Beijing Archives - 4corners7seas

Life in Beijing: catching the bullet train

You’re woken up by the sound of an old man violently expectorating in the hutong alleyway outside, cringing during the pause while he holds his mouthful of phlegm for a second or two between noisily bringing it up and noisily depositing it on the floor with typically exaggerated sound effects. Then (after the usual faffing around waiting to get your 100 yuan key deposit back upon check out) there comes a sardine-tin subway ride, the hordes pushing & shoving their way into the carriages before those inside have been able to get off, a veritable rugby scrum of inconsideration; those alighting scowl and mutter their anger towards the phalanx of morons pushing their way on at each station, yet they did the same when they boarded.

Subway ride dealt with, next up comes the joy of clearing the airport-style security at the railway station. Tickets & IDs must be shown to the guards at the entrance, and all bags must go through the scanners; the line is long, and it’s full of people hellbent on pushing their way through in front of whoever they can get in front of. No matter that it makes no difference whatsoever and the train doesn’t leave any earlier if you get into the station a few minutes faster; everybody still wants to get in there a few minutes faster.

Departures hall, Guangzhou South Station — Guangzhou South Station

Finally, you attain the air conditioned sanctuary of the departures area, a vast aircraft hangar-like space with seats and elbow room and coffee and noodles. Riding China’s bullet train system isn’t exactly the most user-friendly experience, but they definitely did a good job with the engineering side of things; the trains are sleek, fast, and comfortable, and the gargantuan stations are something else.

Then comes boarding time, and your gate’s escalators are opened for everyone to descend to the platform; another ridiculous crush takes shape as a mass of people hurry to get through first, for no reason whatsoever. Simmer down, you think; the departure time is fixed, we all have a seat, and our seats are pre-determined. No reason to rush.

Well, no reason that is, unless you’re one of the hopeless nicotine addicts who simply must power through one last cigarette before being locked inside a no-smoking train for an hour or two until the next station.

Smog through the bullet train window in the vicinity of Shijiazhuang — View from a high speed rail station somewhere in Hebei province

There are many such individuals ignoring the no smoking signs (and the pleas of the staff), so you descend the escalator into a fug of cigarette smoke mixing with the PM2.5; the pollution’s so thick you can see it in the air, with even just the far ends of the platforms looking hazy. The cigarettes stink, but they probably don’t make much difference given the filth you’re already breathing; should’ve kept your mask handy but it’s crammed down in your bag somewhere. At every station the train stops at along the way, all these smokers will gather by the doors as the train pulls in, cigarettes already in mouths, lighters already in hands, to leap out and furiously inhale as much tar as they can in 30 seconds before the train attendants yell at them to get back onboard; the platform is strewn with half-smoked cigarettes and they all pile back in. So much for the stations being no smoking areas! At least the no smoking on board is strictly enforced – lengthy announcements clearly explain that it could cause a fire, and that on a train travelling at 300kph this would be disastrous.

Finally boarding the train, it’s an absolute gong show waiting for everyone to settle down. The smokers huddle at the doors, flinging their cigarette butts to the ground at the last possible moment before crushing in, while bags are still being arranged and re-arranged, shoved up on the luggage rack, taken back down to get something out, shoved back up, people competing for the ‘best’ spots on the racks; you shove your bag wherever you can and take your seat, marvelling at just how much commotion it takes for everyone to get on and sit down.

Settle down they eventually all do, though not until well after the doors have closed and the train is already pulling out through the suburbs; anyway, now you can finally relax and enjoy the scenery through the window.

But today the scenery is grim, a spectral, smog-choked land rushing by the window under a smothering blanket of airborne foulness. The views are great sometimes to be fair, but not today… this is just one of those days, one of those days when it feels like China is chewing you up and spitting you out – spitting you out with an exaggerated sound effect like a mouthful of phlegm.

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Life in Beijing: the Street Barber of Shilipu

Beijing, China

I was just going through some old photos and found this one of a pop-up street barber near my old place in Beijing. There isn’t much of a travel blog post I can write to go with it, but it shows a side of Beijing (and China) quite different from the grandeur of the Forbidden City or the Greatness of The Wall. That is, the Beijing experienced day-in day-out by millions of people living in it (millionaire fat cats and Party bigwigs not included, living as they do in their own little Ferraris-and-designer-bullshit bubble), all those people hustling day-by-day to make enough to get by using whatever means they have… the tuk tuk drivers running commuters back and forth from the subway stations to the monolithic apartment blocks most call home; the old ladies selling socks and bras on pedestrian overpasses, sat on little plastic stools with their wares laid out before them on dirty sheets over the concrete; the stallholders whipping up portion after portion after portion of delicious bing (savoury pancakes) for the hordes of passers-by; the harried office workers and shop clerks elbowing their way into and out of insanely overcrowded subway carriages, shuffling through the claustrophobic human cattle experience of some seriously shittily-designed platform transfers; and the gruff old gentleman with his pop-up bicycle barbershop near the foul-smelling public toilets on a side road near Shilipu Station, there some days, absent others, wielding his scissors and comb with bare hands even in subzero temperatures.

