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Chinese Visa Extensions in Leshan and Kaifeng

Kaifeng Drum Tower — Kaifeng’s Drum Tower

If you’re in China on a tourist (L) visa and want to get more time in the country without having to go down to Hong Kong for a new visa, you may be able to extend your existing visa at a Public Security Bureau office.

The extension rules officially require you to have several thousand dollars in a Chinese bank account – obviously that’s quite a lot to come up with if you’re backpacking, and opening an account is also a hassle, but the rules are enforced differently in different places.

Some PSB offices are notoriously strict, and will absolutely not extend your visa without checking all the requirements have been met, while others are happy to do it (and collect the processing fees!) without enforcing the bank account requirement.

I did once visit the Beijing PSB, and there was clearly no way they’d do it so easily there. It’s also a soul-crushingly grim facility staffed by some particularly surly officers; if you haven’t already gone and got the bank account and all the paperwork sorted in advance, just don’t bother going anywhere near the place. Either do the bank account & proof of funds, or take a trip to somewhere with a more relaxed PSB.

The PSBs known for being amenable to extensions without bank account statements are widely discussed on Lonely Planet’s Thorntree boards; those along the Yunnan tourist trail in Lijiang & Shangri-la, for example, are known for this, as are the offices in Leshan and Kaifeng.

A huge amount’s already been written & discussed about all this on the internet and the situation frequently changes, so the purpose of this post is not to provide a full and up-to-date visa extension guide (see this Lonely Planet thread for recent discussion & updates); here I’ll just relate my own experiences of extending at the PSB offices in the cities of Kaifeng and Leshan, and how enjoyable they are as travel destinations while you’re getting your red tape sorted.

The first time I looked into extending I initially wasted a day visiting the Beijing PSB, then ruled out Kaifeng because it was still a 10-hour slow train ride (it’s now just a 3-hour bullet train ride), and ended up heading all the way down to Leshan via this monster 27-hour train ride to Chengdu (again, a thing of the past – bullet trains now do it in 8 hours)

Visa Extension in Leshan, Sichuan

Leshan is in Sichuan Province, not far from the provincial capital of Chengdu. As the home of the Leshan Great Buddha, it’s a popular stop on many Sichuan itineraries regardless of whether you need to extend your visa. Many visitors to the Leshan Buddha do it as a day trip from Chengdu, but if you’re extending your visa it’s necessary to stay in town as you have to be registered at accommodation in the same place as the PSB issuing the extension.

It’s a decent place to spend a couple of nights though, so it’s a good extension option. Between visiting the Great Buddha and making your application at the PSB (and going back next day to collect) your days will be pretty full, and in the evenings you can get stuck in to the local cuisine. There are some great roadside BBQ joints, and the local take on tan tan noodles (served cold and very spicy) are absolutely spot on if you’re there in the hot & sweaty summer months (although the ice cream I tried literally tasted of hairspray).

Unfortunately I don’t recall the name of the decent little hotel I stayed at (picked out from the Lonely Planet book, I think), but you can search & book Leshan hotels here

Leshan can be reached easily from Chengdu by bullet train (around 50 minutes) or highway bus (2 hours). Extending only takes a day, and when I did it the Leshan PSB staff were by far the friendliest uniformed Chinese officials I’ve ever encountered… at time of writing in 2018 it’s still regarded as the easiest & friendliest place to extend in China.

Throw in a visit to the Buddha, and it’s a good option if it fits your route. I actually witnessed a full-blown brawl on the steep steps at the Buddha that I still can’t believe didn’t end in tragedy – full story here. Hopefully your visit will be a bit more chilled!

Visa Extension in Kaifeng, Henan

Kaifeng’s a city of great historical importance, but of rather less modern significance. It was the capital of China for 160 years during the Song Dynasty, and in those days was one of the largest cities in the world; these days it’s a scrappy mid-sized provincial city which sees few international visitors.

It’s definitely quite rough around the edges, but it has a wealth of historical sites including one of the few complete city walls remaining in China (not quite as impressive as those in Xi’an and Nanjing though), various gates and pagodas, and the Dragon Pavilion out over a long bridge across Yangjia Lake (one of several large lakes in the city).

While I wouldn’t travel to Kaifeng just for the sightseeing (and certainly not for the atmosphere or the shopping), there is enough cool stuff to make for some interesting wanderings while you wait for your visa and the lakes would be pleasant spots to hang out and people-watch (but not in winter – it was already pretty damn freezing when I was there, and that was only early November).

