ISpyShanghai

Taking the train from Shanghai to Beijing is really convenient- you get on board at night, eat a little, drink a little, and wake up as the train pulls into Beijing Train Station in time for breakfast. The T train leaves Shanghai Railway Station (a den of thieves and brigands so be careful) at 20:26 on Friday night, and arrives some 13 hours later. It would be a fast train (the T stands for “especially fast” in Chinese) if it didn’t keep stopping in various places, but it’s still amongst the quickest routes on offer.

A train ticket from Shanghai to Beijing costs 478RMB (cheaper on a slower train and/or lower class seat)

The best class of ticket is “soft sleeper” which gets you a place in a 4 bed berth with a pot of hot water, small table, comfortable bunk beds, and that’s about it (what do you want, a bouncy castle? It’s on a train). The linen is provided; it’s clean and is changed every trip. Attendants come round regularly to tell people when the train is at their station (they hold onto your ticket too, so no point trying to stay on past your stop), empty the bins and recharge the hot water.

Unless you booked plenty of time (maximum 12 days) in advance and are travelling with 3 other people, you’ll probably end up sharing your carriage with someone else. The two Chinese businessmen in the car with me and Emma didn’t say a single word to us the entire journey. Perfect!

The (Chinese) food in the dining car is cheap, foreigner friendly (i.e. no crazy animals, no crazy parts of animals) and as good as a cheap Chinese restaurants downtown. Beer is cheap, cheap, cheap and if they hadn’t shut the dining carriage down at midnight, I would have stayed up, drinking and toasting with the other diners.

Getting to sleep with a belly full of beer and the gentle rocking of the train is like falling off a log.

I’m flying this weekend, but only because time is tight, the train is definitely a lot more fun. I’d also recommend taking the train from Shanghai to Shenzhen, great stuff even though I was in hard sleeper class that time.

Travelling by train during Chinese New Year is, so everyone says, a nightmare. The station is like a refugee camp, they pack the passengers on trains like cattle, and if you close one eye, some ragamuffin will steal the other one.

Well it ain’t true. Think about it- everyone is desperate to get home for the equivalent of Christmas day to spend Spring Festival with their family- but on the day after that, the same trains are running and no-one’s in a rush to get anywhere any more.

Emma worked her Chinese magic on the good people in the Jingan Railway Ticket Office (just opposite McDonalds- no queue) and on Wednesday morning we bought (hard bed) tickets to go from Shanghai South Station to Shenzhen the following lunch time.

Shanghai South Station- on the first day of Chinese New Year

It’s around 18 hours on the train so we had a good lunch of good lunch of pizza and salad from the Italian cafe in the station before leaving on time from Shanghai South and starting to chat with the neighbours in our carriage. In the hard bed section (soft beds have fewer people and more room, but there were no tickets) there are three beds stacked one above the other, and the same on the other side in a miniature carriage of 6. You can’t quite sit up straight in your bed if you’re as tall as me, but there are seats on the other side of the carriage and of course you can walk around freely, eat dinner in the buffet car, gaze out of the window and chat to your fellow passengers.

The hard beds on a Chinese train

The carriages are warm and smoke-free, the bathrooms have clean squat toilets, the food is good and hot, beer is 5RMB a can (they only have Snow though, no Harbin). Before I had time to read more than a few chapters of my book it was 10pm and time for lights out. Lying in a warm bed on a gently rocking train, listening to the rumble of the tracks, knowing you’re speeding along to where you’re going is incredibly relaxing. I was out like a light until a squawking attendant woke us up 25 minutes from arrival at Shenzhen Station.

We crossed the land border from China to Hong Kong (isn’t it supposed to be the same country?), then took the 40 minute metro to Tshim Sha Tsui East station for 30 Hong Kong dollars. So now here I am- sitting in a hotel room looking across Hong Kong Harbour, thinking about tailors, dim sum and the firework display that starts at 8pm.

Hard bed ticket from Shanghai to Shenzhen: approx 400RMB one-way

I almost went to Beijing this weekend, almost in the sense that Emma said “Let’s go to Beijing” and I said “OK!“, but then my boss said “Let’s work on Saturday” and I said “OK!“.

So now I’m not going.

Forgive me father, it has been 11 months since I came to Shanghai and I still haven’t visited anywhere in China except Suzhou. Perhaps if they moved Beijing closer, or had trains that left from outside the Eager Beaver at 4am. Shanghai is very pretty though, especially in the clear autumn sun. Here’s a photo of a blimp edging past the JinMao tower and the Gilded Palace Of Shimmering Prestige (or whatever the hell that building is called).

Why the blazes did this never take off as a method of public transport?