Entries about train

We arrived at the train station just before eight to stand in a long line of foreigners buying tickets. If there was one train journey that guidebooks recommended in Myanmar, it was the Gokteik Viaduct over a deep river gorge, the longest railway trestle in the world upon its completion in 1901. At 102 metres high, even today it is the highest bridge in Myanmar. The viaduct stretches 698 metres from end to end. The bridge was built during British occupation by the Pennsylvania Steel Company.

It took about ten minutes for the line to start moving, but it moved quick enough. We'd debated catching the train from Mandalay, but the price wasn't terribly different and if we caught the train in Pyin Oo Lwin, we departed at a gentler 8:20 am compared to 4:00 am in Mandalay. The train was an hour late anyhow. Once it arrived, something got lost in translation where we were mildly worried that our train was bound for Mandalay and not Hsipaw. But the staff assured us this was going to Hsipaw and that we'd be fine. The couple in front of us asked to switch to the left side, the one recommended by Lonely Planet to get the best views en route to Hsipaw. We asked if we could switch too and they obliged. The downside was a far more worn out seat cushion. The price to pay for photos.

The train crawled along like a horse carriage in the beginning and gradually worked up more speed. We stopped in small towns where the stations consisted of only a small ticket cabin and locals would hop on and off.

Eventually, we made it to the Gokteik Viaduct, a gleaming silver bridge across from the plunging gorge and river below. More than a century old, you can only imagine how well maintained the bridge has been, a bit of an eerie thought. The train inched its way down the winding path to the bridge. The long tracks gave us time to take photos of the bridge, peeking out between the trees, and then observe hill as we switched sides about three times. Locals were used to us crazy foreigners jumping around and let us take pictures out their windows too. The final approach had spectacular views of the reddish rocks and viaduct.

Soon we reached the end of the safe views and headed for the bridge. Luckily, it didn't quite look its hundred plus years old and it had been restored recently enough to inspire confidence. The creaking wasn't as ominous as described since the train had done that the whole time. Below us, the river meandered through forested landscape. Large hills were visible from either side. Out the windows, elbows and hands stuck out attached to smart phones and cameras. An unmarred shot was almost impossible.

Soon we reached the end of the spectacular gorge and viaduct views. We travelled through a few tunnels. As we neared Hsipaw, more rice terraces dotted the relatively flat landscape.

We arrived late afternoon. Lily the Home guesthouse was there to pick up its guests so we grabbed a ride to check out their $10 per person rooms with private bathrooms. We pulled up to a hotel-like building and double checked the price. Typically the places we stayed were a little more toward the bottom of the barrel. The room they showed us was nice, clean and had facilities to do laundry, a never ending task for us. Once that was out of the way, we set out to find food since our cinnamon bun and Oreo train lunch hadn't quite filled us up.

At the end of the street, near the river, there was a quaint park. After going inside, we noticed bridges over calm ponds, a children's structure, decaying paddle boats with panda faces. There were plenty of trees for shelter in the area. There were some people but not a whole lot. We left down the main road and saw the digital clock tower.

We ventured down a street with a few restaurants and settled on Sein restaurant which had a barbeque and cheap enough food. I ordered a skewer of potatoes and one of okra. Ryan had fried rice, a frequent choice of his. The food was tasty and came with teriyaki and spicy sauces. The portions were affordable and a good size. The man working there was friendly and funny too, poking fun at the grumpy tourists walking by without acknowledging his greetings. "Why you come to Myanmar?" He'd jokingly ask. "So angry, why can't they smile?" He was from Southern Myanmar and had just started working at the restaurant a few days earlier.

Despite almost missing our train, the whole ride was a great experience. We slept soundly on our bottom and middle bunks. Trains in the hard sleeper class (still not as hard as my mattress in Thailand) had three bunks, the top one being the most cramped and cheapest, requiring quite a climb. It was nice to enjoy the bottom bunk where we could actually sit up and have a conversation in the morning.

We bought some snacks for breakfast which turned out to be expired dried yam and we could really tell that those weren't fresh. Quite the chewy affair. I also snagged expired orange juice that thankfully didn't make me sick. It was carbonated and sugary enough that I figured it'd be okay. The dates also could be packaged dates but based on our expired chocolate we couldn't be too sure.

We kept watching the countryside migrate become less and less urban as we headed away from the coastal areas. The landscape became more rocky, and mountainous. Ryan spotted some rice terraces as well.

The captain of the train -- perhaps just a worker, their uniforms were so official looking -- was quite intrigued with our presence. Although he spoke no English and we no Chinese, he kept trying to have conversations with us. Our short sleeves were too provocative for his tastes and he was quite concerned we'd be cold. He checked out Ryan's luggage tags on another visit too. When I finally changed into a shirt with three quarter length sleeves, I gained his approval.

A few hours later, one of the woman working helped us get off at the right stop at Guilin. From the train station, there were tons of vendors calling out for tours to Yangshuo or to the rice terraces, but we wanted to find our bus station instead to avoid getting scammed. Once we walked the street, passing many fruit vendors -- selling oranges, bananas, pomelo, rambutan and even one that was yellow and appeared to have fingers called Buddha's hand -- and restaurants, we made it to the train station. We were happy to find a woman who spoke English at the ticket counter, but less thrilled that we still weren't at the right ticket station. Luckily, she wrote us out directions to the next one in Chinese to show the driver along with the bus driver.

At the other bus station, another woman spoke English at the ticket counter. We were getting spoiled in Guilin and we boarded a bus to Heping that left about twenty minutes later. The driver really gave our nerves a workout with a driving practise that's less common in North America: driving into the oncoming lane to pass even when there's oncoming traffic, as well as honking the horn when the other cars, in their own lane, refuse to move over. It really got the heart racing and I was surprised they still had functional horns on their vehicles.

