Hard Sleeper

After one more day of rest, Kinsey and I got ready for our short trip to Xi’an. For some inexplicable reason, I thought that we should travel light to Xi’an, then return to Chengdu, before traveling onward to Lijiang. In retrospect, we probably should have just gone to Xi’an and then flown to Lijiang from there. In any event, I managed to book two train tickets to Xi’an, but due to National Week, the hostel could only get me berths on the hard sleeper train…there are six bunks per compartment, three on each side. On the way to Xi’an we each had the middle bunk and on the way back, we’d each get the bottom. Prices increase the lower you are, but space also seems to decrease. We paid about 209 yuan each one way, approximately $20.

On our way to Xi’an, a night train that left at 9:20 pm, was a lot less comfortable than the train from Beijing to Shanghai. To be fair, the Beijing to Shanghai train is an express, newer, and likely to be a little more plush anyway, but if you get a four inch mattress on the soft sleeper, you get a hard flat surface with a ½ inch mattress on the hard sleeper. I slept on the comforter for extra padding, but that leaves you without covers. Meanwhile, the Xi’an train was definitely not an express. It felt like the train never went very fast and then made many interminable stops. Sleeping was difficult.

Traveling during National Week meant that the train was at full capacity. Kinsey and I made one walk through and found only one train car with soft sleepers, mostly filled with foreigners and some wealthier Chinese. The hard sleepers are full of middle class Chinese, lots of families, but not that many children. After that, you find cars with seats filled with the poorer Chinese, many of them men traveling alone. On our trip from Beijing, the seats had been filled with a lot of college age kids, but they were not in evidence on this train. Somehow the ticket takers keep track of everyone--who gets on and off, when and where. One note of caution, if you ever take a train and you are not getting off at the last stop, you must get help figuring out when to get off. Announcements are only in Chinese (and you cannot understand what they are saying--not even cities or stops), so I think it would be incredibly difficult to figure out when you were supposed to disembark.

In some ways, the hard sleeper was less intimidating than the soft sleeper. There were no doors, so you felt less concerned about sharing spaces with strangers. On the other hand, on our ride back, we had some issues with cigarette smoke. This varied car by car, so it was just a matter of whether you happened to be unlucky and had a bunk in a car with a rogue smoker. We also traveled during the day from Xi’an to Chengdu, so I think there was more of an issue with smoking because of that. The private car soft sleepers most likely did not have a smoking problem.

Lastly, no matter what anyone has told you about bathrooms in China, the squat toilets were disgusting. In some places, they were tolerable. On the train, it got pretty bad. There’s no place on the train for privacy, except for the bathrooms, so I tried to change from long pants to shorts one day. That was quite a trick as the floors were wet from the hole-in-the-floor toilet and I had to take off my shoes without touching the floor with any part of me or my clothing while the train was moving. Many places will have one western toilet, usually marked "handicapped," but there are still places with all squat toilets. And, regardless of what type of toilet you have, you'll have to put your toilet paper in the trashcan. I'm not a big fan of that trend either.