Jan 5 – Train to Guilin

I woke up definitely sick, with a mild fever and really sore throat and chest. We asked the hotel staff (with the aid of the phrase book included in my China guide, since they spoke zero English) if we could leave our bags downstairs until early afternoon. That way we could ride around and not lug our big backpacks all day. If I had been feeling more chipper, we could have gone to one of the theme parks on the outskirts of Shenzhen. (We’d read all about them the night before in a large hardcover book detailing Shenzhen’s tourist attractions; this book was very quaint in its language and had captions like “Here the happy girls show the joy of the Splashing Water Festival.”) However, as it was, I could barely pedal around the corner to look for breakfast sustenance. I was in a bad, and rapidly deteriorating, way.

We had until 5:30 p.m. before our train to Guilin would depart, and the only thing we had to do was to figure out if we needed any special packing materials to get the bikes on the train. David had recommended that we ask at the station. We did this in the morning, inquiring of a police officer stationed in the ticket sales area; however, no one at all spoke English that we could find, so we weren’t totally sure of the response we garnered to our sign language question. The policeman seemed to be saying that there was no extra charge for the bike, and that it was no problem.

We did some more wandering in the general vicinity of the train station , checking out hardware stores and buying great quantities of tiny, sweet mandarins from street vendors. Pollo ate at a little fast-fare restaurant. Time passed, slowly, and I felt more and more achy and sick.

Finally we collected our bags from the hotel and made a final trip to the train station. We entered the waiting area with at least 2 hours until departure. I don’t think I’ve ever been so early in my life. There were other people waiting there too, which was amazing to me. Who shows up two and a half hours early for a train if there’s anything else to do anywhere in a 10-mile radius? I guess a lot of them had luggage which they didn’t want to check at the station lockers. At any rate, the waiting hall got more and more crowded until about half an hour before departure, at which point suddenly everyone got up and lined up at the gates leading to the platform. (I say “lined up,” but this is a special kind of Chinese queue, that’s really no line at all; just a mass pushing against the exit point.) We decided to wait out the “line” and just exited once the mass had gone through. It’s not as if seats are first come, first served; each passenger has his own ticketed berth.

As it turns out, the bikes were no problem at all. No one even asked us about them. We put them in the hallway near the doors at the end of our car, tucked out of the way. This I love about developing countries: rules are not wasted on unimportant stuff. (The flip side is that sometimes rules aren’t even wasted on potentially important stuff, such as mandatory helmet use with motorbikes, or the enforcement of basic driving regulations.)

We had bought “hard sleeper” berths, the cheaper sleeper option. Our compartment had 6 beds, and we had the top ones (highest of 3). The mattresses were thin but pretty comfortable, and I was impressed by the accommodations for our 234 RMB fares.

The journey lasted through the night – 14 hours. Being able to sleep made all the difference, of course, and the trip passed fairly quickly. I had taken an Advil – miracle pill! – at the start, and so my fever subsided and I had that delicious feeling of freedom from aches.