The First of Many Great Chinese Sleeper Train Journeys - Yichang to Shanghai

After 3 days relaxing on the Yangtze river in style aboard the President number 6, we rushed to the train station in Yichang for some ancient Chinese "sitting in plastic chairs and waiting for the train" torture only to find all the chairs were taken yet again so we had to settle for ancient Chinese "siting on concrete floor and waiting for the train while everyone stairs at you" torture instead.

The Chinese seem to have got in their heads that catching the train is like catching an international flight. They all rock up half a day before their train is due to depart and just sit around waiting, which is not at all my idea of fun, however seeing the hoards of people sitting and waiting for a train that is due to leave in 5 hours is quite a phenomenon.

On this occasion there was no friendly university students wanting to practice their English on us so we just sat on out bags, had staring competitions with the hoards and waited. About 45 minutes before the train is set to depart people get up and start queuing at the designated gate in the waiting room which is also quite a phenomenon. We choose to wait till the gate is open and then just tack on the end of the line and walk straight thought the gate and onto the train, but hey what would we know!

Once our gate was open we headed for the train, which was about 800m long, it was amazing. We had tickets in a hard sleeper carriage, bunks are 3 beds high, 6 beds per section and 66 beds per carriage with toilet at each end, wash basins and hot water and a friendly lady conductor who did her best to keep the toilet smelling nice, the bins empty and swept and mopped the floor so many times that we lost count.

We boarded the train at 1407 and found that somehow due to the lack of our ability to read or speak Chinese we had 2 top bunks in different sections, we sat on a lower bunk for as long as we could but as the train got fuller and fuller were evicted from our relatively comfortable positions.

We retreated to the little seats along the ailse and started playing connect 4 (thanks Nicole) a young Chinese guy (now known as YCG) who had a bed opposite mine invited himself to play with us, so Brock taught him the game and then I played him for the next 3 hours untill he started to beat me!

At this point where my game was faltering the 10 year old Chinese girl (who will now be known as Kylie - I'll explain this later!) who was sharing a bed in Brock's section had got out her how to speak English reader and was staring at me longingly. So I ditched the connect 4 and YCG and engaged in some impromptu English lessons with Kylie, the whole carriage was fairly well entertained by our English lesson, people walked past and smiled, others stared and the condutor lady stopped for a chat and to watch for while. Once we had exhausted the possibilitys of the Engish reader we did some maths which Kylie was exceptionally good at, she was faster at working out multilication than I was at checking her answers!



Once we were exhausted with sounding out words and arithmatic it was time for dinner, everyone filled up their paper prepackaged noodle soup bowls with boiling water and slurped away. Kylie was so pleased that she had bought the same green packet of chicken noodles that I did. It was sweet of her to get so exceited over noodles that wern't that great because I could taste the MSG, but for 80cents for your dinner you can't really complain too much I suppose.

After dinner we took some very funny photos, Kylie took care of the fingers protruding from the back of peoples heads in every photo. Once again the friendly condutor lady stopped to have a look at what we were doing and a giggle. After the photos there was free food, from YCG - the trumpet NBA chips were the best. And from Kylie and her grandma we got given little jelly fruits things that you suck out of the packets, fresh peanuts that Kylie shelled for us, sponge cake covered in chocolate and rice crackers.

Kylie insisted that we give her an English name as she didn't have one, so I picked Kylie as its such a good Aussie name. Her actual Chinese name is Luo Yan Ran, Brock and I have a terrible memory for Chinese names so we were pretty happy when she wanted and English one. We asked her to give us Chinese names, so for me she picked Li Li (beautiful, beautiful) and for Brock she chose Nan Nan (man man), I guess the names sum us up pretty well!

At 9pm we reatreated to our bunks at the top and slept very well suprisingly. In the morning I stayed in bed for as long as I could before I had to get up to go to the toilet which was still astonishingly clean. Then it was more fun and games with Kylie and another pretty little girl Arty, who was 5 but unfortunately had rotten teeth (we have seen lots of little kids like this!). We made paper cranes and drew pictures, and had more snacks. I thought the train was going to arrive at 10am in Shanghai but when 10am came and went ant we were still chugging along I went back to bed for a couple of hours. I woke to find Brock reading his book with the two little girls perched up on his bunk jabbering away at him in Chinese.

We had time for a few rounds of thumb wresting before we reached Shanghai at 2pm. We said goodbye to our new little friends and headed off to Blue Mountain Hostel for a very well earned shower - yes we both smelt very very bad!