Last summer, I traveled to China on a Weedon Grant to study Chinese language in Beijing. Overall, my experience was amazing, particularly camping at Huangshan (Yellow Mt.), which has the most spectacular natural scenery I have ever seen. Furthermore, I am now life-long friends with my companions from that trip. To some degree, this is largely because we have been through so much together. One train ride — from Nanjing to Huangshan — was perhaps my most memorable experience in China, and one of the most difficult. It was during the National Day fall break that five friends and I embarked on a ten-day trip. I had traveled by train in China before, but we had no idea what was in store for us on this particular journey.

     With the Chinese train system, one can only buy tickets from the station from which the train will leave, so we could not buy our tickets for Huangshan until we got to Nanjing. In terms of travel, National Day in China is like Thanksgiving in the United States — extremely busy — and Huangshan is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists. By the time we bought our tickets, the only

seats still available were hard seats. For

a 14-hour overnight train ride, we really

wanted to have sleepers, but there

was nothing we could do.

At the train station, a gigantic

mass of people awaited the opening of

the gate to the quay. Once the doors

opened, a frenzied stampede of people

wielding their bags like weapons

surged forward in a no-holds-barred

free-for-all to get onto the train. To

make matters worse, one of my friends

got knocked down and dropped her

ticket, so we had to push back against

the waves of people to look for her

ticket. We later found out the reason

this occurs is that many people buy

standing-room-only tickets, and so,

understandably,

they want to get

onto the train and

grab a seat, in case

the person who

has that ticket does

not show up. Also,

the room in the

overload luggage

bins quickly gets

filled up, as we discovered when we

had to hold our heavy bags in our laps

the entire trip.

The train itself was the most

crowded, densely populated space I

have ever been in for any period of

time. Bench seats meant for two actually

held three or four people, and the

seats for three had five or even six

people squeezed in. Literally every

square inch of floor space was filled,

including the aisles, even under the

tables between the seats, where people

sitting in the seats are supposed to put

their legs. Many people stood as well,

and there were

even a couple of

nimble people

who managed to

sit up in the overhead

luggage bin!

At many points

throughout the

trip, I would have

said the train was

as full as possible, but somehow at

every stop, one or two dozen more

people would get on the train! To this

day, I still have no idea how that was

possible, and where those people went.

Of course, when we got on, our

seats were already occupied. We convinced

everyone to move except for

one family — an old grandmother, mother, and infant child

who sat in two of our seats, begging us to let them stay. As

a result, two of our number had to stand throughout the trip,

which we did in shifts.

However, with extra people squeezed into the seats, and

almost no leg room because of the people sitting under the

tables, where one’s legs should have gone, sitting wasn’t

necessarily much better. On a two-person bench seat where

we had our two seats, an old peasant woman (with whom

we had generously "agreed" to share our seat) continually

made liberal use of her sharp elbows in order to carve a

little more space for herself on the edge of our seat.

At 7:15, our ordeal almost at an end (our scheduled

arrival time was 7:30), the train stopped at a station well

before Huangshan. The train waited there for a long time,

and while we were waiting, another train pulled up along

side of us. The other train was a luxury train, and our car

was next to the dining car of the other train. We could see

passengers being served by waiters, eating caviar while

drinking champagne. Perhaps these last details are not entirely

accurate, but by that point I may have been hallucinating.

In any case, compared to our car, it seemed to be

unimaginably luxurious, how I might have previously imagined

the Sultan of Brunei’s personal yacht would look like.

After inexplicably remaining stopped at that station for

an hour and a half, and having watched the luxury train

arrive and leave again, our train departed, and we finally

arrived at Tunxi (the train station for Huangshan) at 9:00.

We jumped off the train, and someone in our group took a

picture of the train. We were just glad that our ordeal was

over, and we went and found a hotel room, and promptly

fell asleep for the remainder of the day.

I don’t mean to give a bad impression of Chinese trains

or traveling in China — this was the only bad experience I

had on a Chinese train, and I traveled on many other ones,

both hard sleeper and hard seat. Experiences I had in China

were among the best of my life, and I would strongly encourage

others to travel in China. However, the 14 hours

spent on that train remain the most unforgettable event of

my semester abroad.

Nick Higgins, a fourth-year Asian Studies major, received a

Weedon Travel Grant for language study in China.