No, not in a car. In one of China’s bullet trains.

Last weekend, I had to visit the US Embassy in Beijing (for reasons I will explain below), and I had set aside one day of my three-day junket to sight-see. While my hotel was fairly close to the Bird’s Nest and the Olympic Park, I decided to add another city to my list of visited places — Tianjin, a historic city that hosted foreign concessions as far back as the 1860s.

I would have skipped Tianjin for a more propitious time, but the idea of zipping along at an average speed of 150 mph was really appealing. I love trains.

Washing bullet trains for the next run

China is completely gonzo about high-speed rail services. Already blessed with an extensive conventional rail network, China is building new HSR lines to connect the provincial capitals and major cities. One such HSR line is the 73 mile (117 km) run between Beijing and Tianjin.

China’s bullet trains are built by China High-speed Rail (CHR) using technology and designs shared by French, Japanese and German companies. They run on dedicated electrified lines on welded rails (no clickety-clack noises), and the cars have airline-style seating. Ticket prices are a bit steeper than for conventional trains; the Beijing-Tianjin run costs 58 yuan ($8.50 — yeah, Americans, it sounds cheap, but a sleeper berth on the overnight train from Changsha to Jishou is 118 yuan. Everything’s relative.)

The Tianjin bullet train leaves about every hour from Beijing South Train Station. From my hotel just north of the fourth ring road, it took me about 40 minutes to get to the south station by subway. The south railway station is as spacious and modern as any airport terminal, and nowhere near as busy and crowded as the west station, where I would go to take a train to Changsha, Hunan.

Beijing South Train Station

09052010-bullettrain

Once in Tianjin station, I discovered that it, like Beijing South, is huge and modern. There is a wide plaza surrounding the station complex (there are shops nearby) and fronting the Hai He 海河 River, which runs through downtown. The place is big enough that it took me quite a bit of walking to find the ticket office to buy my return ticket. Contrary to my experience so far, the ticket office is right next to the station entrance.

With not much time available, I took a quick walk around Tianjin along the river, using a map I bought in the station to keep myself from getting lost. Like many other Chinese cities, Tianjin is in the middle of a building boom. There are so many self-erecting cranes around the Middle Kingdom that they should make it the national bird! Here, it seems architects want to preserve, or at least recapture, the European flair that Tianjin has had for the past 150 years. Instead of the slab-sided, white-tiled, utilitarian edifices seen in most Chinese towns, the buildings in Tianjin celebrate a diversity of architectural styles. There’s also an Italian style village on the other side the station, but I had to meet friends for dinner in Beijing at 6, so I skipped the village.

Cranes - China's national 'bird'

So why was I in Beijing in the first place? To get a legal document notarized. Notaries public do not exactly grow on trees in China, so I had to visit the embassy in Beijing or one of the consulates. Thanks to a perplexing division of provinces among them, I naturally could not visit any of the consulates in three provinces contiguous to Hunan (Hubei, Guangzhou and Sichuan). Oh, no, I had to travel clear across the country to Beijing! Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Since I have no classes on Mondays, I reckoned if I flew roundtrip to Beijing, I could just barely fit the trip into a three-day weekend. Here was my itinerary:

Saturday: Take the 11:30 am bus from Jishou north bus station to Changsha, arrive at 4 pm. Walk about four blocks to the airport shuttle bus terminus at the Civil Aviation Hotel. Arrive at the airport at 5 pm. Board my plane at 6:30 pm. Arrive in Beijing at 9:30 (weather delays in Changsha … again). Take the airport shuttle train and subway to my hotel. In bed by 11.

Sunday: I woke up late, so I didn’t really leave for Tianjin until about 10 am. Came back by 6 pm.

Monday: Check out of hotel, take subway to embassy for a 10:30 am appointment. Leave embassy with my documents notarized by 11:30. Eat lunch — American-style burgers at Fatburgers. Take the subway and airport train back to the airport early. (I figured I had no time for sightseeing.) Board plane at 5:00, arrive Changsha train station around 8 pm. Buy sleeper berth ticket for the 11:44 pm overnight train. (Incidentally, this was the same train that I took to reach Jishou the first time in August 2008.) Read a book for two hours, chat with two young Chinese for another hour.

Tuesday: Arrive in Jishou at 7:30 am. Eat breakfast, shower, teach two classes beginning at 10:10 am. Lunch, then spend four hours judging the university English-speaking contest.

