July 2006, Beijing: The legendary hard seat on Chinese trains.
We’d waited and waited and tried and tried but just couldn’t get sleeper tickets. How bad could the “hard seat” be? I mean, it has a cushion, right? The trip’s only 23 hours – no worse than flying from Sydney to London. As is so often the case, here was another great example of “famous last words”.
Leaving Beijing we tried for the elusive in-train upgrade. Sometimes people book sleepers but don’t show up. No luck. So we settled into our hard seats which were, in fact, pretty hard. There’s a cushion but it’s thin, and the seat doesn’t recline. As the train clanked out of Beijing West Station, we realised something we didn’t know before. There is a level below “hard seat” which might as well be called “no seat at all”. Seemingly 50 poor souls were making this 23 hour journey in standing room only.
Things were fun at first. It was summer holidays and opposite us was a big group of students heading home for the break. They laughed, sang, played cards, shared food, and asked us about our own plans. As the train wound its way further west, this got tiring, and then really old, and then downright annoying at about 2am when the makeshift karaoke still showed no sign of dying. Worse, I was already starting to feel the need to – as they say in the classics – drop the kids at the pool. We still had a long way to go. Why, you might ask, didn’t I use the toilet on the train? Because the train was full of peasants with their big sacks, which meant the toilet was by now a fairly forbidding proposition, and the washroom area was serving as a sleeping compartment for about six farmers. No, beyond draining the dragon, there was nothing to do but hold on.
 Litang |
 Northern Viet Nam |
 十一 |
Returning to my seat, I discovered it had been borrowed temporarily by a poor young woman who couldn’t stand up longer than 15 hours. Softie! I let her sit for a while and then said she could squeeze on next to me. Instead, she slumped onto the floor and plonked her sleepy head on my lap. She was lucky compared to some, who wedged themselves on the floor beneath the seats amidst the rubbish that was rapidly accumulating through the train, despite the best efforts of the valiant train attendants who struggled down the corridors, dodging sleeping bodies all the way.
Morning dawned with more singing, after a break of just a few blissful hours. With my belly already protesting, I managed to wee without further commitment and found my way back to our seats. An older fellow was clipping toenails from his greasy feet right there in front of me. Yon had her eyes squeezed tight, like Dorothy wishing she was back in Kansas. Later, I looked at my watch and wondered when Chengdu was going to appear. We were due in an hour but there was nothing but wilderness outside. By now I was fighting off stomach cramps, so you can imagine my reaction to the announcement that we were four hours behind schedule. Hang in there, mutha-f….a, was the message running from brain to belly every three minutes for the next four hours.
You could feel the relief rinsed in exhaustion when the train finally ground to a halt in Chengdu. Even the exuberant students couldn’t rustle up more than a weak “hooray” as everyone bundled out of the train. A sweaty, stinky mass of humanity, sacks of rice, and luggage spilled out onto the platform. We’d pre-booked a hotel so all I could think was “quick taxi, then straight to the hotel and onto the dunny”. Outside, I saw the end of the taxi queue. It was at least 200 people long. I looked at Yon. My brain went into overdrive, yelling at my belly: “You’ve made it this far, you little trooper, just another 30 minutes, come on, you can do it”. The belly said “nuh-uh. Screw that! Find me a dunny, now!” I looked at Yon again; she clearly understood. I ditched my gear and sprinted back into the station.
This toilet was remarkable. It had no stalls, just two narrow sloping tiled trenches under raised flat platforms either side of a central ramp. There was only one space left, above the downhill end of one of the trenches. I dropped my daks, straddled the trench, sucked in my breath and hoped for the best. About six other guys were watching, all squatting themselves, pants around their ankles. Their poo flowed down the trench beneath my own, and as I looked up I saw them staring at me. One guy said to the next:
“Check out the white guy taking a shit”.
Chengdu
At last we were here, the provincial capital of Sichuan Province. Home to some of China’s spiciest food, the province lent its name to many dishes: on western menus, basically anything with the word Szechuan (the old romanization) in front claims to have originated here. Our first meal was so laden with chilli and Sichuan pepper corns that our lips were anaesthetized for the rest of the night.
Even in 2006, Chengdu was a pretty cosmopolitan city. We enjoyed strolling around, eating, and drinking tea in the park. While there, an older woman came up to us and said, in English: “Young person! Young person, where are you from?” In our discussion, we learned that she “retired, and had nothing to do”, so taught herself English. She’d done a good job, because she used it to persuade Yon to sing a song with her friends. They were singing Chinese opera classics, so when Yon did an a capella version of the Andrews Sisters’ Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B, they were a bit dumbstruck. He couldn’t blow it eight to the bar unless a bass n guitar were blowin’ with hiiiiiiim, she told them, but they couldn’t understand a word unless subtitles were showin’ with her. Instead, there was a polite applause and we drifted off before they lost face by not asking for an encore.
Leshan
Six years later, I came back with my sister and parents. Chengdu had developed a lot in that time – its GDP tripled, for starters, and its population went from 6.9 million to 7.2 million. There were nicer hotels and better restaurants, and that train station now also served up high speed rail alongside hard seats. But the flavour seemed the same as it had in 2006.
This time around we visited Leshan, home to an enormous Buddha statue. That was pretty awesome, but the way back was even better. I lined up a bus ride for us and when we showed up to catch it, there was a little mini-bus back to the nearby town. There, I was given some strange instructions: go down some kind of alley, and wait by the side of the road. I wasn’t sure I had it straight, but by then I’d been in China long enough to know that these things worked far more often than they didn’t. Mum and Dad trusted me, I think, though they had little choice. At the appointed moment, standing bizarrely by the dusty side of the road in what seemed to be a small-scale light industrial area (think junkyards and tyre shops), a beaten up coach pulled up and opened the door. I mumbled something and the guy just waved us on. By nightfall we were back in Chengdu, but far from the hotel. We got off the coach at a city bus stop.
Somehow, I managed to read the characters on the bus stop for the place where our hotel was, and because I’d previously paid attention to our surroundings, I managed to bring us off the city bus at…Honeymoon Desserts! Mum, Dad, and sister could barely believe it; neither could I. It had been an epic day, and that Honeymoon Dessert was a hit.
Panda Town
The real reason we came to Chengdu in 2006 and in 2012 was to visit its Panda Research Station. Both times, we got there early on a humid day, having been tipped off that the pandas are active until they’re fed, and then sleep all day long.
The Panda Research Station has a special facility for raising tiny baby pandas. You can peer inside it, like new parents at a hospital looking at their scrawny offspring in humidicribs while the masked nurses take temperatures and monitor charts.
Who wants kids when you could have a panda? In real life, they are even cuter still…
And don’t forget:
