We lost this competition we did not know we had entered, but our bags were eventually stowed several compartments down and locked to the bars.

But before I even had the chance to clumsily navigate the already crowded but not near full train car, I had a glimpse of the privy.  Not much better than the planked outhouse in Mongolia, this was a small room with a hole in the ground and the other walls of this compartment was used for the set of several Saw sequels.  This was made worse by Allyson’s way ill-timed bout of traveller’s diarrhea. 

Then I saw our hard “sleepers.”  Now I should first tell you what I was expecting.  Based on the all the warnings, I did not believe that this would be a luxurious car, like in the titular Agatha Christie book, but I did expect to have some semblance of a compartment; maybe some separation of the area in which we would spend 24 hours.  I thought we might share a compartment with two other people.  In truth there was no separation, only paired bunks, stacked three high in rows of about 30 stacks per car. 

It was then I remembered we had gotten the upper berth or bunks.  I had returned from dead lifting both bags way over my head and wondering how the on-average-shorter-than-me Chinese got their bags up, and found Allyson perched in her top bunk visibly shaken.  At first I just figured it was from the onslaught of visual, auditory, tactile and odorous information pounding me.  But it turns out she had angered a fellow passenger we would share close quarters with for the rest of this trip.  In the chaos, it was not immediately clear how one gets up the upper buck of a triple decker (the stuff only in a child’s fantasy and a parent’s nightmare).  Allyson had stepped on the lower bed to get up to the upper bed and was immediately grabbed on the arm by the man and yelled at in Mandarin.  Daily street Mandarin of banal topics can sound like a shouting match, so I can only imagine what this was like, as I was struggling down the train car.  I think Allyson was more upset because of her role as a anthropologist and her usual sensitivity to cultural norms.  As I see it the stress of the situation deserves a little leeway, but oh well.

So we quickly extricated ourselves as this man was also the head of a very large family that occupied most of the bunks around us.  In the upper bunks you do get a little more privacy, but they are also set maybe 3 feet from the ceiling.  This leads to several problems.  One is that a man of my height, but really of any height cannot sit up or even lean up.  Also when the lights come on, the halogen is a retinal nightmare.  And to top it off this train has speakers adjacent to the top bunks.  If you’re on the bottom it is a mild background sound but on the top it is an auditory assault.  To make it worse it is on a 20-minute loop of bad Chinese pop music and annoying jingle filled commercials that are now burned in our brains.  However Allyson has nailed an impression of the most annoying one featuring the trill of a small child in sing-song Mandarin that makes me laugh every time she does it.

Across each set of six bunks is a small (1-foot by 2 foot) table and fold out chair that while providing an alternate positioning also places ones legs in the “hall” and in the path of all comers.  This was not a great option either, but was an occasional change up to the near constant laying down and staring at the ceiling.  Once to break up the monotony, I tried to find the dining car that I wasn’t sure existed given my experience so far, and eventually I did.  This was after traversing about ten or eleven (I lost count) cars that seemed identical to ours.  I was like a bad Twilight Zone episode and the cars just kept going.  I half expected to run into Allyson and our car despite going one direction.

I did find the soft sleepers though.  Remember the ones that are not so different from ours?  I mean they weren’t exactly luxurious either, but they had doors, soft mattresses and outlets that would have allowed us to watch TV and movies on our netbook to amuse ourselves.  Lesson learned.

When I found the dining car, I was only rewarded with a small car with six small tables all full and served warm beer AFTER I had paid.  I will tell you though that travel like this makes warm beer infinitely more drinkable.  The dining car provided no more solace or comfort during the trip.  

So that is how Allyson and I spent 24 hours and change; crammed in a 3-story bunk bed nightmare with nothing to do but lay down straight, try not think about the linens’ origin, inhale the smoke from the adjacent smoking area with open doors and listening to a baby crying intermittently and wondering if we could so the same.

There has been no sweeter arrival than the one to Guilin…