I always wondered where he was on the days he wasn’t there. Maybe he had a few different spots and rotated around them, maybe he had an entirely different job and did that as a side income, maybe he just did a couple days a week for a topup. Who knows… but I admired his hustle, and I admire all of their hustle, all those millions in Beijing doing what they have to do. It’s a tough place to exist for many, yet it still beats a life of toil in the rice fields, and the opportunities it presents for a better future are a powerful call – despite the Dickensian life of a migrant worker.

Have you been to Beijing? Did you see anything like this? Leave a comment below.

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Life in Beijing: Airpocalypse Now

Beijing, China

One night while living in Beijing I coughed and hacked and spluttered all night long, with an itching and burning in my throat that nothing would alleviate.

I didn’t sleep much that night, and when I finally did wake up in the morning, shattered, I awoke to the horrifying sight of blood flecks across my pillow.

Had I been at home, or in Japan, or New Zealand or Canada, I would’ve gone straight to the doctor, terrified; but I was in Beijing, and I knew exactly what the cause was and exactly how to fix it.

The cause was PM2.5, and the solution was simply to leave China.

Check out these three pics taken from the exact same spot (a rail bridge near my old apartment, looking along Chaoyang Lu towards the CBD):

Beijing on a clear pollution day — Good day

Beijing Airpocalypse: visibility on a moderate pollution day — Normal day

Beijing Airpocalypse: visibility on a day with severe PM2.5 air pollution — Scary day!

PM2.5, if you’re not familiar, means particulate matter (i.e. tiny particles) measuring just 2.5 micrometres in diameter.

2.5 micrometres is the size of many bacteria, invisible to the naked eye, and small enough to penetrate the alveoli of the lung; PM2.5 is therefore the most harmful constituent part of air pollution (though far from the only harmful part).

Much has been written about how China’s phenomenal economic boom of the last few decades has come at terrible cost to the environment; the factories turning out the cheap trinkets and electronics parts for export around the world, the power stations belching out their fumes, and the huge quantities of coal burned every winter to heat the northern cities while the temperatures plunge below zero, all combine to put huge amounts of PM2.5 in the air. On some days it can be so bad you can’t even see the tops of the buildings around you, earning the epithet Airpocalypse Now.

The problem affects cities throughout China, with the worst-hit being Beijing and surrounding cities in Hebei Province, the northeastern cities of Shenyang and Harbin, and the western cities of Xi’an, Chengdu, and Chongqing.

China Airpocalypse: severe air pollution in Xi'an — This one was taken in Xi’an

China Airpocalypse: Chengdu on a day with high PM2.5 levels — …and this is Chengdu

On the really bad days you don’t want to go outside at all; you just want to stay inside with the windows shut – but even then, you start getting a film of soot on everything inside your room and have to dust and sweep it all off. And you know that shit’s in the air you’re breathing…

It’s not like that every day though, far from it in fact. If you catch Beijing on a sunny day in spring or autumn with a clear blue sky it can be quite lovely; summer is hot & sweaty, but the heavy downpours of summer rain are welcome as they scrub the air of pollution. Winter is the worst, as the above-mentioned burning of coal for heating greatly increases the PM2.5 levels; thankfully many days in winter see a fierce wind ripping across Beijing which blows away the pollution (sorry, Korea!) but makes it brutally cold. Cold though they may be, the windy days are far preferable to the smoggy days.

You can check the present level and weekly forecast on the excellent aqicn.org; see this page for an explanation of the scale.

The Great Wall of China snaking away into the smog — The Great Wall snaking away into the smog (this wasn’t a particularly bad day)

So, you’re travelling to Beijing and you’re wondering what to do about the pollution. My best advice would be to try and have enough time to be flexible with your plans – there really is absolutely no point going to the Great Wall, for example, when the PM2.5’s hitting 200; you won’t see the views, and it’ll be a pretty unpleasant experience. Check the forecast, and try to do any shopping, museum visits, or hitting specific restaurants you want to try, on the bad pollution days; and of course, aim to make outdoor excursions when the pollution’s less bad.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get clear blue skies every day, but don’t count on it!

The other thing you should definitely do is take a good mask with you – and that means a good, properly fitting mask, with a fine particle filter. See here for a guide to choosing an effective mask; aqicn also has a list of recommended masks.