Kaifeng also has the advantage of being just 3 hours from Beijing or 5 hours from Shanghai by bullet train, making it possible to extend your visa with just an overnight stay as long as you get to the PSB early enough on the first day. (Note – according to recent reports (see #679) it presently takes several days to process an extension in Kaifeng, so be sure to check the latest reports and take them into account)

There’s only one direct Beijing-Kaifeng bullet train each way per day, but you can also access Kaifeng via Zhengzhou. There are dozens of bullet trains daily between Beijing West & Zhengzhou East, taking 2h30 to 3h30; at Zhengzhou East you can switch to another bullet train to Kaifeng. Once the Zhengzhou-Kaifeng Intercity Railway is fully operational you’ll be able to take the bullet train from Zhengzhou East to Kaifeng’s main station (35 mins), but until then it only gets you to Kaifeng North (20 mins) which is a long way out from the centre. For the time being, therefore, the bus may be preferable (slower, but gets you direct to the centre of Kaifeng) – there are regular buses back & forth to Kaifeng from the High Speed Rail Bus Station next to Zhengzhou East (80 minutes, running from 07:00 to 20:00, departing every 10-15 minutes as per here)

I stayed at Kaifeng International Hostel, which is convenient for the PSB office and just round the corner from Baogong Lake. They were under renovation at the time, but the friendly owner opened a room up for me anyway and the place appears to be looking good now.

Should You Extend Your Visa in Leshan or Kaifeng?

If you’re in Beijing or Shanghai and just want to extend then head back to the city, or you want to extend somewhere en route between the two, definitely Kaifeng. But if you’re not doing that and are just looking for a good place to stay while extending, Leshan is better. And if you’re already planning your route to include Sichuan, then Leshan’s the obvious choice. (NB as noted above, according to recent reports it presently takes several days to process an extension in Kaifeng, so be sure to check the latest reports and take them into account)

Other PSB Options for Visa Extensions

A few other PSBs with reputations for being easy to extend at are those at the main tourist spots in Yunnan – Dali, Lijiang, and Shangri-la. Lanzhou (capital of Gansu Province) is also reported to be good. This list is by no means exhaustive, so do make sure to do your own research; but if you’re considering Kaifeng or Leshan, hopefully this post helps you out with that.

Useful Links

Can’t extend? Head to Hong Kong to apply for a new visa

Book Kaifeng International Hostel or search other hotels in Kaifeng

Hotels in Leshan

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

Use chinatrainguide for journey planning, and see my China overland travel page; to book Chinese trains online use 12go Asia

Leshan: Big Brawl at the Big Buddha

Chengdu, China, Travel tales

The Great Buddha of Leshan in China‘s Sichuan province is one of the largest statues in the world, 71 metres tall, and the largest stone Buddha. It can easily be visited as a day-trip from the nearby city of Chengdu, especially since the opening of the high speed rail line connecting the two cities; however, I was actually staying in the city of Leshan (乐山) for a few days while extending my tourist visa at the Leshan PSB (Public Security Bureau, 公安局, gonganju) i.e. the police. The Leshan PSB is known for being the easiest & friendliest PSB at which to extend your visa – this was certainly true in my experience.

So on my first full day, after visiting the PSB in the morning and submitting my documents to apply for the visa extension, I took the bus over to the Big Buddha in the afternoon. Visiting the PSB is usually something to dread – a week or so earlier I’d made the mistake of attempting an extension at the big PSB office near the Lama Temple in Beijing, which was a soul-destroying, hair-tearingly tedious (and futile) experience – but the Leshan PSB lived up to its reputation for friendliness. The officers there even smiled, which was quite astonishing. By contrast, the visit to the Buddha, itself so composed and serene, turned out to be rather stressful; an awful lot of people were visiting that day (this was during the Chinese holidays, and to get from Beijing to Sichuan I’d endured this journey), and as is often the case in China a certain proportion of them weren’t exactly watching out for others or being very patient or polite about things.

Such is life in China in the early 21st Century – queues are made to be pushed in front of, space exists to be filled (and if you leave any that’s your own fault), and others are often treated as inconvenient obstacles rather than people. Crowds can be stressful, and some of the people in them can be total bastards; but generally speaking this is merely tedious and annoying, something to either be put up with or perhaps to join in with (if you can’t beat them join them, fight fire with fire, etc). It isn’t usually dangerous though; but when people are being selfish morons on a narrow staircase carved into the side of a vertical cliff-face with a raging river far below, things get pretty sketchy!

