Traveling the World

Shortly after we left the Wuhan train station, I pushed passed 3 cars of people to reach the 8th car to try to switch my tickets for a sleeper. Unfortunately for us, at this time of the year everyone and their mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, uncle, and baby are traveling. My only worry is we’ll be repeating the sitting business on other trains around China.

Guilin Train Station

We arrived at Guilin at 5:30am, our nerves shot from having slept barely a wink. We were instantly bombarded by touts and hawkers, so shot right past them and walked the distance to the hostel, which turned out to only be 10 minutes. The hostel we stayed at is called the Xiao Yang Lou International Youth Hostel, and for 35rmb a night, the place is great! The beds were big and comfortable, and the atmosphere was friendly, lively, yet quiet at night. All the staff spoke good English as well! To book a room, call them at 0773-2158398. They are located on Zhong Shan Nan Lu, a straight 10 minute walk from the train station if you turn left as you leave the station. The address is guang xi gui lin zhong shan nan lu 110-25 hao (广西桂林中山南路边110-25号).

Die Cai Mountain

As for activities, we only really had a day and a half before my friends arrived from Hong Kong and then we moved on to Yangshuo, so we relaxed and walked around. The biggest thing we did was take the tourist bus for 1rmb to the Die Cai Mountain. 10rmb to enter, this scenic area of the city provides a nice hike and shelter from the sun. If you’re lucky, you might meet up with an elderly man sporting a wife beater at the top, who will gladly take pictures of you!

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!

Now you may be asking yourself, “why is he going to Hangzhou?” The answer is that I am going to teach in Hangzhou for a 7 day spring camp, so I am going 5 days early to see Shanghai (because you voted for it) and Hangzhou before the camp begins. I will leave the night camp ends in order to be back in Wuhan for work at 9:30am! I know it sounds crazy, but I love my job so I don’t want to miss 2 weekends in a row!

I will try to continue posting while I’m gone, but there might be a few days where the website is silent.
I am going alone and bringing only a duffel bag with clothing, my camera, and a notebook. I hope you are as excited about reading the posts as I am about experiencing something new!

Is there anything specifically in Shanghai or Hangzhou you think I should do? Let me know by commenting below!