Another grimly fascinating thing is hiking up a mountain in China to the point where you’re above the smog, and can actually see the dividing line in the air like this:

Above the smog at the top of Taishan — From the top of Taishan

China Airpocalypse: smoggy view of Beijing from Xiangshan — Looking over Beijing from the top of Xiangshan

Scary stuff! Fact is though, that severe air pollution is part of life in early-21st Century China; if you’re like me in wanting to travel partly to see what life is really like in different parts of the world, then perhaps you can simply consider dealing with the air pollution as part & parcel of that. It’s horrible when it’s bad, but you have the luxury of leaving at your ease, so try to take it in stride as part of the China travel experience.

As for those who call the place home, it’s something they’re going to be dealing with for a long time – but (hopefully!) not forever. A couple of recent events – the 2008 Olympics and the 2015 military parade for the 70th anniversary of WWII – have demonstrated that the air in Beijing can actually be drastically improved in a short time by enacting a few pollution-reduction policies. I was there for 2 days just before the parade in 2015, and the weather was lovely – deep blue skies and fresh, clean air. When it’s like that, Beijing really does have its moments.

These pollution-reduction policies include halving the traffic by only allowing odd- and even- numbered registration plates on the road on alternating days, and closing down all the factories in Beijing & Tianjin and the surrounding province of Hebei for a fixed period. Of course this latter policy is pretty radical from an economic perspective, so there’s no chance of it being a regular thing – it’s only for when the eyes of the world are on Beijing. But the fact it does work, and quickly, does give hope for the future i.e. if & when the majority of power is generated from renewables.

View through the train window of Guangdong on a smoggy day

View through the train window of Guangdong on a clear day — …and how the same area looks on a clear day!

The more difficult long-term problem is going to be the waterways; the River Aire in my hometown of Leeds was so thoroughly dumped full of shit during the Industrial Revolution that it was devoid of life for over a century (though the fish have finally returned in recent decades), and China’s poisoned rivers are likely in an even worse state. It’s unlikely to affect you as a traveller (beyond how wretched it looks should you take a boat on the Yangtze), so I won’t go into more depth but if you’re interested have a look at the crazy photos here.

Hopefully one day in the not too distant future the denizens of Beijing will be breathing clean air and looking back at the late-20th / early-21st Centuries the way Brits look back at Dickensian London; until then, try to avoid visiting in winter, pay attention to the forecasts on aqicn, pack a good mask, have alternative plans for bad-air days, and hope for the best!

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How to Visit the Great Wall of China from Beijing

Beijing, China

Great Wall, Simatai section — Hiking along the Great Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai

“You know, you can see it for miles. It goes on for miles over the hills and everything; but so does the M6. D’you know what I mean? You can see that for miles… and you go, “great,” and that does a job – you can drive on that!”…“It’s the Alright Wall of China” – Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad

Pilkington was typically unimpressed, but for everyone else the Great Wall of China lives up to its name (not to be confused with the Great Firewall of China!), stretching thousands of miles across China from northeast to far west (you can dig up wildly varying statistics, depending how the measurement is taken). There are many points from which you can visit sections of the wall, but the vast majority of visits are made from Beijing; this is eminently practical, as the closest sections of the wall to Beijing are only 50 miles or so from the city proper, and chances are that Beijing is on your itinerary anyway.

Simatai section, Great Wall of China — The Great Wall at Simatai

To visit the Great Wall from Beijing, you can either make a DIY visit on public transportation, or join one of the bus tours sold at every guesthouse, hotel, and travel agent in the city. I’ve done both and both were good, though there are better and worse ways to go about it.

Great Wall Sections Near Beijing

This site has a handy list of the sections you can visit near Beijing. In a nutshell, Mutianyu and Badaling are the closest and the most heavily-visited; Simatai, Jinshanling, and Gubeikou require a bit more time to reach and so are less visited and offer good hiking opportunities; and Jiankou is a pretty rough and wild section which looks well worth the extra effort involved, if you have time.

The Badaling section of the Great Wall of China — Badaling Great Wall

Bus Tours to the Great Wall

With regards the bus tours, I’m not a big fan of tours generally but they’re a convenient way to do it; your transportation is all sorted and you just have to show up at the pickup spot on time in the morning. Also if you’re keen to get out to one of the more remote sections of the wall, a bus tour is the easiest way to do so; one thing I would suggest avoiding though is a bus stour to Badaling or Mutianyu; being the closest parts they’re also the most popular, and armies of touts lie in wait for the tour buses every morning, ready to bombard you with offers of insanely overpriced bottles of water and cans of Red Bull, packs of low quality postcards, and all manner of tatty tourist shite. I haven’t been to Badaling by bus tour, but I’ve heard the horror stories so I have no intention of ever doing so – Badaling is best DIY visited by train in the afternoon (see below). The same tourist shit show occurs at the other sections too if you take a bus tour, but on a much lesser scale than at Badaling and Mutianyu (I refer here to bus tours visiting Mutianyu only; those which involve hiking from Jiankou to Mutianyu (see below) should avoid the worst of it).

