Essay

Ride Of Your Life

There is an uncomfortable irony of watching livestock freely grazing on the plains while you are consciously comparing your own surroundings to a cattle truck.

December 2011 Issue | by Sean Silbert

Illustration by Xiang Zhaohui

Unlike in the West, where a dearth of official holidays forces tourists to take their vacations at their, well, leisure, most Chinese cram their vacations together into two “Golden Week” holidays. Following National Day on October 1, seemingly the entire country packs their bags for fun in the sun, overloading tourist traps nationwide. Beijing takes the worst of it. The serpentine sections of the Great Wall at Badaling were almost overflowing with people, and the once-impenetrable walls of the Forbidden City were stormed by hundreds of thousands of tourists in a single day.

The hope of seven full days of relaxation and adventure, work free, was only made more tempting by the prospect of escaping the onslaught of the tour group hordes, urged on by their loudspeaker-wielding guides. The obstacle, though, was hopping onto a train ahead of 24.3 million people as they attempt to draw blood in order to climb aboard before you. I already had my dream destination in mind – lush Hunan Province, a world away from the concrete canyons and equally grey skylines of Beijing. So did everyone else, it seemed.

Two trains leave daily from Beijing West station, once the largest rail transfer point in Asia, to the next transfer point down south. During any other week of the year, these trains would have any number of open hard sleeper beds available, an easy passage for the day-long excursion from north to south. Before I even arrived at the station, a line had already formed outside of the tiny ticket office down bustling Andingmen Inner Street. I arrived ten days in advance, and yet my first attempt to acquire tickets was still an abject failure: every open space was filled within thirty minutes of the painfully early 9 AM opening time. Day two’s perseverance was rewarded in the form of two tickets, hard seat, a 22-hour journey.

My travel partner was apoplectic. Hard seat is no joyride with the Griswolds. Third class is the ultimate in no-frills traveling, with only about a square foot of moderately cushioned fabric to smooth the ride. Yet this was our only option – we even made a frantic attempt to upgrade to the (seemingly deluxe at this point) six-to-a-slot bunks in the cars ahead of us by scurrying back and forth between Car 2 and Car 14 and Car 10 and Car 2, after which an incongruous, smartly-dressed conductor only reinforced our fears that the train was very, very full.

We brought pillows – that was a good start. Our ride, though not as oppressively stuffed as expected, still accommodated a few standing passengers, the type who seemingly carry their domestic environs in a red-and-orange striped plastic sack. There was a smell of disinfectant permeating the environment that would be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s spent an extended time in a hospital, though it seemed that the only real cleaning was done by a numb-to-the-world attendant assigned to clean up the constantly replenished piles of used tissues and spat-out sunflower seed shells blocking the aisle.

There is an uncomfortable irony of watching livestock freely grazing on the plains while you are consciously comparing your own surroundings to a cattle truck. The car forces you to acknowledge its presence. Vendors travel through the aisles selling food when you’re not hungry, or toys that you don’t have the room to play with. As night set in halfway through our journey, the lights stubbornly stayed on, turning our inability to adopt any position other than slouch into a rather unwanted way to stay awake.

Without a steady form of entertainment, and with our view outside the window darkening after the early part of the October afternoon, we found ourselves with nothing else than “the conversation.” Two white boys traveling steerage are sure to attract attention, but we couldn’t really break free of the stock-questions politely asked of every foreigner able to converse with them. “What country are you from? How many years have you been in China?” My interest in this formality waned to the point where I suddenly found I had grown up in Iceland, and my occupation was anything from a taxi driver to a graduate student in economic theory, depending on the interrogator.

Yet “the conversation” kept us going through the trip. An older man across from our park bench table eventually conversed with us on an extended basis. He revealed himself to be a retired artist, proudly presenting the license issued to him by the appropriate State agency. The mountain peaks of our final destination, inscrutable thanks to the darkness outside of the train, soon appeared to us in black and white through his pen trailed across a napkin. Our seats became more than a rude jolt out of the tourist bubble; they were our way of breaking into a view of China formerly hidden from us.

Regardless, we still held out for sleepers on the way back.

Tags: leisure, Hunan Province