Night Trains and Custom Lanes

February 10th 2009


I've fallen a bit behind on my updates, or maybe too much has been going on in the past few days. Anyways I'm about to potentially flood your in-boxes while I take a day and a half out to chill before I leave Hanoi tomorrow night. Peruse at your leisure. Onwards.


I went from Hong Kong to Hanoi in three parts: the first was a high speed train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, the second was an overnight train from Guangzhou to Nanning, and the final leg was the overnight train from Nanning to Hanoi. The first leg out of HK was uneventful enough, probably because the HK train station has the technical standards of any other developed country and everything ran smoothly. I was happy enough to leave my sad little Room 27 in Tsim Sha Tsui's Mirador Mansion and see what the proper mainland had in store for me.


Entering and leaving Hong Kong required several progressions of security and customs checks on both sides. Maybe I'm just sick of being trundled off and on my chosen mode of transportation for redundant security checks, but I'll be happy to see the end of check points once I get to Vietnam.


I suppose I got my first taste of the real China (as opposed to supremely urban Shanghai or hardly-China Hong Kong) when I arrived at Guangzhou Main Station. Guangzhou actually has two main train hubs and, having arrived at Guangzhou East, I needed to metro over to Guangzhou Main. Although HK and Guangzhou are only two hours apart by train, the differences are very pronounced. The spectrum of ethnicities immediately dropped back to near homogeneity. Hand-in-hand with that comes the undue attention to outsiders (yours truly). That's nothing new to me, but compared to the topical acceptance in Japan or the bemused curiosity in Ghana, this southern part of China was a mix of guarded interest or disdainful indifference (explanation to come).


As for the physical reality of the place: there are a lot of Chinese people. It's one thing to observe the 1.2 billion statistic and quite another to move from place to place and never see the glut of people let up. Also, what I've seen of China is both intensely dirty and surprisingly clean. There is no cultural stigma against littering, arguably quite the opposite, and having all the aforementioned multitudes constantly using any open spot of ground (or not so open) as a trash receptacle generates immense quantities of visible garbage. So much so that, walking around, I was always surprised that I wasn't already wading around waist-deep in the stuff.


The solution lies in the problem: with so many people they can afford to employ street cleaners constantly. Once it's been pointed out to you once (thanks Cornell) you realize that you can't walk down the street without seeing a few people with brooms and bags sweeping back and forth all day every day. Kudos to China for taking care of garbage, but I'd still enjoy seeing a civic campaign against littering in the future. Why? Because sweepers can't get everywhere, and they couldn't get into Guangzhou Main. Once I passed through security, I made my way to the "Waiting Lounge". This vast hall was last clean when they built the place. Searching for a clean seat I had to dance past apple cores, soda cans, cigarette butts, orange peels and sunflower seeds, to name a few. I believe that orange peels and sunflower seeds make up about 80% of this vice, especially dismal since the seeds have been in and out of people's mouths and spat into great heaps on the floor. I think (hope?) there is a future market in some sort of portable disposal unit for this sort of refuse.


I got to the station relatively early so I watched the lounge slowly fill up until, just prior to departure, the place was seriously overflowing with people. When they finally let us on the deluge predictably tried to shove it's way through the inadequate entry gate, so I just hung back and let things thin out before I made my way. There was an element of risk in this because I wasn't sure what exactly the etiquette regarding inter-city domestic travel in China was: perhaps the seat number on my ticket was a mere formality and the initial rush to board had been the true competition, unknown to my naive eyes. I had a bottom bunk hard-sleeper, more convenient than the middle or upper bunks but, alas, infamous for being used by everyone as spare seats before lights-out. I wasn't looking forward to politely asking any Chinese people to kindly remove themselves from my bed and the guy who was thusly enjoying himself when I arrived departed immediately and I never saw him again.


Although I had prepared for boredom, I was happy to find three Australians in the same set of sleepers as me. Moreover, they too were headed all the way to Hanoi where they were doing long-term volunteer stints in a variety of job placements. Tim the geologist/topographer, Claire the teacher and Linda the something-or-other were very pleasant people and shared with me lots of valuable information on how to get around Vietnam and Hanoi in particular. I owe them a great debt of thanks for saving my wallet many a Dong.


On this train I experienced some of the aforementioned disdainful indifference. This is putting it kindly, I believe, but I'll let you be the judge. I was having dinner and then a beer with Linda in the dining carriage. Linda is Vietnamese-Australian and thus often got the fifth degree in both Chinese and Vietnamese before anyone truly believed she was foreign and even then she received mostly usually disapproving annoyance. So when we had to communicate via gesture for beers the guard in charge only reluctantly took our money for the service. The dining carriage "bar" was a money-covered table with two chain-smoking guys in uniform – you give them the money, the reach under the table and pull out something you hope you like. On the first beer the main guy didn't want to give me change, and when I could produce exact change he stared daggers at me for having been foiled. The second time we wanted a beer, he simply refused flat out. When we started to play cards, he told us to leave.