The Simatai section of the Great Wall of China — Jinshanling Great Wall

In our case, on my first visit to mainland China with my mates Ross & Mike we took a hiking tour to the Jinshanling & Simatai sections; this involved a 10km walk along the wall, with the bus dropping us at the start and picking us up at the end point (which was a restaurant, with a buffet meal factored in to the tour price). It was a really awesome hike actually, in cool November weather, along a crumbling and atmospheric section of the wall:

A few touts did latch onto us at the start, but I just ignored them and marched at a fast pace which did the trick. At the end there was the option to zip line down over a reservoir, which Mike decided to go for; it was the slowest zip line I’ve ever seen and looked totally lame, so I walked down with Ross.

I would definitely recommend hiking from Jinshanling to Simatai, but unfortunately Simatai was bought and redeveloped a few years ago and access to Simatai is no longer possible from Jinshanling (they’re separate areas with separate ticketing). After being closed for a few years, Simatai is now open again as part of the new Gubei Water Town tourist development; the water town basically looks like tourism industry imitation bullshit, but 10 Simatai watchtowers remain open for a 90-minute hike (advance reservation required – see here) and it’s possible to get there by direct public bus (2 hours) from Dongzhimen Station (as described here). For a longer hike (5 hours or so), you should go for Gubeikou – Jinshanling or Jiankou – Mutianyu.

Again, the two bus tours that I’d avoid like the plague are Badaling and Mutianyu; if you’re short on time and just want to make a half-day trip to one of the closest sections without doing a 5-hour hike, it’s far better to visit Badaling by train and it’s a nice section of the wall as long as you avoid the tour bus shit show.

Visiting Badaling Great Wall by Train (or bus)

You can easily reach Badaling in an hour by train from Beijing North Station (located next to Xizhimen Station on Beijing Subway line 2). It’s a regular commuter train requiring no advanced reservations (which can be such a headache to get for the intercity trains), so you can just rock up at Beijing North and get a ticket for the next train. Disembarking at Badaling station, it’s a 15-minute walk along the road (turn left out of the station and head uphill) to the Badaling Great Wall entrance gate, where they charge a 40 yuan entry fee (you pass a bunch of souvenir stalls and restaurants on the way, so you can grab some lunch if needs be).

You can also reach the Badaling Great Wall by public bus from the Deshengmen bus station near Jishuitan Station (subway line 2); tourist bus 877 goes directly to the Great Wall in the morning, while the other buses run throughout the day. I once took one of those other buses, but this isn’t really recommended unless you can read the Chinese characters for Badaling well enough to pick them out from the list of stops on the side of a bus while a lying bastard taxi driver distracts you and insists that there are no more buses today and you have to take a taxi. Fuck those guys; they’re without shame! Furthermore, other than bus 877 which goes direct to the Wall in the morning (which I would avoid anyway for reasons given above), the rest of the buses leave you with a longer walk than the train so I really do recommend the train – unless you’re being adventurous and catching the bus to Badaling from the Ming Tombs as per here (the Ming Tombs can be reached on the Beijing Subway’s new Changping line). If you’ve done that, I’d love to hear how it went! The train’s also way more comfortable, and from the windows you catch glimpses of the Juyongguan Great Wall section shortly before reaching Badaling.

The Badaling section was fully restored a long time ago and is the most well-maintained section of the Great Wall; it therefore doesn’t quite have the ancient atmosphere we felt at Simatai (possibly now lost there too since the redevelopment), but it’s still really impressive and stunningly located in the mountains.

Summary: Which Great Wall Section Should You Visit, and How?

To sum the above up; if you don’t like bus tours and want to DIY it, go to Badaling by train at lunchtime for an afternoon visit, avoiding the heavier morning bus tour crowds. If you don’t have much time so just want to go to one of the sections nearest Beijing rather than doing anything more involved, again, go to Badaling by train in the afternoon. Otherwise, you should go for a bus tour out to hike Gubeikou – Jinshanling or Jiankou – Mutianyu, or perhaps visit the redeveloped Simatai. I haven’t been, but I reckon Jiankou looks particularly cool; I’m dubious as to whether Simatai is worth visiting since the redevelopment, but it might fit the bill if you want to do a decent hike without walking for 5 hours (and it’s still a beautiful area). I would personally completely avoid the tour buses to Badaling, and those visiting Mutianyu only (as opposed to the Jiankou – Mutianyu hike)

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Beijing to Chengdu in the autumn holiday: 27 hours in a tin of sardines!

