It's been a Hard Seat's Night

It is said that, at any one time, there are more than 10 million Chinese people travelling on a train somewhere in China. Of these 10 million I’m reasonably confident that at least 7 million were not only on the train with Jen and I out of Beijing, but were also sharing the very same carriage. You thought the tube got crowded during rush hour? Ha - by comparison to this train it is an exercise in spaciousness and solitude.

There are four general types of train tickets in China. The most luxurious and expensive are the Soft Sleepers. Then there are the Hard Sleepers –half the price of Soft Sleepers but generally comfortable, particularly for an overnight trip if you are on a budget. Soft Seats are the third type – only found on short-haul services. Finally, there is the chair of the masses, the seat of the people, the Hard Seat – this is the only type of train ticket that the average Chinese person can afford so, even despite the fact that these carriages are much more common than any other, out of a major city they are still packed to the rafters. And because of ticket supply and budget issues, it is by Hard Seat that Jen and I made the 16 hour trip from Beijing to Xi’an.

Let me paint a picture for you dear readers. First of all, imagine a train carriage where each and every seat is full. Then add about a 50% increase to capacity for the seated passengers alone. So by this I mean that if there should have been two people on a seat, there were three. If there should have been four people, there were six, and so on. Then add people sitting on laps, corners, tables and the like adding what must have been another 50% (at least) to the carriage capacity. Then add the babies and infants, being carried, held and precariously positioned all over the carriage – indeed, one “mother” went so far as to leave her small child sleeping on my backpack while she found her way up the carriage to an empty piece of floor under a seat where she promptly curled up and got herself a few hours sleep! So far so crowded, but such forced intimate human interaction was just the beginning of the fun. For, you see, people stood in the aisle. And when I say “stood in the aisle” what I actually mean is that I'm pretty sure that every person standing around minding his or her own business anywhere near Beijing West Train Station was railroaded (no pun intended) into the train to stand in the aisle whether they had a ticket or not. So by my estimation, if the carriage had an official everyone-in-a-seat capacity of 100 people, there were somewhere between 400 and 500 souls somehow crammed into this one.

And then we got the crowning glory, the piece de resistance – the food trolley was wheeled in. How it even got as far as our carriage is beyond me, given that we weren’t at the front of the train and everywhere forward of us was just as packed, but come through it did to be greeted by an extraordinary display of chair climbing and roof hanging by literally hundreds of people to allow it to pass. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. But with snacks.

After all that, it goes without saying that the trip wasn’t comfortable, but somehow it ended up being immensely enjoyable and this was all due to the fact that the rest of the carriage treated us like absolute celebrities. Foreigners aren’t often to be found with the masses in the hard seats and so they adopted us as their own with the kind of wonder and fascination that the Chinese so often display when met with westerners. A group of young girls decided we would be great to practice English with and they did just that incessantly, eventually telling us that Jen was pretty and I was cool. So they scored 50% right. Others vigilantly looked after our bags and offered their snacks (turns out the nuts they gave us had to be peeled first – cue much amusement when we didn’t realise this and ate them whole), while almost everyone who got off at any stop on the journey said a personal goodbye to us, even if they’d been sitting (or standing, or hanging) at the other end of the carriage. It was local hero superstardom, and you couldn’t help but lap it up.

Sadly, all good and wildly cramped things must come to an end, so after 16 hours of frivolity and a complete lack of blood flow to the lower parts of our bodies, we alighted our train…and found that Xi’an South station is about as close to Xi’an as London Stanstead airport is to London.

F*$@ing Chinese trains...

N.B. As we were in cattle class, and I mean really cattle class, we felt it somewhat inappropriate to be taking out our brand new camera and flashing it around, so I'm afraid there are no pics for this entry. You'll just have to use your imagination and/or take our word for it.