Traveling the World

The most exciting parts about traveling are the adventures and uncertainty. That is, unless, they’re a bad thing. Such an example occurred when my friends and I decided to reverse the order of our destinations, as the woman at the train station assured me a train ride from Guilin to Chengdu in the neighboring Sichuan province would only take 9 hours. Because it was the peak travel period during the summer vacation, we were only able to get hard seats on the train, something I shuddered at the thought of.

We got on the train, horrified to find that the train was an older model and thus had no centralized air conditioning, only ceiling fans that rotate. Now let me mention that in these train cars, people stay awake most of the night because the seats are so uncomfortable that it’s difficult to fall asleep. I have good hearing, which makes me a light sleeper. As a result, I can’t sleep at all in these train cars because of the people talking ALL NIGHT LONG.

The absolute worst part of the train ride, besides departing from Guilin at 12:30pm, is that at about 5 or 6 hours into the supposed 9 hour hellish experience, I found out by talking to someone nearby that the train was actually 25 hours long. I screamed and shouted and ran to a train employee and demanded to find out why there was such a huge difference. He showed me his train schedule, and sure enough, we had enough 20 hours to go. But why? I looked at the Lonely Planet book to see what route the train could possibly be taking! It seems that because of the mountains, it’s easier to have the train go AROUND them. We went from central Guangxi province, into Hunan Province, and around the top of Sichuan province and then down into Chengdu.

That made our trip 10 times worse, because now we had to sit in those damn seats for a whole ‘nother day!
Around midnight I went to upgrade to the sleeper cars, and had to wait an hour while standing up for the people to get off at Changsha so tickets would be available. After the hour had gone by, there were no seats. Sad as hell, I returned to the dreadful position of being wide awake on a hard seat. In them morning, we had two surprises. The first involved live chickens running around, while the second was a boy who collapsed suddenly from a seizure.

We all died a bit on the inside for having to endure such a terrible journey, but sucked it up and did what we had to. We chalked it up as amazing experience, and now we’re stronger for it. The lesson we learned was, never trust idiot employees at the train stations!