Beijing, Chengdu, China, Overland travel, Trains, Travel tales

Obviously, the train was packed. It was the autumn holidays, when the whole of China travels home to see family, and the only tickets available had been for the hard seat carriages – these carriages do have numbered individual seats (‘hard’ meaning non-reclining, because there are so many packed in), but they also serve as standing room carriages for those without seats. This train was originating from the enormous Beijing West station, where I was attempting to board, and would take a mere 27 hours to get from Beijing to Chengdu down in Sichuan province…

Beijing West train station: 27 hours from Beijing to Chengdu — Beijing West train station

I’d been to Sichuan once before for pandas and hotpot, so this time I was just passing through en route to Yunnan; I didn’t fancy the 40-odd hour train ride all the way to Kunming though (in those Chinese pre-bullet train days), so Chengdu seemed a good place to break the journey and visit the Great Buddha while applying for a visa extension at the Leshan PSB. Arriving at Beijing West I was mentally prepared for a tough 27 hours in an uncomfortable seat on a packed train, but the first challenge was simply getting on the train in the first place! It was so completely, totally packed, just getting into the vestibule meant getting through a seething wall of people, luggage, and angry shouting.

The huge stone Buddha of Leshan — The Leshan Great Buddha – where I witnessed a brawl on the steps

Secure in the knowledge that I had a designated seat already reserved and that I’d be able to move the asshole I was certain to find already occupying it, I hung back and waited for the shoving and shouting to die down a little, for everyone to settle down sufficiently for me to at least somewhat calmly get on. However it quickly became apparent that the train would leave without me long before the passengers settled into any form of order, and I was going to have to roll my sleeves up and do this Chinese style i.e. batter my way through that wall of people. And batter my way I did, shoving through the dense crowd, not saying excuse me, not saying sorry; that’s how it’s done, and others in the way are treated as obstacles rather than people. Get yourself to your goal and to hell with everyone else.

And of course, some asshole was already there, sitting in my seat; I told him in Chinese it was my seat and showed him my ticket, and with a glare he vacated it, instead squeezing in with his mates on the seats on the on the other side of the small table. I claimed my spot and settled in, and I’d even amazingly managed to get my bag on the rack a short distance away (competition for luggage space was, if anything, even worse than for seats – migrant workers in China travel with huge amounts of stuff, I guess pretty much all their possessions in a couple of massive hold-alls, as they move between construction jobs in the cities and their rural villages back in the countryside).

The first hours of the journey were dull and uneventful, as the grey buildings of Beijing gave way to the grey air of the surrounding countryside; the riotous mass of the platform at Beijing West had finally settled into their seats and standing spots, and everyone just sat or stood quietly, snoozing or playing with their phones.

My fellow passengers were a mix of young and old, and I figured a lot of them were family groups due to the way they were sharing their seats; each little table had six seats around it, with 8 to 10 people taking turns to sit in the six seats.

It was when I went to the toilet that I realised I had this wrong; upon returning to my seat I found it occupied by an old lady. Now, I hadn’t minded making that other asshole move, but I wasn’t moving this old dear. And then, as I had more time to observe the behaviour around me, it dawned on me that seat reservations counted for nothing in this carriage; the way the overcrowded train was dealt with was that you occupied a seat only for as long as you physically sat in it, in most cases being until you needed the bathroom. Go to the toilet, and it’s someone else’s turn. That ‘other asshole’ who’d been in my seat wasn’t an asshole at all; rather, he was doing it the way it was done, and I was in fact the asshole for thinking my ticket gave me exclusive territorial rights to that specific seat. I saw now that things weren’t working that way with the train so packed – we were all in this together, and all seats were available to all passengers.

It also became apparent that people were often standing just to let others sit, even if they didn’t actually need the toilet, and I realised that with this train being so full, so uncomfortable, and taking so long, this really was the best way to deal with a pretty unpleasant journey.

The day dragged itself monotonously away, gloom in the carriage and gloom out the windows, but as night fell on the fields outside and the lights flickered on, things loosened up on board. The silence was broken and conversations struck, and bags of snacks and decks of cards were produced. I observed a few rounds of this one card game that everyone seemed to be playing, but couldn’t make out the rules other than that the objective was to get rid of all your cards and then loudly proclaim your victory. The mechanics for actually doing so were hard to make out.

And then, to my surprise, a young chap who’d been mostly sitting at the same table as me suddenly asked, in English, if I’d like to play. He explained the rules and then coached me through my first few heavy defeats until I got the hang of it and could fend for myself; a decent game called ‘two soldiers, one king’ or some such, involving one player (with the strongest hand) against a team of two, the cards thrown down on the table with a theatrical slapping motion.

