China Trains

G train at Hangzhou

Travel Date April 2012.
Click on any picture to see a large version. 

I have always enjoyed train travel. I grew up travelling on country trains in New South Wales in the '50s and '60s. Sadly, the Australian rural train system is slowly disappearing, as I mention here in my rarely up-dated Australian blog: Sentimental Journey - a Lost Railway

On my overseas travels whenever time and funds permit I choose to travel inter-city by train. Consequently, over the past decade I have travelled by rail on America's AMTRAK, from London to Oxford and Ipswich in the UK, the Eurostar from London to Paris, a couple of TGVs in France and on several inter-city trains in Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Portugal, Spain and Morocco.

When planning my trip to China I spent hours browsing through these web-sites studying their system and learning how to buy tickets, which routes worked best for my itinerary and comparing times to air routes.

CNVol 

China Train Schedule Search 

China Train Tickets 

Each is useful in slightly different ways; I used them all for planning. China Train Tickets includes a marvellous map which shows the vast extent of the Chinese active train system:

The system in China is massive. Unlike much of the rest of the world they are expanding their system, not letting it decay. There have been some teething troubles with the speed of growth of the high-speed-rail system, but the results have been spectacular in the past couple of decades. 

Click on China Train Tickets to also see an explanation of the different speeds and types designated by G, D, K and other letters.

G train on-board speed indicator

I found that in almost every case trains were faster and much more convenient than air. In two cases air would have been faster: Suzhou to Beijing (5 hours by G train) and Beijing to Xi'An (7 hours plus connections by G and D trains via Zhengzhou). I considered the night train from Beijing to Xi'An but decided against it because of the difficulty of obtaining a two-person sleeper. My wife prefers privacy. 

K train 'Welcome Aboard' at Shanghai

K Train Soft Sleeper Car

K train 4-person compartment Soft Sleeper Berths

K train six-person Hard Sleeper car.

I still chose the train for both routes. By the time I factored in airport security and cabs to and from distant airports at both ends compared to a short ride to Suzhou North and even shorter on arrival in Beijing South, the time and money saving for Suzhou - Beijing was minimal. I paid first class on the G train, which was almost the same as economy air-fare. The saving in frustration and airport hassles was well worth it. For the Beijing – Xi'An section there is now a high speed 5 1/2 hour G train direct, but not then. Instead we decided to break the journey in Zhengzhou for a couple of nights to see a non-tourist Chinese city. I'm glad we did.

K train end-of-car amenities.

We only used air twice in China for our internal travel. The various G, K and T train combinations would have taken too long from Xi'An to Guilin. We tried to book the T101 sleeper from Hong Kong to Shanghai, but could not get tickets. Instead I booked air using ctrip from Hong Kong to Hangzhou and took the G train from there to Shanghai.

G train entering Suzhou North

These were the trains we used on our trip:

• Hangzhou – Shanghai G train 169 km 1:30 elapsed time.
•  Shanghai – Suzhou K train 84 km 1:00
• Suzhou North – Beijing South G train 1237 km 5:10
• Beijing West - Zhengzhou D train 693 km 4:58
• Zhengzhou – Xi'An G train 505 km (miles) 2:05

We booked in two ways. For Hangzhou – Shanghai and Zhengzhou – Xi'An I booked personally at the train stations. For the others we used hotel concierge services for a very small service fee.

The ticket offices in Hangzhou and Zhengzhou stations are enormous. Zhengzhou, which is a major rail hub, has four giant booking offices.

In Hangzhou I asked at the information counter for directions to the English-speaking counter and joined the long queue of sub-continental migrant workers at that counter. Look for that queue in the absence of directions. The queue at Hangzhou had about thirty in it when I arrived, but the progress was slowed by those at the front meekly letting queue-jumpers muscle in. I finally reached the front myself and startled several queue-jumpers by being less accommodating and pushing back. It seems they had not had that reaction before. I got some dirty looks, but a cheer from those behind and a smile from the lady at the counter. Unfortunately, after giving her the details I discovered that I needed both passports as a laowai to buy the tickets. I had to go outside, collect her passport from my wife and rejoin the back of the queue. Thankfully it was a little shorter second time around.

Booking Queue, Hangzhou

Station Square, Zhengzhou

You would think I'd learn. I did exactly the same thing in Zhengzhou, but that time I had to return to the hotel. At least it wasn't far from the station.

None of the stations had airport-style security for luggage, although one (Beijing IIRC?) had standard metal detectors at the entrance. I arrived about 30 minutes before travel time, just to be careful. At the major stations all passengers wait in large designated waiting rooms until the train arrives and the passengers leaving the train are gone; only then are passengers allowed on the platform to board the train.

Leaving the waiting room, Zhengzhou

G Train Suzhou - Beijing 1st Class

G train at Zhengzhou

All the trains were clean; most appeared almost brand new although the K train was a bit shabbier generally. On board the G trains it was hard to believe that we were travelling at over 300km/hr. The ride was smooth and quiet. There was almost no feeling of acceleration or deceleration as we left and arrived at stations.

