It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry (part 2)

Saturday, 10/11/2012 – 149 A.D.

So, we had arrived in the Chinese city of Nanning mid-morning after a night of broken sleep crossing the border from Vietnam. Our ultimate destination was Hong Kong, but we’d have to go via the city of Guangzhou and unfortunately we hadn’t been able to buy advance tickets while in Vietnam. One look at the queues for the ticket booths and we turned away in shock – they were out the door and we were still to properly wake up. The only way into the station is if you have a ticket, so we had little option but to drag our luggage to the top of the steps up to the building to get a bit of fresh air and plan our strategy. 

You see the guy at the bottom of the second picture looking at me as I am taking it? Imagine sitting on the steps as a large city’s Saturday morning rail users pass by and three out of four of them look out you in that way. Okay, so we were the only blondies, the only Caucasians, the only ones in shorts and the only ones sweating. And we’ve stood out in many countries, but in this place I was really aware of it. I’d read that people in China would be curious, but it got to the point where one young man took out his phone and slowly took a picture of us, fully aware that we were looking right at him as he did it. Now I know how animals at the zoo feel! We had to move off the steps and inside when the rain came, but we still couldn’t get inside the station proper without a ticket. And how were we going to get one of those? Well, first we needed money, and we’d seen a couple of ATMs nearby. We’d done our research and knew that Construction Bank of China was the one to use as it was part of the global alliance and we wouldn’t have to pay as many fees. But these cash machines were for a different bank – we figured what the hell, in these circumstances we’d take the hit. Not so, for the ATM wouldn’t take out cards.

The rain seemed to be stopping, so I sent Lieutenant Tim off on a daring mission to find a machine across town that liked Barclays connect cards. That left me leaning outside the wall of the small supermarket and guarding the bags as the people continued to pass and stare without any sort of discretion. Some of you regular readers may have worked out that the name of every post in this blog is taken from a (reasonably) popular song. Seeking solace from my iPod, the first tune that came on was Bob Dylan’s It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry – very apt, I thought! That was easy, but sometimes I spend hours lying awake at night trying to decide what to call the latest post.

After 45 minutes of me thinking he might have been picked up by the Nanning police for jaywalking, Tim returned with 100 yuan for each of us. Great – now we can buy the tickets…but what if the dude behind the desk speaks no English, as is quite a likely scenario from the research we’ve done? Before she’d left, bless her, Nina had pointed out to us on the timetable which train was the one to Nanning, so I figured that if I wrote out the characters in my best Mandarin script then at least ticket officer might respect me for trying before sending me away empty handed.

[James makes sense of this...]

 [...by writing this.]

Do you like the little piccy of the bloke lying down? That was to show we wanted beds, rather than seats. However, I had no idea how to differentiate between soft and hard sleepers! Leave that one up to Fate. Fortunately the queues for tickets were now greatly reduced since an hour ago and we didn't have to wait in line for long. We chose a bloke who for some strange reason we figured might have a smattering of English. To be fair, the transaction ended up going a lot smoother than we thought, but when I made the universal symbol for sleep (hands together, head to one side) he laughed and indicated there was no way that was going to happen, instead touching his seat to indicate that's exactly what we'd get. Fair enough, we knew these trains could sell out and bookings should be made as early as possible. Still, we'd slept on Greyhound buses many a time, so this shouldn't be too different. And with job done, I left Tim with the bags and went for a well-earned wander.

Our train was at 17:25, but come 14:00 we'd had enough of what Nanning had to offer, which wasn't much. As far as we could see it was a concrete jungle with no real charms to its centre. Therefore we held our tickets high and went into the station per se, first passing through baggage scanning, then personal scanning, and showing our tickets to about four different people. One railway worker rushed up to ask us, in pretty good English, where we were going. She pointed us to the right waiting room, as if she was the token foreign assistance person, but it was refreshing to hear someone speaking my mother tongue so well in a place like this. And waiting room 3 was a place choc full of people. There were no seats available, but there was hot water on tap, so at least I could eat the pot noodle I'd brought with me - hot food! Makes a change from crisps and dounts! 