He spoke great English and told me he was from Chengdu and a student at Peking University, heading home for the holidays. Then the girl across the aisle leaned over and explained she was also a Peking University student heading home from Beijing to Chengdu to see family… I told her I’d thought the people sitting around her were family and friends, which confused her no end. These people were all strangers who’d only met when they got on the train; the sharing of seats was just the obvious thing to do in the situation, and it was strange to them that I’d taken it to mean they all knew each other. This eminently sensible approach was a far cry from the chaotic scenes at Beijing West, and the contrast was yet another example of China’s tendency to infuriate and fascinate at the same time.

I’m not going to try and make out that the 27 hours I spent on that train from Beijing to Chengdu were some sort of life changing moment or mind-blowing travel experience, or even merely time well spent; fact is, it sucked. It was uncomfortable and (for the most part) extremely tedious, with hardly even any decent scenery to watch (mostly just smog-smothered fields, unbroken for hundreds of kilometres on end), and I arrived in Chengdu completely knackered (I’m sure we all did). You’d have been doing very well to snatch more than two hours sleep in that carriage – the only reason I even managed that was because one of my fellow passengers offered me her window seat in the middle of the night, and that was the only seat I found it possible to sleep in (some lucky people can sleep anywhere, but I’m not one of them); after grabbing a couple of hours I then offered the prime spot to one of the other standers near me. It was that camaraderie, the attitude that we were all in this crappy situation together and should split the discomfort as evenly as possible, that made it bearable; and it was that camaraderie, with the card games and the chit chat, that made it as memorable an experience as it was an uncomfortable one. Still, not one I’d want to repeat.

With the recent improvements to the rail network in China and high speed rail now reaching most corners of the country (and vastly increasing the overall capacity of the system), there’s no longer any need to endure such a 27-hour train journey across China. That was only 5 years ago, yet you can now get from Beijing to Chengdu in under 8 hours by HSR (though the slow trains do still operate, if you want to save money or just fancy it… still advisable to avoid travel in the peak holiday seasons – just look at this shit show). 8 hours remains a long time to sit on a train of course, and you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to make new friends – when taking the bullet train from Guangzhou to Beijing (8 hours) once I sat next to a footie fanatic, and we agreed to support one another’s teams. As I’m a Leeds United fan and he was a Guangzhou Evergrande fan, that worked out pretty well for me! (a short time later, Evergrande became Asian champions… meanwhile Leeds continue to languish in the English second division)

The breakneck pace of development in China is a remarkable thing to witness; visit just a couple of years apart and you seem to see a decade of progress. A price is paid in environmental issues of course, and some people benefit more while others are left behind, and China can still be a tough place to live and travel; but it is always fascinating, even on a boring 27-hour train ride.

Update: the journey described here was in 2012. Just 5 years later it seems that the card games and socialising are a thing of the past on China’s slow trains, with everyone absorbed in their smartphones. The bullet trains have pretty much been like that since they started, but obviously this is more to do with phone technology than the trains themselves.

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If you’re travelling around by China by train, these days it’s easiest to book your train tickets online. You still have to line up to physically show your ID and pick up your tickets, but that’s better than it used to be; if you know your dates you can book multiple journeys in advance and pick all the tickets up at the same time. Unless you have a Chinese residency number you can’t use the official site, so I recommend using 12go Asia*

Make sure to sign up for a VPN service before arriving in China so you can use the internet as normal – see here

For more China posts, click here

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An action-packed first overland run through China

Beijing, Chengdu, China, Chongqing, Overland travel

Beijing's Forbidden City — The Forbidden City, Beijing, China

I’d been to Hong Kong & Macau the year before, but when we arrived in Beijing at the end of our Trans-Siberian journey, it was my first time in mainland China (and for my two companions too). Mike and Ross had flights booked back to England from Shanghai two weeks later, and we’d set out an ambitious itinerary to cover as much ground as possible in those two weeks.

China trip map — We covered this route in 10 days, which was some serious overlanding without bullet trains yet available!

After spending the weekend in Beijing, the plan was to visit Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing, and the Three Gorges, en route to Shanghai. This was years before all the cities on this route were connected up by bullet train, so we were looking at three night trains, a river boat, and as it turned out also a bunch of buses… it was a lot to bite off in just two weeks, but we just about managed to chew it!