To my delight, it all went smoothly. Since I was not traveling on a holiday, there were no egregious airport delays, and there were plenty of train tickets available even two hours before departure from Changsha (25 hard-bed sleepers, and more than 200 seats).

And more importantly, I managed the entire trip almost entirely on my own. A friend helped me book the airline tickets with her company’s usual travel agency. Everything else I did myself, even with my fractured Chinese. Although the whirlwind trip was pretty tiring, and annoying in its premise, it also gave me a big shot of self-confidence as an independent traveler.

I am on my way to Beijing, to meet up with some friends and do the sight-seeing I couldn’t do in February. I planned to get to Beijing the same way as last: shuttle bus to Changsha, then overnight express train to Beijing. Only this time, I was going to stay overnight in Changsha.

And a good thing, too. Because my plans for train travel were dashed yesterday evening.

China has an extensive passenger train system. It also has a huge population. Normally, getting a train ticket is not a big issue, but the end of the summer holiday is two weeks away.

So, when I went to the ticket office last evening, I found a horde of people trying to buy tickets. And I found there were none for me.

The Changsha ticket office has two big LED boards listing available tickets for northbound and southbound trains. For the Beijing-bound trains, there were no sleeper berths available until after the 22nd, no seats until the 19th. If I wanted to travel standing for 16 hours, I could have gotten a ticket for the 18th.

But I was expected in Beijing on the 16th. And standing that long in a crowded train has little appeal. It’s bad enough on short trips.

Fear not, dear reader! I will be in Beijing as planned, but I just had to spend about twice as much money to book a round-trip flight there. (For reference, with fees and all, my tickets on China Southern Airlines were 2330 RMB; a round-trip train trip (soft sleeper) would have been about 1100 RMB.)

Here’s how I recovered from my errors. While you cannot book train tickets online easily in China, booking hotels and airline tickets is as easy as in the USA. After returning to my hotel room (155 RMB, btw), I logged onto eLong.net, a discount travel site. Within short order, I booked my tickets for a Sunday morning departure and a Friday morning return. With eLong, you can pay cash for your tickets. If you are in a major city’s central area, they will deliver them to you. Mine were delivered to my hotel room this morning at 10, four hours ahead of schedule. The messenger politely accompanied to me to the ATM across the street where we settled accounts.

So, I stayed another day in Changsha — no big deal. I ate at Pizza Hut and shopped at Carrefour (my big Western fix for the summer), and walked around town some until the 95° heat chased me back to the hotel.

Tomorrow I’ll catch the shuttle to the airport, and after a two-hour flight, be in Beijing. Till then, toodles!

Given my available funds, and time remaining before classes started here, I decided to fly in to China instead of taking the train. There are no direct flights from Hong Kong to Zhangjiajie, the nearest airport to Jishou. Those flights leave from Shenzhen, so I had to figure out how to get there.

Conveniently enough, there is a coach that departs every half hour from Hong Kong that takes you to a special transfer point. The immigration controls for both Hong Kong and China share the same building, which straddles the border. After leaving there, you board another coach that shuttles you to the airport.

Even more conveniently, for me, the ChinaLink Bus Company leaves from the Elements shopping mall right above a Hong Kong MTR stop (Kowloon station). So, all I needed to do was walk a half block from my hotel to the MTR station at Yau Ma Tei, transfer at Central station on Hong Kong Island (yes, you do not have to take the Star Ferry to cross Victoria Bay!), get off at Kowloon station, go up one floor and walk a short distance to ChinaLink’s depot across from Starbucks.

[My alternate plan was to take the MTR to the intercity rail station, take a train to Shenzhen's rail station, then buy a ticket to Jishou. I rejected this plan, because it would have required an overnight train. As things turned out, it would have made no difference.]

So, set out from the hotel around 11 am, pulling a 20-kg bag and carrying a 10-kg shoulder bag down the street to the Yau Ma Tei station. There are two flights of stairs from street level there to the station proper, so lugging all this gear was not all that pleasant, but doable. The fare to the Kowloon station is HK$4, or about 50 cents. I arrived at the ChinaLink depot in time to board the 12:30 out. Cost for the coach: HK$100, or about US$13.

Around 1 pm, we arrived at the transfer point. I had to fill out a departure card for Hong Kong immigration, which took a few minutes, and got my passport stamped quickly after that. At 1:12, I walked over a yellow line marking the boundary between Hong Kong control and Shenzhen control, walking into mainland China for the first time. Two Chinese immigration officers took their time carefully comparing my visage with my passport photo, now eight years old, eventually deciding that the guy in the picture must be the same one standing in front of them.