Who knows what had caused this ruckus. Maybe the guy was having a bad day... more likely he was enjoying his sad little power trip a little too much. What can't be overlooked, however, is at this point Claire, prototypical white female, enters the scene and suddenly we are treated to more warm beers and we can play all the card games we please. I don't know what was more sad, that his methods were so transparent or that he thought his efforts might count for something. Anyway, score one for white girls.


When we reached Nanning the next morning, we made for the Lotusland Hostel. Although I had a reservation, I didn't have a map; although they didn't have a reservation, they did have a map. We rocked up around 6am and got installed. Well, I thought they had got in, but I crashed immediately after getting my room key and when I woke up the next morning they were not to be found. Good people, best of luck to them.


My friend Eveline from HK had recommended Lotusland to me, claiming it was the best hostel ever. I'm not particularly fond of hyperbole but this place seriously is one of the best hostels ever. The place must have been designed by a backpacker for backpackers because it had all the amenities and homeliness that backpackers look for. The fact that it's not even in a primary destination makes the find all the more delightful. Most people to come Nanning in transit to or from Vietnam, but clearly many have stayed in the unexpected comfort of Lotusland for a few extra days. Friendly multilingual staff, sturdy clean rooms, modern hotel locks, an abundance of deep couches, plenty of clean and working amenities and some at-cost imported foodstuffs for comfort, this place truly had it all. It was even by a park by the riverside. Sadly, I didn't get to spend a single night here.


After waking up around 11, cleaning myself up and settling in, I trekked back to the train station to buy a ticket to Hanoi for the following evening. Indeed, I had wanted to take a bus (only five hours) but the bus station was still closed from New Years celebrations. To ease things along, I wrote out my itinerary in Chinese characters. I stood in line, paper ready. When I got to the ticket window, the conversation went like this:


"Hi, I'd like to take the train to Hanoi tomorrow night, 2/1." I pressed paper against the glass.

Pause. Pensive look. Papers shuffled. "Okay," in decent English, "506 yuan."

My turn to pause. Gesturing at the chart on the wall, "290 yuan? 290 yuan for Hanoi?" I only had 400 yuan on me.

"Tomorrow 506. Today 290. Go today?"

Well now, there's a quandary. I had about ten seconds to determine if she was trying to extort me or if for some reason tomorrow the prices really would jump up before the long line behind me got agitated. At seven second, I played for time.

"What about 2/2? 290 yuan?"

"506 yuan."

"Everyday 506 yuan?"

"Yes."

"But today 290 yuan?"

Nod.

"Dammit." So I bought the ticket for 290 yuan. It was already 2pm and the train left at 6:15pm so I had to hoof it back to the hostel and pack my stuff back up. Prematurely shaken out of my sublime mental and physical state of relaxation, I awkwardly explained to the hostel staff I wouldn't be staying with them. The guy at reception began to apologetically explain that he couldn't refund my money, but I waved it off and told him I'd already slept in the bed anyway.


Back at the train station, I found the "Lounge Reserved for Soft Sleepers" to be immeasurably better than the lounge in general lounge back in Guangzhou Main, though it turned out that the train was composed entirely of soft sleepers, eliminating any sense I had of class superiority. Moreover, I found that the only real difference between soft and hard sleepers were the amount of bunks (four versus six) and the existence of a door.


As opposed to the hundreds or thousands of bodies on the Guangzhou-Nanning lines, on Nanning-Hanoi there were little more than fifty passengers. My three bunkmates were Eric from Beijing and some Vietnamese couple. Eric, the 23-year-old Chinese student was an amusing enough guy: Eric being his English name because his Chinese name was nearly the same as a Mandarin word for "fuck" and us tone-deaf foreigners kept swearing at him. He had been a volunteer at the Olympic village last summer and the German team he was assigned to greeted him every morning with a hearty "Good morning, Fuck!", much to the glee of his co-volunteers.


Eric, moreover, had never been out of China in his life. I saw his brand spanking new passport with a single Vietnamese visa in it and he asked furtively if I'd ever been out of America much...

"Just a bit."

"Really? I heard to be careful Vietnam of the cheats."

"Mmmm, never happens in China, does it."

"No, never."

We split ways in Hanoi, though I got his email and thought we could meet up for a beer. I heard back from him the next day: "Really be careful if you want to take a motocycle or buy anything. Everyone seems to grab money from you." He was going to try his luck down south. I hope he makes it back to China alive.


I started left HK with some customs lines and I arrived in Hanoi the same way. At 11pm we were marched off the train for Chinese immigration and at 2am again for Vietnamese immigration. Suffice to say, in the interim three hours no one had smuggled any drugs or bombs on the train, but Kevin was measurably crabbier. The Vietnamese authorities also took the liberty of sticking a thingamajig in my ear and, having determined that I was a sufficiently healthy individual, charged me 2 yuan for the privilege.


At 5am we arrived in Hanoi, got kicked off the train, and it was at this point I found myself in Vietnam with no money. I felt like I had made this mistake once before...