The weekend in Beijing was pretty mental, probably the most full-on weekend I’ve had when travelling overseas – we managed to cover most of Beijing’s major tourist attractions while also partying hard, including an all-night bender with a knife-wielding nutcase, eating a load of fried critters, getting acquainted with the Beijing tea house scammers, visiting Mao’s mausoleum while still drunk, and trekking round the Summer Palace on zero sleep… a brilliant weekend! (full story here)

From there it was a night train to Xi’an, the ancient capital during several imperial dynasties and one of China’s most historic and atmospheric cities. There we visited the Terracotta Warriors, climbed nearby Hua Shan, walked the 600-year old Ming dynasty city walls (one of only a few fully extant city walls in China and said to be the most impressive, though the people of Nanjing would disagree), and ate the awesome street food in the Muslim Quarter. Climbing Hua Shan was a particular highlight for me, and was one of the best things I’ve done in China:

View from the top of Hua Shan — Hua Shan’s dramatic scenery is well worth the trip from Xi’an

Another night train took us from Xi’an to the sprawling, choking city of Chengdu, famed in China for its friendly people and panda bears, its hot women and even hotter food, where the plan was to visit the panda sanctuary and sample the spicy Sichuanese cuisine. We only had one night there, so after an evening of hotpot and beers Mike and I got up early to go see some pandas while Ross got his beauty sleep, and we were on our way again on an afternoon bus to the megacity of Chongqing.

If you’re not familiar with China, Chongqing is perhaps the biggest city you’ve never heard of. It was chosen by the government to be the focal point in the development of the Chinese interior, which is years behind the modern China of the more affluent coastal cities; to this end, the city and a large chunk of surrounding countryside were carved off the corner of Sichuan province and designated as Chongqing Metropolis, i.e. one of the four cities in China carrying province-level status (along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin). As a result, the official population of Chongqing is 26 million, although this is a little misleading as it includes a massive rural hinterland larger than many countries – the city proper is perhaps half that.

But with that said, it’s certainly a huge city, massive in its sprawl, in its crowds, and in the scale of its monolithic architecture; we got off the bus at some shithole bus station in a city that felt about two decades behind Beijing, under a smothering blanket of smog so thick you couldn’t see the tops of the ranks of concrete hulks lining the hillsides.

On a subsequent visit in better atmospheric conditions (8 years later, after trying and failing to visit Tibet), I was able to see that Chongqing holds a striking position in the hills along the Yangtze at one of its major confluences, and is a very attractive city location-wise (though still very much a city of phlegm and trash); but on that first visit we were only able to make out the grim facades of the rows of faceless tower blocks fading away up the steep riverbanks.

We had no clue where we were or where we were to stay – this was a little before the internet and wifi everywhere made accommodation so easy to book ahead, back when you just went there and found somewhere to crash. A crowd gathered to stare at us as we attempted to communicate with a taxi driver, a complete gong show of a scene, and he eventually took us to a cheap-ass hotel (as requested) tucked away on the mid-upper floors of one of those faceless blocks, somewhere downtownish… at the sight of three western blokes walking into her hotel, the receptionist immediately collapsed into a fit of such hysterics she was rendered unable to speak or even function; she was so completely paralysed that we actually had to wait for the manager to come check us in!

We continued to have this effect on her for the remainder of our short overnight stay; it was pretty baffling, but that night I heard some, er, noises from the next room, and put together with the somewhat seedy and tucked-away nature of the place we eventually realised we’d stayed at a love motel or maybe even a brothel, hence her great amusement at three lads sharing a room (though really her spontaneous combustion was still a tad over the top)

Anyway, we were in Chongqing as it is (or was) the jumping-off point for boats down the Yangtze and through the Three Gorges; but we were also hellbent on trying the legendary Chongqing hotpot, renowned throughout China as the hottest dish in the land. The previous night’s hotpot in Chengdu had been good, but the one we had in Chongqing was some seriously, mind-blowingly spicy stuff – it was also the most hilarious meal I’ve ever eaten, with the rotund proprietress force-feeding animal gizzards into our burning mouths while poor vegetarian Ross turned green…

A brilliant meal in Chongqing! — Chongqing hotpot… insanely hot!

After the hotpot we managed a visit to a mad little nightclub (after a couple of near-misses with ‘helpful’ locals trying to get us into ‘massage’ parlours), before grabbing a few hours sleep (reception girl waking up and peeing her pants again when we came in), then got up in the predawn dark for the boat down the river (leaving reception girl in hysterics one last time).

We didn’t have time for a full 3-day Three Gorges cruise, so we opted for the public transport hydrofoils that used to blast up and down that stretch of the Yangtze (cruises are the only option these days). You can read about that in more detail here, but basically we were glad to do it that way – while a bit more time to take in the spectacular gorges themselves would’ve been good, I’m not sure a 3-day cruise would’ve quite justified the time.

