Having heard on the news and from various acquintances that the entire southern section of the Zhuhai-to-Beijing expressway was iced over and at a standstill, we decided to take the train not the bus. Due to the general over-demand for tickets at Chinese new year, the only tickets were available “tomorrow” in typical Chinese style.
I had just a couple of hours on Saturday to wrap up affairs at the office, and Sunday was spent shopping for a laptop and last minute travel snacks and warm clothes. What was supposed to be five days of measured preparation was crammed into half a day, but since it marked the beginning of the holidays, it didn’t seem so stressful.
After shopping on Sunday afternoon we recce’d the Shenzhen railway station and found it to be a chaotic surging mass of people much like the images shown on TV of Guangzhou station.
The pre-visit allowed us to identify the smart points of access, however, so when we arrived together with Connie, who decided to come with us for the wedding, we knew where to emerge from the metro, where to stow our bags in left luggage, and most importantly, where to go for a fatty Guangdong supper.
The thousands of people standing and squatting around outside the station looked pretty dejected… many had had their trains cancelled in the previous couple of days and the weather was freezing cold by Shenzhen standards. Cancelled trains simply never showed up - there was never any formal notice or replacement train plan.
We were fully prepared to wait a long time for our train: we’d set a limit of waiting till 2am by which time if there was no information, we would give up. Because of the crowds, the station concourse was closed off to everyone except people holding, or rather frantically waving above their heads, tickets for a currently departing train. Unfortunately the plaza outside the station has no public broadcast system or announcement boards whatsoever. So information about what trains were actually leaving could only be obtained by the police holding back the pushing crowds by the one opening in the cordon.
Part of the crowd in the station plaza had got it into their mind to queue towards the station entrance thanks to the random placement of some ropes. Having asked three or four people what they were waiting for and whether they were being let in, each time receiving a shrug “dunno just queueing because everyone is”, Jenny walked around the back of the queue, all the way along the side past all the waiting people, up to the police physically holding everyone back, and shouted to ask them what train was currently being filled. The answer came back that only people on the N554 could come through: our train, and on time too!
Next came a the-Japanese-are-invading struggle through the last part of the crowd to get inside the station. With a suitcase and two bags each, we each had to rely on physical strength to shove and trample to the police line. The police were holding back the people with a human barrier of joined arms, so finally we had to scrum-dive under their temporarily raised elbows to get into the station entrance area. There we had to queue, have our tickets inspected again, and push again to get into the station concourse proper. Just getting into the station from the melee outside seemed like a major triumph.
After only half an hour of standing crammed inside the concourse, we got the call to get on the train. Chinese stations try to get all the 1000+ people on a train in 5 minutes, so it took a final bout of pushing and running around to get to our carriage. Within minutes the train moved out of the station and we called ourselves the luckiest travellers in Shenzhen!