Both of us dozed on and off as people came and went around us. Come 17:00 the crush for the platform began and we showed our tickets for the umpteenth times, just wanting to get on that train, sit back in our seats and chill the hell out, safe in the knowledge we were on the way to Guangzhou. Then we got on the train…it was bad…it was very, very bad. It wasn’t exactly third class, i.e. the seats were not rough wooden benches, but it was like a carriage out of a circus train. There were too many people, not enough room and far too much noise. After inching our way down the narrow aisle we found our seats – sofa-like chairs with three people on either side of a tiny table, no arm rests to divide seats and vertical backs that provided minimal comfort. There was no space on the overhead racking so we had to shove our big bags under the chairs, our sofa seat mates taking a while to realise that’s what we were trying to do. I thanked The Road that it was my turn for the window seat, but I did feel sympathy for Tim sandwiched between me and an old woman who stared blankly into space as chaos reigned around her.

[Brave faces, pain behind the eyes.]

The train starts up and somehow the carriage comes even more to life. I get the feeling that everyone else knows each other, though this is surely impossible. The chattering is constant and there are plenty of babies strategically positioned here and there who will certainly cry at some point on the journey. Maybe for the whole journey? Some guy a couple of tables down who looks like he’s toiled hard in the paddy fields all his life plays an mp3 at high volume – some kind of live comedy show with screeching woman and canned laughter, yet not one person tells him to turn it down. Every table has a small silver tin upon it. We put our heads together and work out it must be a bin, but the kind of bin where the rubbish just sits there looking up at you, rather than tidied away nicely within the all-concealing black sides of a bin liner. If the older generation start using them as spitting trays them I’m sleeping in the restaurant car! You may by now have guessed that we are the only westerners on the whole train. 

Opposite us are three young guys, and the one directly opposite me has his head in his hands. After a while he gets up, then after a couple of minutes returns to grab his things and is never seen again. I notice other people walking down to the end of the carriage with all of their luggage and not returning. Somewhere there must be a few available beds going, but I cannot face the language barrier to try and negotiate one. Besides, with bloke opposite me having gone, Tim nips across to take his seat. This gives me more room on my side and he gets the window. Plus as brothers we’re happy to partake in legroom battles, whereas me and the guy who just left were already off to a tricky start. It’s not long into the journey before the train manager walks down the carriage taking the details of peoples' tickets. But when Tim and I reach for ours, he waves us away – does he think we’re no trouble, or does he have some more worrying surprise planned for us?

As you can from the above shot, people became interested when we started playing cards, even sneakily looking over the back of the seat to see what Tim had in his hand. Some people stopped walking up and down the carriage to watch us take part in our 52 card wizardry. I did at one point wonder if they thought we were gambling – illegal in China – but there was no money on the table, so I figured we were okay. Just as we were finishing our third game of “spit-speed-slam”, the train pulled up at some anonymous station and a stern-looking member of the police got on. This guy wasn’t interested in tickets, he wanted to see everyone’s passports. Once he reached us, we both breathed a collective sigh of, “Not again, we’ve just put them in our bags which are stored away!” and he picked up on this. “Where you from?” he bellowed. “England,” we replied. “Okay,” and onward he went, once again not bothered. Either we weren’t considered a threat and had free passage, or the secret police were already watching us.

Upon finishing cards it was only about 8 o`clock and we’d be on this train for nearly another ten hours! Neither of us fancied cracking open the laptops in this pressure cooker environment, which left us with iPods and books. There was also the option of going to sleep, but things were still a little lively, even though we were both pretty knackered. And besides, there were uniformed young women going up and down the train shouting about the various products they were selling, an example being shoe shine wax, which they were happy to demonstrate for free, though they got few takers. But despite that, it wasn’t long before my eyes became hazy over Elmore Leonard’s words and I had to fold up the book and blow into the inflatable pillow. 

I slept the kind of crappy, broken sleep that you always sleep when you’re on public transport and unable to relax to the state of REM. Every now and then I’d twitch awake as one person shouted or someone else sneezed. Eventually I worked out that it was easier to get some kip with my head on my arms as they were folded over on the small table. At various points I awoke to find that others had gone to the land of shuteye, that every now and then there was someone else new asleep next to me as people shuffled around in their seats for gawd knows whatever reason. At one point there was a young child laid out horizontally with the mother nowhere to be seen. Call me paranoid, but I made sure my hand was firmly on my wallet as I drifted off again, and every time I awoke I looked up to see that my day bag was still above me in the overhead storage.

At about 03:00 I remember waking up for the zillionth time and realising that for the first time ever since leaving Nanning not one person was speaking. Yep, everyone was either sleeping or attempting to, and some opposite me were getting quite sleepy indeed…

Awwww! Night-night!