So, we thought we were lucky to be on the train… the next 48 hours of being on the train, or more specifically the 37 hours after when we were supposed to arrive, redefined the word “lucky”.
After emerging from the tunnels under the mountains marking the border between Guangdong and Hunan, the reasons for the road transport standstill became apparent:
As the train moved slower and stopped more frequently, it became apparent the Chinese railways couldn’t cope with this weather either. We were supposed to arrive on Monday morning. As night fell on Monday evening, the train was at a standstill in remote pitch black hill country some hours south of the first Hunan city on the route, Chenzhou. There was no phone reception, which the train driver informed us over the tannoy was the reason we could not keep going: he needed to use his mobile phone to call base and work out where he was. We had many hours to think over the Confucian logic in that pronouncement.
During the hours stuck there, one woman on the train went into labour. A maintenance engine from further south came up within half an hour to collect her and take her back to the hospital. It was nice to see that when it comes to bringing more Chinese people into the world, everyone can cooperate and find a quick solution. But bringing food and water to the train was obviously out of the question.
Most annoyingly of all for George, Jenny applied her unique talent for striking up conversations with complete strangers, and by the middle of the night had succeeded in bonding our carriage as one happy (or from a western perspective, overtly hysterical) group of people oblivious to the annoyance of their situation.
I walked up and down the train a few times, and the carriages were quiet: sleeping bodies, brooding people chatting intermittently and quietly. Not so our carriage, where Jenny’s non-stop social event created a buzz of conversation, snippets of song, and gales of laughter. They even established a QQ group - the Chinese equivalent of MSN + Facebook - to continue the conversation after the journey. This might have been pleasant in the day time, but by 3am with the electricity of the train off and the icy cold air flowing in from outside, I became grumpy and started to tell people to be quiet and go to bed. That was a stupid thing to do, because the Eeyore-ish foreigner became a focus of even more hilarity and eardrum-irritatingly animated discussion about “all foreigners this” and “we Chinese that”.
At one point someone realised that just outside our compartment was the only place on the entire train where you could get one bar of mobile phone signal… but only if you held your mobile phone at arm’s length outside the window. Within minutes there were five people all holding their phones out of the window, turned onto loudspeaker, yelling “Wei? Wei?? Can you hear me? Wai! Wai!!!!” That continued for some time until we made a small shift to bring us within range of a village, where the villagers descended on the train passing boxes of rice and vegetables up to the train windows for ten times the normal price. One man got a villager’s mobile phone number and started accepting phone orders for food. Another man repeatedly shouted out of the window demanding rice wine.
The daytime of the second day was spent moving very slowly for half an hour, then waiting, stopped, for over an hour each time before moving again. No information was available from the train staff about the cause of the delays, let alone ideas proffered for a resolution of the problem. You could see where previous trains had stopped: rubbish everywhere and piles of poo from the train toilets piled up and either steaming or frozen in bizarre excremental stalagmites. We spent a lot of time just staring out of windows at rubbish and poo.
When waiting in stations, we had the chance to ask other people about their journeys by shouting across to their carriages. One train from Shanghai to Kunming, bizarrely routed through Hunan, was on its tenth day of travel. Later we stopped alongside a train from Lanzhou in the northern province of Gansu, on its fourth day: the passengers had started a riot in the dining room in search for food and had smashed several train windows. They faced at least one more day of travel with icy wind blowing in.
Day 1:
Day 2:
I stared at the following view for three hours:
Fortunately we didn’t have to spend a third night on the train, and got into Zhuzhou station by the late evening. A four-times-inflated-price taxi took us skidding through the un-snow-ploughed roads of the city to Zhuzhou-Uncle’s apartment.