Going through the Three Gorges — The best part of the Three Gorges

After disembarking at the Three Gorges Dam (an impressive structure, from what we could make of it through the smog) we took a shuttle bus to nearby Yichang, and from there we just managed to catch the last bus of the day to Wuhan (we almost got fleeced out of a handful of cash by the driver of the first bus, who took our payment for the Wuhan bus and then jumped back on his own bus and tried to drive off! Mike stood in front of the bus at the station exit with his arms out wide and thankfully the guy stopped instead of running him over, and I got round by the door and got the cash back…)

Arriving in Wuhan late at night at another shitty bus station in another bleak-looking town, we checked into a fleepit hotel and went out to score some street snacks. The spicy grilled skewers of quail eggs, squid tentacles, tofu, and some random animal organs for Mike, were delicious, but the area was a dump – I’ve never seen so many people sleeping rough in China as we did in Wuhan that night. We snatched about five hours of sleep before getting up early doors to try and catch a train onwards to Shanghai; by now we had about 48 hours left until their flight out of Shanghai Pudong, and wanted as much time in Shanghai as possible. However, getting out of Wuhan turned into a ridiculous run-around; the city of Wuhan is actually a fairly recent (20th century) amalgamation of three formerly separate cities standing on the three corners formed by the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers. Each of the three sections has a different train station, and the one we went to was completely the wrong one; I couldn’t read or speak Chinese yet at this point, and without mobile internet we couldn’t work any of this out. After messing around at the train station unsuccessfully for a while (and using the horrific toilet – think turds floating in the urinals), we managed to find a bus, but it wasn’t leaving for hours; we spent those hours trekking around a couple of other bus stations looking for an earlier departure, and ended up back at the first station again buying tickets for that first bus. This was made all the more difficult by the complete lack of a subway in Wuhan at the time, and I think after checking out at 7am we only managed to leave that damn city at 1pm!

(Eight years later I visited Wuhan again for a couple of nights en route to try and visit Tibet, and while I still didn’t really warm to the place much at all, the improvements in infrastructure must be acknowledged – with a brand new subway system with half a dozen lines, and a big new main Wuhan station to handle the bullet trains, the kind of tedious morning we experienced that day is unlikely to be experienced by future visitors to Wuhan. China’s rapid development can literally be seen and experienced by making visits just a few years apart, and it’s quite an astonishing thing to witness)

Anyway, that bus took us to Nanjing, where we had to wait around in Nanjing station for a few hours before we could get on a midnight train to Shanghai, and we finally arrived in Shanghai around 4am that night. I remember the three of us sitting there in that brightly lit, uncomfortable, jam-packed train, flitting in and out of sleep, surrounded by other passengers doing the same, when suddenly the old lady next to Ross hawked, and hawked, and absolutely hawked up the most almighty mouthful of putrid phlegm you can possibly imagine, and gobbed it loudly and proudly on to the floor right in front of her. The splat zone had about a 6-inch diameter, Ross looked good to puke, and Mike and myself just totally lost it at that point, deliriously tired and laughing our heads off at one of the most unpleasant things I think I’ve ever seen!

All in, we’d got down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai in about 45 hours, including the Three Gorges, with nothing pre-booked, which with the transportation available at the time was pretty Herculean! Doing it now of course, the bullet trains (and improvements in the internet situation) would make it much less punishing, but we arrived in Shanghai dead on our feet. Still, the next day was the lads’ only full day in the city, so we got up, saw the sights, ate a bunch of awesome street food, drank most of the next night, and then Ross and Mike got their hungover selves on their flight back to England and slept it off on the plane.

As for me, I slowed the pace down a bit (I needed to after England to Shanghai overland in 5 weeks!) and chilled in Shanghai for a couple more days, then went down to Yangshuo (which was awesome), before making my way (via hikes at Huang Shan and Tai Shan) to Qingdao for the ferry to Korea, and ultimately on to Japan and the approaching ski season in Hokkaido.

These days the route we covered would be doable entirely by bullet train (except the 3 Gorges, obviously!), which would’ve made it pricier but would have given us a useful bit of extra time in each city; it’s really been quite amazing to witness China’s infrastructure boom through repeated visits over the last decade. Another thing that’s improved is the booking systems – buying train tickets used to be a complete pain in the ass, but these days you can simply book online and pick the tickets up before travel. If you don’t have a Chinese residency number (required for using the official booking site) the easiest way to do this is 12go Asia* (lines can still be long for picking tickets up though, so if you know your dates it makes sense to book several tickets in advance and pick them all up in one go)

Have you travelled overland around China? How was it? Leave me a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

Make sure to sign up for a VPN service before arriving in China so you can use the internet as normal – see here

For more China posts, click here. Also check out my China overland travel guide

(*this is an affiliate link i.e. if you use it to book a ticket, I’ll score a commission; this comes out of their profit margin at no extra cost to you. Thank you in advance should you choose to use this link!)