In 10 minutes, I was in another coach, which played a melange of soft rock from the US and China, bound for Shenzhen airport. (There’s something eerie about hearing Dan Fogelberg on a bus in China …)

[Shenzhen is a boom town. According to Internet sites, it was once a little cowtown on the Guangdong border with Hong Kong. In short order, the Chinese turned little Shenzhen into a teeming metropolis, with air, highway, bus, rail, and shipping connections, with high rise buildings going up everywhere and shipping containers stacked to the skies.

ThinkPads and iPods are assembled here. So are watches; Shenzhen is reputed to be the watch-making capital of the world. It is China's second-busiest port, after Shanghai. Hong Kong residents cross the border daily to shop here, since Chinese prices are far below Hong Kong's.]

At 2 pm, we arrived at the airport, where I loaded my bags onto another free (!) luggage cart to find the ticket desk of China Southern Airways. My intention was to buy a ticket to Zhangjiajie, arriving that night. One big problem: that flight, the ticket agent told me, doesn’t fly on Saturdays. I’d have to wait a day for the next scheduled flight.

Uffda. My choices were stay in Shenzhen overnight, then catch that flight, or continue on somewhere else. I knew Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan, had several trains leaving for Jishou every day, so I decided moving was better than staying another night in a hotel. I bought an economy seat to Changsha, leaving at 3:10, for 860 yuan, or about US$125.

This flight, in an Airbus 320, took about 90 minutes. I arrived in Changsha, collected my luggage, and found the shuttle bus to central Changsha. Cost: 17 yuan, or about US$2.50. (As with all the coaches I had ridden so far, this one had comfortable, airline style seats, and air conditioning.) The terminus for this shuttle is the Civil Aviation Hotel.

By now, it was raining a fair lick, so most of us passengers waited inside the hotel lobby, or under its awnings outside, for the downpour to slacken a little. Once I ventured outside the safety of the hotel, I was mobbed by taxi drivers wanting my business. They were pretty insistent, but I knew from The Rough Guide to China that the train station is just a few blocks from the hotel. I’d rather walk in the rain, thanks.

Once I approached the station (an imposing building that looks like it should be a train terminal, with a big clock on top), an intrepid local pounced on me, offering to tote my heavy bag for 10 yuan. I figured, why not. He couldn’t go far lugging that monster on his shoulder. The two of us trudged through the crowds toward the terminal entrance.

Now this fellow either didn’t travel much in the train, or he assumed I already had a ticket, because we walked right past the ticket office. I’m used to US rail stations, where you buy your tickets in the same building as the trains stop. The Changsha ticket office is outside the actual terminal, in a shopping-center-like wing adjacent to the station. My porter and I went through the security checkpoint at the station entrance before we both finally realized that tickets are outside.

The ticket office was organized chaos. The Chinese are not real good at queuing up calmly and orderly. It’s more like everyone for himself. (City street traffic is like this, too.) I was able to pronounce “Jishou” (吉首 are the first Chinese characters I learned. You need to be able to read the departure board!) clearly enough for the woman at the ticket window to issue me a ticket. I did not successfully convey the idea that I wanted a sleeper, however. So, I got a soft seat for 82 yuan, or US$12.

Not ideal, but after sitting in an overly firm airline seat for 15 hours, I figured 8 hours in a train seat could not be much worse. I’m still debating that point with myself.

Departure time was 10:58, so I had a three-hour wait. Not too bad.

Imagine, however, if all the driving commuters and airline passengers in your hometown had to take the train instead. Add to that the busy schedule of the Chinese rail network, which boggles my imagination. Trains arrive and depart from Changsha every 20 to 30 minutes or so. I would wager, then, there were probably ten of thousands of people teeming inside the huge Changsha station while I waited for my train, the N566.

After some false starts, I finally found the correct waiting area for the N566. Changsha has four waiting areas, plus special waiting rooms for soldiers, women with babies, soft-bed passengers and VIPs. Waiting area 1 accommodated passengers for at least 15 trains. TVs along the wall had on some Bloomberg program, but no one was paying attention. There was just too much noise. Eventually, a large contingent of passengers boarded their train and I was able to snag a seat.

{I should point out, as if it were not obvious, that I was likely the only Caucasian in the waiting room. I ran into Aussies and Brits at the Shenzhen and Changsha airports, but I saw none in the rail depot.)

