don't make me stand any longer...

About a week ago Martin and I decided to make a "quick trip" to Huangshan - one of the most famous and beautiful mountains in China. At the time we were in Yangshuo, and estimated that it would take maybe just over 24 hours to get there. We thought we'd take a bus to Guilin (the nearest big city an hour away) and then catch a bus or train directly to Huangshan. Ha ha ha. That would have been nice.

What we've actually done over the last week is quite different...

We left Yangshuo around 9am on Sunday morning and arrived in Guilin just over an hour later. We went directly to the bus station to ask for a ticket... which of course they didn't have. We were told that the nearest place we could get to was Changsha, so we bought a ticket and waited for a few hours in the stinky bus station. The ticket to Changsha was ridiculously overpriced and it was only after a good long think that we realized we were in fact traveling on Lantern Festival. Good one.

We arrived in Changsha at about 11pm, only to find the ticket office was already closed and we'd have to find a bed for the night. We opted for the cheapest option - following a little woman to her "house-hotel"... we were shown to a tiny dirty "room" that held one rock hard bed and a small rubbish bin. The walls of this room were pieces of cardboard held together by sticky tape and there was no roof. She left us there trying to figure out how we'd both fit in this bed and how we'd keep our skin from touching anything in the room!!

Needless to say the amount of sleep we both got was minimal. We dragged our bruised (the bed was really hard!) and tired bodies out at 7am in order to get a head start at the ticket office. What a nightmare!! After waiting a good 20 minutes in the queue, the woman behind the counter shouted "mayo" (which means 'no have') to every destination we asked her.... and believe me we tried a lot of places!! The queues for the tickets were nuts (as they usually are in China) with people pushing, shoving and screaming at each other while others just jumped the queue and threw money at the ticket-providing lady in desperation!

After a while of standing there trying to figure out what we could do, a lovely young man arrived and offered his services in broken English. We explained that we were trying to get to Huangshan and after much discussion he suggested we just buy a ticket to Yichun. We looked on our map... no Yichun. I asked whether he was sure it was in this province and he said "yes yes it's a big city". Huh. Where was this big city on our map??
In the end we decided to trust him and were grateful as he helped us buy the ticket... another expensive one. We just hoped we'd at least be driving over a huge distance to make up for the price.

Our bus from Changsha to Yichun left at 9:30am, and we left quite happily thinking that we were on the last leg of the journey. But then we started driving further and further away from civilization and the only towns we passed seemed ghost-like. There were just a few people in the streets and most of the houses were abandoned. Scary.
Suddenly (only 4 hours later) we found ourselves driving into a big city and stopping outside the bus station. We were in Yichun already! Our friend was right - it was a big city, but the trouble was we'd only driven for 4 hours!

At the Yichun bus station we again encountered the "mayo mayo" and we started to feel rather pissed off. What were we doing wrong?? We decided to go to the train station and attempt to buy a ticket there...

At the station the queues for just getting into the ticket-buying-area were so long we almost turned around, but then Martin had a good idea... we played super dumb and got some of the guards at the door to help the "poor foreigners who speak no Chinese". A man led us to the ticket office and straight to the front of the queue!! Nice. We were told (again) that there were no tickets to Huangshan, and just as we were about to give up and just ask for a ticket back to Guilin, the security guard asked us to follow him. He took us past the crowds of people and into the waiting hall. There he explained in Chinese (which I had to pretend I only half understood) that we'd have to wait for 5 hours here but then he could help us onto the train. Good news!

Waiting for 5 hours for a train you have no ticket for is not the best situation to be in, plus it was freezing in the waiting room... we sat there feeling very sorry for ourselves but still grateful that the guard had even helped us in the first place. Usually people in China don't want to deal with foreigners so we're left to fend for ourselves.

5 hours later we were escorted onto platform 1 by about five guards, one platform manager and one English speaking woman who they'd recruited as our translator. When the train arrived we were taken to the seating carriages and told to just get on. "But we don't have a ticket" I said... "It's ok you can just stand" was the reply. What?? This was a 12 hour overnight train!!! Martin told me I should just be grateful we got on the train in the first place but I was really not looking forward to standing for 12 hours.

It was just after 7pm when we got on the train... we found a small place by the door to put our bags down and that was that. Being by the door had two disadvantages - it was colder and filled with smoky boys, but it was at least less full of people than the actual carriage so there was a little space to move. We stood and stood and stood some more.

By 2am we'd moved into the carriage as the cold was really getting to me and the smoke was affecting Martin's lungs. There was pretty much no room to move in there and we were squashed up against other peoples bodies, faces, bums... whatever.

The only piece of good luck on that trip happened at 3:30am when we were told we could upgrade our "tickets" to a sleeper if we wanted to. After explaining that we didn't actually have tickets, the kind conductor helped us out anyway and gave us two sleeper tickets!! Yeah baby, I've never been so happy to be able to lie down :)
We only had a few more hours left on the journey but it was bliss to get under a duvet and shut our eyes.

We arrived in Huangshan city just before 7am and were flooded by touts offering their various services (food, hotel, bus) as soon as we walked out of the station. We took a bus to Tangkou (a small town nestled right under the mountain itself) and managed to find a cheap-ish hotel just next to the bus station.

Time for some sleeeeeep.....