Taxi queue at Beijing

After my experiences on the Chinese train system I am rather sad that our politicians are still closing some lines and debating whether we need a high speed rail at all in my country.

I will close with some views from the window. One of the big differences between air and rail is that you see some of the country as you pass swiftly along.

Apartments Are Being Built Everywhere

Cheers, Alan

Shanghai, China

 The Bund from our hotel window.

Travel Date 2nd - 5th April 2012.
Click on any picture to see a large version. 

Before leaving Hangzhou we had learned our lesson from the earlier taxi ride and took the cab to a hotel next to the station instead of the cavernous interior. We had a cheap but satisfying lunch at a dumpling shop then went back to the hotel for drinks in their air-conditioning before walking to the waiting room.

We took the G train after lunch from Hangzhou to Shanghai. It was our first experience of the Chinese high speed trains. Smooth as silk, plenty of room to relax and no real indication of the speed until you look at the screen at the end of the carriage and see 302 km/hr (~190mph). After travelling on several Chinese G trains, the Eurostar and the TGV Lyria in France I am rather sad that high speed rail is unlikely to be introduced to Australia until after I leave the planet.

Before visiting China I tried to learn some of the basic greetings and phrases I would need. I gave up trying to learn to read Chinese characters. That is far beyond my mediocre linguistic skills. I discovered a handy little tool on the web which let me create a tiny pocketbook of useful words and phrases.

The only words I can immediately recall now are nia hao (pr kneehow = hello) and xie xie (she she = thank you). I carried a netbook with me. On the desktop I saved a folder with addresses in Chinese, such as the sights I wanted to see and all my accommodation, copied and pasted from web-pages or using a web translation like Google Translate, Freetranslation or Babelfish. I used that quite often to show taxi drivers addresses.

I have become expert in using the many different hotel booking systems around the world. In China I mainly used cTrip and Agoda. I try to get the best standard within my budget, but usually that budget is very tight. Consequently we often stay in 3* hotels, sometimes in 4* and occasionally in hotels that could only wish for a star. A note on using cTrip. Unlike most Western booking sites the price you get may be flexible and change before you arrive. We had one case where the price was reduced before we arrived, and one where it increased. Neither was a significant change, but be aware it can happen. Also see my comment in the previous post about hotel deposits.

For Shanghai we got lucky. Les Suites Orient is possibly the best hotel experience I have had or may ever have. See my Tripadvisor review for details. Unfortunately recent reviews are not quite so glowing. Maybe they had a change of staff since my visit.

We took it easy in Shanghai, with no particular goals apart from relaxing, wandering around and seeing the sights. The first thing we discovered, unsurprisingly, was that Shanghai is crowded. Personal space is a concept yet to be discovered in China.

Shanghai has an interesting history. Like Hong Kong it would not exist as one of the world's largest metropolises if not for the arrival of the Foreign Devils - the Portuguese, British, Germans, Americans and others - on Chinese shores.

Until the middle ages it was a small fishing village on the swampy shores of the Huangpu River and the Suzhou Creek. Gradually from that time it expanded to be a modest textiles and handicraft centre, but the real population growth started with the arrival of the first Europeans, Portuguese Jesuits, in the early 17th century. Later the British arrived. They used very persuasive trading techniques including gunboats, marines and soldiers. The Chinese, who invented gunpowder, became like many before them: victims of their own invention. The Opium Wars eventually followed which resulted in Shanghai forcibly becoming one of the major Chinese ports open to foreign traders. That eventually resulted in a continuing population explosion. Despite being ravaged in the early 20th century in the Sino-Japanese war, continuing in WWII, the present population is conservatively estimated at 23 million.

The famous Bund was originally the section of the river where the wharves for all the foreign trading ships were located. This is a picture of the Bund as it used to be:

This is the view now: 

At night the river became spectacular, with many boats being illuminated:

Many of the buildings on the modern Pudong side of the river lit up brilliantly:

The bund was also impressive at night:

We spent the days in Shanghai walking a lot in the back streets. I liked the old markets such as the ones near Yuyuan Gardens.

We also visited the ultra-modern shopping district in Nanjing Road.
 

At the quieter northern end of the Bund where the river and the creek meet is this tranquil garden:

We learned early that green lights for pedestrians at crossings were totally meaningless. It didn't matter what colour the lights were, the cars roared through anyway and death-defying pedestrians crossed as though the cars were not there. We tended to wait until there were long gaps between cars or large groups of people crossing.

This man was manufacturing sugar-cane juice from cut cane on demand. Not quite the right drink for my diabetes, but he was doing well on a warm day.

One of the odd quirks about transport in China, as I discovered earlier in Hangzhou, is the autorickshaw prices. They are often double or triple the price of a cab for less comfortable journeys over a shorter distance. The only advantage I could find was that sometimes they were around when taxis were not.

Cheers, Alan