Two young men struck up a conversation with me. One, a college student, helped me locate a public phone so I could call ahead and tell my people in Jishou (吉首) what on earth I was doing, and he made sure that I understood I should wait for the red announcement boards to light up, so I would queue up at the right time. The announcements of train departures were basically useless to me, and not just because I can’t understand Chinese. Train attendants were using bullhorns that were barely audible over the din of the multitude.

Finally, boarding time arrived. Here again, the Chinese approach of “everyone for himself” in a line meant that all of these passengers were all trying to push their through a narrow gate at the same time. You cannot be polite or timid here; when in Rome, as they say.

I can’t say I blame them, actually. Boarding call is just 20 minutes before the train pulls out. If the train is made up of a dozen or more cars, you might (as I did) have a long walk. So everyone hustles to get on board. I suspect missing the train requires one to go back to the ticket office to get a new fare. I did not even want to contemplate that possibility.

It was nighttime, so there was no scenery to keep me awake. My fellow passengers in car 11 were just as worn out as I was, so conversation was pretty much not in the cards. No one was talking much, except for a group of five boisterous teens who didn’t crash for the night until nearly 2 am. So, we weary travelers trundled through the night at an average speed of 65 kph (40 mph). Not as quick as flying, but perhaps more interesting.

NEXT: I arrive (finally)

In June I booked flights through a discounter, www.cfares.com. You can join for free and search for and book domestic and international flights, as well as hotels. There are three main choices for arriving airports in China: Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. As it turns out, the HK prices were somewhat lower and placed me somewhat closer to my final destination. Besides, I figured that landing in HK would ease my transition, since they speak English in HK.

My ticket cost $663 one-way to Hong Kong. I fly out of Louisville Wednesday morning and cool my heels in Chicago-O’Hare for a couple of hours, before boarding a 15-hour nonstop to HK. Crossing the International Date Line means I arrive Friday afternoon (local time).

Originally, I was all gung-ho about immediately boarding a plane or train bound for Hunan. After some reflection, it seemed wiser to stay at a hotel after so long a journey. So, returning to the wonders of the Internet, I went to www.hotels.com and www.lonelyplanet.com to scope out a reasonable compromise between cost and amenities. (In other words, I didn’t want a hostel or the Ritz, but something in-between.) The best choice seemed to be the YMCA International House in Kowloon, for several reasons. Despite its association with the YMCA, it is not at all like the YMCA’s here in the states. It’s really a hotel, which might explain why the hotel will be renamed The Citylights in September. Cost: about US$80. It’s near two major metro stations, one of which I need to get to the mainland. And finally, there is a cheap shuttle service by coach from HK International Airport right to the hotel. While I could also take the metro or bus, lugging my bags in either did not seem that appealing.

Since the re-acquisition of Hong Kong from the British Empire in 1999, China has made rail travel between HK and the mainland much easier. There are now regular trains to Guangzhou (Canton) leaving practically on the hour, and direct express trains to Beijing and Shanghai. Guangzhou is a major rail hub, where I will have to changes trains (and train stations) to board an overnight train to Jishou, Hunan. The HK-Guangzhou trains leave from Hung Hom station, not far from the hotel, and take about 1.5 to 2 hours to reach Guangzhou East train station, where foreigners can go through passport clearance. (From what I have read, the East station was built both to accommodate foreign nationals and to solve some security issues in the larger main train depot.) The cost of the ride is about US$25.

About 7 km away is the main train station. There is a regular bus connection between the two train stations on the No. 272 line, costing RMB 2 (or about 25 cents). From Guangzhou station, I plan to board the N596/N597 train which heads north toward Xiangtan, just south of Changsha, Hunan, then veers west toward Huaihua and then north to Jishou (and further to Zhangjiajie). This train is air conditioned, leaving Guangzhou at 10:18 pm, arriving in Jishou 2:22 pm. (An earlier train, while cheaper, is not air conditioned. It would arrive in Jishou at 5:33 in the morning.)

Chinese trains typically have four “classes” — in order of increasing cost, they are hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper and soft sleeper. The seats do not recline, so overnight travelers either have to be exceptionally tough or insomniacs. Hard sleepers are stacked three to a side and six to a berth; while bedding is provided, the quarters are a tight fit. Soft sleepers are more comfortable and somewhat more private. There are four soft berths in each compartment.

For the train I plan to take, the ticket for a soft sleeper is US$62. Why can’t Amtrak be like this?

One concern I have, which I have not yet had answered, is whether I can buy the Guangzhou-Jishou ticket the day of the departure or whether I need to buy it in advance. If the latter is the case, I may either stay in HK another day or find lodging in Guangzhou.