On the Train with a Toddler

On the Train with a Toddler
Jul 24, 2009 By Jessica A. Larson-Wang, www , eChinacities.com

Last Spring Festival my husband and I decided it would be a good idea to take a train from Beijing to Sanya, a trip straight from one end of China to the other that takes a good 35 hours, involves loading the train onto a boat, 2 nights sleeping on the train, and all of this during peak traveling season. With a toddler. And not only did we make this trip once, but on the way back we were insane enough to do it again.

I suppose you may be asking why we didn’t just fly. I was asking that myself after about the 24th hour on the train. I suppose it started with my husband’s reluctance about flying. Having only ever taken one flight in his whole entire life, when we moved from Kunming to Beijing more than a year ago, my husband was not impressed with his experience. Although our flight from Kunming was fairly non-eventful, my husband did not enjoy the sensation of taking off, the occasional turbulence, or landing, and deemed the entire thing unnatural and vowed to fly as little as possible from that point on. Had I been able to find cheap tickets to Hainan around Spring Festival time, he might have been convinced, but one way tickets during peak season were running over 2000RMB apiece, a bit too much for our budget. The train, at half the price and about 10x the time, thus became a more viable option.

The trip down went fairly smoothly. We had tickets for two bottom sleepers, which made our one year old son’s sleeping arrangements rather less of a hassle than they would have been had we been relegated to say, the top bunk. Less convenient were the old Chinese women in the upper bunks who insisted that our son was alternately wearing too little or too much, or plying him with snacks. Our son was at that time quite the night owl, so when the lights went out around 10pm, my husband had to take the little guy to the compartment between cars, where the bathroom is, so that his excited shrieking wouldn’t wake the other passengers. Overall, though, he was fairly happy with the train ride, and we arrived in Hainan in one piece, if exhausted.

Things got tricky, however, on the way home. During peak season trains start selling tickets much further in advance than they do now, and when we arrived in Hainan it was still dark out, so we could not immediately purchase return tickets. We put it off a few days, enjoying our beach vacation and figuring that return tickets from Sanya after the official end of Spring Festival vacation couldn’t possibly be as hard to obtain as the tickets there. We were, as it turned out, wrong. I sent my husband to get tickets on his own, telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he was to get sleeper tickets and nothing else. If worse came to worse, I said, we could even go home a day or two later than we’d planned.

My husband came back, a good five hours later, having spent about 2 of those hours on the bus out to the train station, which was well outside the city, with tickets, but not at all the ideal tickets I’d imagined. He’d only managed to purchase one sleeper ticket, which was for the top bunk, and one ticket for a hard seat. Angrily, I told him that we could have flown, we could have gone a different day, or even taken a different route back home, but that, mark my words, we would regret purchasing these tickets which not only separated us, but made the person with the top bunk unable to take our son. The only consolation was that at least the tickets had been cheap, the hard seat less than 500RMB. However, since the deed was already done, we decided to just cross those bridges when they came, and enjoy the rest of our vacation.

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Related Links

Blue Sky's the Limit at a Sanya Beach
The Adventures of Train Travel in China
I Want To Raise My Family in China – Am I Crazy?

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