Dan's Adventure

Carrying on from yesterday’s tips for travelling in China, the following seven points are things that you should be aware of before diving in:

1. No centralised booking – In China there is no centralised booking system for the trains or buses. Each station can only book onward tickets from that station, so you can only book tickets to your next destination when you arrive. If you know where you would like to go next and when, its worth booking a ticket straight away as the tickets are usually hard to come by near the departure date, especially for sleeper trains.
2. Ticket price – Train ticket prices are based firstly upon distance and then by type of seat. Most expensive is soft sleeper, followed by hard sleeper, soft seat and hard seat. The price typically doubles as you go up the type of seat. Unless you are really strapped for cash, the hard seat is never worth it.
3. Buying tickets yourself – Train and bus tickets can be booked from most hostels, hotels and travel agencies but they will charge a commission. Buying by yourself at the station’s ticket office is usually easy enough once you’ve made it to the front of the queue and held off everyone that is trying to push in, tickets are easy to purchase with a phrase book and your destination in Chinese. There are often foreigner ticket windows but this doesn’t mean that they are just for foreigners, just that the person at the counter can speak reasonable English.
4. Passing the time – Chinese people pass the time on long journeys by eating continuously. They arrive at the station with huge bags of food including instant noodles, fruit, nuts, seeds, boiled eggs and dried meats. The train carriages are cleaned frequently by the attendants but buses can end up in a right state by the end of a long journey. On trains all kinds of snacks are sold throughout so you won’t go hungry if you forget to take food with you.
5. Bad habits – No matter how disgusting everyone else thinks it is, Chinese people love to spit. Don’t expect the spitting to stop just because you are on a train or bus. Throughout the journey you will hear people hawking and spitting on the floor. I really can’t understand why anyone would consider this to be acceptable behaviour. Smoking is also to be expected even when there are no smoking signs plastered everywhere.
6. Sleeper buses – Sleeper buses are a necessary evil for some routes, but are a nightmare if you are taller than around 5 foot. I can’t sleep on them at all as the beds aren’t long or wide enough.
7. A good nights sleep – Whenever possible take the train. After the train leaves the station, your ticket is exchanged for a card which is swapped back before you arrive so you can go to sleep assured that you won’t miss your stop as the attendant will wake you up when your destination is next.