We didn't arrive at our transfer spot, the town of Heping, until after five. All the public buses had gone, but there was one guy willing to take us up for 40RMB each. It seemed steep but he was the only game around so we hopped in, got our rice terrace entry tickets at the office, and he drove up the mountain as the sun began to go down. We could still see the terraces climbing the side of the mountains as we drove. The driver stopped at one point on the mountain and Ryan got ready to fight him, unsure of his motives. It was just nature calling and the man came right back.

When we arrived at the gate, I figured out why our driver had been texting people along the drive. Woman and men with large baskets offered to carry up our bags for us but we declined. Others were trying to sell us rooms. A woman followed us for a few kilometers advertising her hotel, but we knew of a hostel we wanted to stay at, since they would have some English to help us plan, and we told her we had already booked a place. It was another kilometer or two up the road, past construction, but luckily the hostelling international sign helped reassure us that by pure luck we were in the right place.

The room was alright, thin wooden walls and a bit cold, but the right price. The floors creaked like nobody's business to go down to the third floor to use the washroom. But they had free laundry facilities, aka a sink and clothes line, and a restaurant with an English menu so we could eat supper: noodles and beef for Ryan and bamboo and egg for myself.

Our first mission of the day was to go get hard sleeper train tickets to Guilin from the Train Ticketing Office. It was a nice 20 minute walk from the place we were staying. We passed a university with a large billboard of Yao Ming, a famous Chinese NBA player, on the front of it. It was easy to find the train booking office as the sign was in English. Unlike the sign, the lady working there didn’t speak a word of English. Luckily we came prepared with Sarah’s Mandarin book and a note written out by a helpful Chinese person. We booked two hard sleeper tickets from Hangzhou to Guilin for 6:53 p.m, thinking that that would give us plenty of time to explore for the day and get to the train station early.

We were feeling pretty good after we booked our tickets, so we decided to pick up some treats from a local convince store for our 18 hour train ride. We would later discover that they were all expired, as most of the junk food is in China. We made our way to the metro to spend one last day in West Lake.
We now set our focus on trying to find some bikes to rent. There was certainly no shortage, but we wanted to find bikes close to the lake. After we decided which bikes we wanted to ride for the day, we headed off to find the Tiger Springs.

About an hour later we discovered we had went too far and made it to a pagoda we didn’t intend to see. We decided since we biked all the way here, we might as well climb it. The original pagoda had long since been burned down and many attempts at rebuilding it had met the same fate. The pagoda we climbed had been rebuilt from the ground up in the mid 1990s, and had about 8 levels. From the top we got a bird’s eye view of the polluted and smoggy Hangzhou.

After climbing down we tried to grab some lunch. We found a restaurant that looked promising, armed with the mandarin book, we attempted to order. All seemed to go well until we received our food. They placed two meat dishes in front of us and a large bowl of rice. I only ordered small chicken plate and Sarah had ordered a vegetable dish, which never came. We tried to explain to them but after some arguing between the cooks and the waitress they just took away one plate and Sarah didn’t get to eat lunch that day aside from a bowl of rice. We did snack on some expired Oreos though. They were okay. We would need the energy for the bike ride.

We made it to Dreaming of the Tiger Spring Temple area shortly after leaving our disappointing lunch. We locked up the bikes and away we went to explore the springs and temples. As we entered, we were greeted by a very nice pond with some large Crane statues and decorations hanging from the trees. Again, there were some nice temples to view and large incense burners everywhere. The area was also the burial site of the monk Jigong. After some exploring we discovered the main attraction, a scene chiseled out of the stone of a man lying down dreaming of tigers across the spring. We checked the time and decided we should head back so we time to get to the train station. We finished taking our photos and hopped on our bikes to head back to the city.

What should have took us only 15-20 minutes, ended up taking just over an hour. An hour we really didn’t have. We had little trouble navigating the city for the last few days, but today we just couldn’t figure which way was up today, even with our not so helpful English tourist map. After much frustration and feeling almost helpless, we were pointed in the right direction by a security guard when we asked where the metro was.
We finally made it to the bike rental place, only to find that the man that rented us the bikes was no longer there. We tried to return them to the man that was there, but after looking at our receipt he said it was from a shop 1 block over. Having been down that block only just minutes earlier, we knew there was nothing down there. Thinking we were getting scammed for our 200 RMB deposit, we walked up and down the street trying to spot the guy that rented us the bikes. Luckily, he ran up to us a few minutes later with our deposit. Running very short on time, we began sprinting to the metro to make it back to pick up our belongings.

We had become pros at using the metro systems in China, so we got to our hostel quite quickly. We loaded up and bolted to metro one last time to make it the train station. Time kept ticking by and as we went to leave the metro, for the first time, Sarah’s metro pass decided not to work and we had to find an agent to help us out. We made a mad dash to the train station once she was let through.

With less than 5 minutes to spare in a large and unfamiliar train station, we ran as hard as we could with 40 pounds of gear strapped to our tired bodies in what we hoped was the right direction. We got our passports and tickets checked – the woman waving us through without even checking mine after noticing the time on the ticket -- and made the final dash to the end of the terminal. Of course our gate was the very last one there. It was like someone had planned out just how to make us sweat one more time in Hangzhou down to the last detail.

They had already stopped boarding our train, and were preparing to board the next train. Fearing we had already missed it, we ran to the front of the line waving our tickets and asking “Guilin?”. I’m sure we looked comical to everyone who arrived well in advance for their train. Out of pure luck, our train had not left yet and the staff rushed us through. Within a couple minutes of boarding the train, it began moving. We threw our bags under the bottom bunk and collapsed from exhaustion. We both slept very well that night under nice soft comforters.