And that’s how you approach the Leshan Big Buddha; 1300 hundred years ago it was carved into the rock face of the cliffs along the river and can only be seen from boats on the water or from up close, so after paying the entry fee (100 yuan) you find yourself walking up a mountain path to eventually reach the height of the Buddha’s head, emerging at the top of the excavated amphitheatre in which the Leshan Buddha sits. From here you can get a good look at his head before heading down the steps; narrow and steep, they’re cut into the side of the cliff, zigzagging down to the Buddha’s gigantic feet. At points you have a drop off the side right to the river, with just a guard rail in the way; I was standing at exactly such a point when the commotion started.

I couldn’t understand what it was they were shouting about, but two fat middle-aged men with their vests rolled up over their sweaty and proudly displayed paunches got into a heated argument right there on the steps, a short distance behind and above where I was standing. The staircase was completely stacked with people toe to heel on the steps, lined up like hot and bothered dominos, breathing down each other’s glistening necks, and there was absolutely no room for manoeuvre between the rock face on my left and the guard rail (and long drop) on my right. Not a good place for a punch up.

Their entire families were now weighing in, old and young, male and female, all yelling at each other; I can only guess that one party felt the other had pushed in front of them, or perhaps someone had trodden on someone’s toes… it probably didn’t help that it was a sweltering day with punishing humidity, so tempers were even shorter than usual. Old ladies and teenagers on both sides were now screaming at each other, and then someone threw the first punch; in a split second these two families engaged in a full on brawl on this jam-packed, precarious staircase, clambering over one another to join battle.

And just as the hundreds of people on the steps were lined up like dominos, now they started to fall like dominos; the two fat men had grappled and fallen, setting off a chain reaction down the steps. I saw people tumbling down towards me, grabbed the guard rail, and hopped over it; with my feet on a little rock ledge I clung on to the rail as a mass of limbs and shouting collapsed downwards just in front of me. To this day I’m amazed that it didn’t result in a full-on tragedy; a couple of years later this fatal crush happened during Shanghai’s New Year waterfront celebrations, and I thought again how fortunate all of us on the Leshan Big Buddha steps that day were to not have been caught up in something similar. No-one was crushed, no-one was knocked off the cliff into the river, and as far as I’m aware no serious injuries were sustained; the falling dominos piled up at a corner of the zigzagging steps, and thankfully the chain reaction didn’t continue around the corner.

I continued to perch on my ledge and assisted the people nearest me as everyone tried to disentangle themselves and get upright again, while these two morons continued in their attempts to trade punches. Somehow word got up to some security guards who appeared surprisingly quickly, working their way as fast as they could (i.e. not very fast) down to the brawl, and somehow they were able to restore something resembling order – I’m guessing it was the uniforms – and eventually managed to get the warring parties to follow them back up the steps, picking their way slowly through the mass of people.

With things calm once again I finally hopped back over the rail to rejoin the line on the steps, and in due course completed the standard Leshan Big Buddha visit… you make your way down, snapping photos, for the worm’s eye view next to his feet, and then exit the amphitheatre via a tunnel on the other side which ascends through a series of caves back up to the Buddha’s head. There are some other trails you can then wander from there, visiting various temple buildings also dotting the mountainside, and I got chatting to an Irish-Chinese family (they even offered me a teaching job at their school in Wuhan) and we all agreed it was remarkable no-one had been seriously hurt in the fracas.

Perhaps even more remarkable was that the two families were still fighting as we made our way over to the path back down to the road; they’d obviously kept right on arguing as soon as they’d been brought back to safety at the top of the steps and were still now screaming in each other’s faces a good hour after it’d all kicked off, the security guards standing close at hand and at the ready. Completely ridiculous behaviour, and we could still hear those idiots shouting long after they were out of sight.

Anyway, brawl aside the Leshan Buddha was great and is well-worth a day of your trip if you’re staying in Chengdu. As noted above, Leshan is also a good place for a visa extension at the PSB; this requires staying for a couple of days, and while the town doesn’t have that much else to see it does have plenty of awesome food – the cold, spicy 5 yuan dandan noodles make a great breakfast, and the barbecue joints hit the spot for dinner. You can also easily continue on from Leshan to nearby Emei Shan (somewhere I’ve yet to visit, but will do so whenever I’m next in Sichuan)

Any questions about visiting the Leshan Big Buddha? Or got any good brawl stories to share? Leave a comment 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

See my China overland travel guide here. Use 12go Asia* to search & book Chinese train tickets.

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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

See my China overland travel guide here

(*this is an affiliate link i.e. if you use it to book a train 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!)

