Riding a Train For 38 Hours

By Adam Sarac

I recently had some free time in between studying and starting a new job, and decided to go traveling. For some reasons the things I usually found charmingly strange about Beijing had just annoyed me during those last days of the semester, so I decided to get away for a while and fi ll in one of my major blind spots on the Chinese map: Yunnan. Even before fi nishing my last exam I began researching traveling in Yunnan frantically. I decided on where to go and got myself worked up with excitement.The time of my last day of school approached and I’d done everything but book the ticket. When I fi nally did, the only tickets left were in the hard seat area.

Somehow sitting on something hard for the 38 hours from Beijing to Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, didn’t seem like that big of a deal at first. I had heard of a friend of a friend who had done it before. Besides, I tend to be able to fall asleep anywhere and I love traveling by train. Most of all it seemed like a great Chinese experience, and if nothing else it seemed survivable.

Most friends I talked to about my plan were not of the same persuasion, but rather of shock and disgust. Why would I do something like that to myself. Some suggested that I change my ticket, go later or take the plane instead. But with their disapproval came my stubborn resolution and curiosity. I would go hard seat for 38 hours and see what it would do to me.

Having arrived at Beijing’s glorious west railway station there was a tingling sensation in my stomach, and a feeling that I was about to do something that was maybe a bad idea—forbidden even. I bought a few snacks, the kind of food my friends mostly fi nd a bit disgusting:chicken feet, pickled mushrooms and vinegar eggs, as if to underline my dedication to the China experience. As if it was nothing at all, I went down to the platform, located my carriage,walked inside and settled down in my seat.

My co-passengers looked me over as I did them, most decided to ignore me, a few kept on examining me for another few hours before losing interest. The carriage was already crowded, all seats taken and most of the fl oor space occupied by the ‘no seat’ ticket holders. People were unpacking their food bags, piling snacks on the tables, making acquaintances with seat neighbors and generally fi nding a comfortable position for what I thought looked to be a long trip for most.

My seat neighbor was going back home to a place in northern Yunnan, he was curious and polite, but with my shortcomings in Chinese and his tendencies to use dialect, our friendship never got past the “why do you study Chinese?”level. An elderly woman and her daughter sitting across from me made no such attempt but were helpful in explaining some of the dialectal words in more dialect. The relaxed,chatty, almost cosy atmosphere of the carriage made it hard to imagine the trip would be very exhausting at all.

The first five hours seemed relatively easy, 10 manageable, 15 tiring but still within the borders of what I had imagined. But the closer I came to the half-time point,the slower time seemed to go.Everyone in the carriage seemed to have gone into energy saving mode, talking was done quietly and in short comments, every now and then someone shifted to a slightly less uncomfortable position. The snack cart came in regular intervals, with the same announcements about what treats were on offer, making time seem to move in endless cycles. The trip seemed not at all to be as physically demanding as I had imagined, rather mentally exhausting and a bit confusing.

By the twenty hour mark, most ideas about personal space and physical integrity had disappeared. My neighbor rested his head on my shoulder, mine kept slipping down on top of his, my shins were tangled together with those of my closest neighbors over the minimal fl oor space under our table. In the moment it felt like the most egalitarian experience I have had with Chinese people, like all cultural boundaries had stopped having any meaning. Then I bought two meal plates in the same day and the looks I got from my neighbors told me that I had revealed myself as the decadent foreigner that I was.

As time then moved tentatively close to arrival, time picked up again. We all slowly woke from our coma. As the sun was rising over the smooth hills of central Yunnan, I was going back into the giddy holiday mood I had been in some 30 hours earlier. Walking through Kunming Railway Station, I had a strange feeling that the ordeal had already passed me by, leaving me with none of the sacred wisdom of another great Chinese experience I had imagined it would. ■