A useful backdoor route from Chengdu to Yunnan (Panzhihua to Lijiang bus)

Chengdu, China, Overland travel

Route options from Chengdu to Yunnan — Chengdu to Yunnan routes. Red:Chengdu-Kunming train. Magenta:high speed rail. Green:Yunnan backpacker trail. Amber:Kham Tibet route. Blue:Panzhihua to Lijiang bus shortcut.

Note: since this post was written, bullet train routes have opened from Chengdu to Kunming (6 hours, via Guiyang) and Kunming to Dali (2 hours), so the Panzhihua-Lijiang shortcut isn’t the major time-saver it used to be. It is still the most direct route though, and remains the best option if budget is your main priority

If you’re in China and planning to go from Chengdu to Yunnan overland (but don’t plan on doing the awesome-looking but quite involved backdoor route through the Tibetan Kham region), there’s a handy little shortcut you can take off the main route from Chengdu to Kunming which can save a lot of backtracking later on.

(I haven’t done the 1-week Kham region backdoor route (from Chengdu to Shangrila) but it does look awesome – see here for description and pictures of the route. I did do the similar overland route through the Tibetan Amdo region from Xining (Qinghai) to Chengdu, which was really good although it wasn’t what I’d actually gone to Xining to do – my attempt to visit Lhasa & Everest having been thwarted by the Chinese government’s restrictive travel rules in Tibet)

Tiger Leaping Gorge (one end of it anyway)

After visiting Sichuan, many travellers take the train (the old, slow type) all the way from Chengdu to Kunming, then do the classic Yunnan route (Kunming – Dali – Lijiang – Tiger Leaping Gorge – Shangrila) from there, and then end up backtracking all the way to Kunming again.

And that’s a big old backtrack! To avoid doing it, instead of taking the train all the way to Kunming you can get off at Panzhihua (in the far south of Sichuan province), and take a bus directly up from Panzhihua to Lijiang. From Lijiang you can then head up to Tiger Leaping Gorge and Shangrila, and then down to Dali and Kunming with minimal backtracking.

If you take the night train from Chengdu, shuttle buses are waiting when you get off the train in Panzhihua to take you to the bus station, and you can be in Lijiang by mid-afternoon. When you get off the train it’s a pretty chaotic scene, various buses waiting to shuttle disembarking train passengers off here and there, with touts running around yelling the destinations out and grabbing passengers. The bus station is on the other side of town, and the touts at the train station will get you on to a shuttle bus to the bus station, while taxi drivers will also try to grab you. It’s all a bit of a shock at 6am, but you should be able to find the right bus; don’t take a taxi to the bus station, it’s an unnecessary waste of money. When I did this, I grabbed one of the touts and told her Lijiang, she took me to a minivan which I could see had 丽江 on the front – I wasn’t sure if that was the actual bus or a shuttle bus, but it turned out it was just doing the short shuttle run (30 minutes or so) to a roadside bus station (of sorts). The ‘station’ was more like a waiting and sorting area, where I scored a very decent breakfast of dumplings and canned coffee while the rising sun revealed some dramatic scenery around us, and eventually we were called to board the bus to Lijiang (an actual bus rather than a minivan) and we were on our way.

Not only is this Panzhihua to Lijiang bus ride a good way to avoid a long backtrack later on, it’s also a good little trip in its own right; it wasn’t the most comfortable bus, but the scenery on that bus ride is in places absolutely stunning as the road climbs from 1000m in Panzhihua to 2400m in Lijiang.

Was hard to get good pics, but here’s some bus window photography to give an idea of the dramatic scenery and the altitude gain:

(A word of warning though – there was no toilet on the bus, and the roadside toilets we stopped at were the stuff of horror movies – one in particular sticks out, a pit toilet in an outhouse in which the pile of excrement actually protruded out the top of the pit, mere inches from the backside of anyone brave enough to squat over it, the flies buzzing from you to the shit and back again. Truly disgusting – bad enough to make a Glastonbury festival toilet on Sunday evening look like a Buckingham Palace powder room – and you would be well advised to try and time your number 2 business accordingly)

Toilet situation aside, it’s a cool bus ride and a big time-saver on a Chengdu to Yunnan itinerary (at least until the Chengdu – Kunming bullet trains start running). Update: with the bullet train now an option, if you take a morning train from Chengdu you can make it to Dali by early evening with a change at Kunming.

Train tickets: these days it’s easiest to book your train tickets online. You still have to queue up at the station 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 trains 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 on Yunnan see here for pics and here for info on overland routes to SE Asia; for more China posts click here

See my China overland travel guide here

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!

Great Wall, Simatai section — The Jinshanling Great Wall section, near Beijing

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!)